> 10/04 - Un agente no un combatiente (Financial Times)

Autor: Charles Clover

Fecha: 9/4/2004

Traductor: Celeste Murillo, especial para P.I.

Fuente: Financial Times

A broker not a fighter

Paul Bremer began his appointment as chief administrator in postwar Iraq as one of Washington's best and brightest. An imposing figure, with a devastating intellect, he possessed above all a "keen understanding of American power and how to use it", says a senior British diplomat who served with him in Baghdad.

Unless he can help salvage the situation, his arrival in the Iraqi capital last May - a dashing blue-suited figure amid a sea of sweat-stained combat fatigues - may one day be remembered as the high watermark of US supremacy: the month-long honeymoon between the formal end of the Iraq war on May 1 2003 and the beginning of a much more agonising and bloody conflict.

At the time, Mr Bremer, who spent 23 years in the US diplomatic service and was President Ronald Reagan's ambassador at large for counter-terrorism, was compared to the US proconsuls and "wise men" who had painstakingly restored postwar Germany and Japan to the Atlantic fold. But after the bloody chaos that has erupted across Iraq this week, a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it will be more difficult to secure such a legacy.

Today, the more appropriate comparison may be with Arnold Wilson, the British colonial administrator in Baghdad during the 1920 revolt in which 500 British soldiers lost their lives. His misplaced faith in the power of the Empire to govern an ungovernable place led him to make all the wrong decisions.

The violence that has torn through Iraq this week has seen US casualty figures rise, making some critics of the US engagement in Iraq draw parallels with the worst days of Vietnam. The US-led coalition has lost control of several cities in the south and centre of Iraq to Sunni and Shia rebels. Just as the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam exposed the relentlessly positive US message as a lie, so have the ragged Iraqi mercenaries, fanatics and tribesmen dealt a heavy blow to US credibility nearly 40 years later.

On Wednesday, Joseph Biden, the Democratic senator, said the upsurge of violence in Iraq was "communicating a similar fear to the American people" as after the Tet offensive, a fear that "we don't have control there, we don't have a plan".

While the uprising is not likely to force the US out of Iraq prematurely, it has made it increasingly unlikely that the US will be able to dictate the postwar political transition to a group of well-chosen former Iraqi exiles, as Mr Bremer had hoped. Iraqi police and security units have mainly refused to fight, or in some cases sided with the guerrillas. There has been no firm announcement of how the US intends to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 or to whom - only that the transition date is immutable.

With the future make-up of postwar Iraq uncertain, the US-led administration in Baghdad, under Mr Bremer, has appeared to be in trouble. Mr Bremer was forced this week to sack the country's Shia interior minister and appoint in his place a Sunni Arab. That is a vital concession to the Sunnis, but one that is unlikely to make a difference to hard-core militants. US forces also tried to declare a unilateral ceasefire in the Sunni town of Falluja on Friday, according to Reuters and other news sources, and took the unprecedented step of negotiating with the armed Iraqis who still hold much of the town after four days of fierce fighting.

When he took on the high-stakes job, Mr Bremer was credited with bringing order and a sense of purpose to what was a chaotic US civil administration in Iraq. Indeed, Mr Bremer's decisiveness last May was a welcome change from the man he replaced, General Jay Garner, who, when asked who was in charge, famously responded by pointing to Iraqis in the crowd and saying: "You're in charge."

But Mr Bremer's resolve may have backfired on him. Indeed, the three big decisions announced in his first month as US chief administrator were at best controversial and at worst dangerously flawed. On May 16, he ruled that top-ranking Ba'ath party figures - as many as 30,000 people - would be removed from government jobs. On May 22, he officially dissolved the Iraqi army. The decisions threw a quarter of a million Iraqis, many armed and trained for combat, out of work.

He also reversed plans to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi provisional government, instead decreeing that Iraq would write a constitution while under military occupation, though he partially reversed this decision last November, announcing they would hand over sovereignty at the end of June this year to a provisional government.

History may decide that these decisions were undermined by America's mistaken faith in its own power. The dissolution of the Ba'ath party and the army disenfranchised Sunni Arabs, who dominated both institutions and had held sway in Iraq since the time of the Ottomans. It is no accident that postwar violence against the occupation has been concentrated in the three majority-Sunni Arab provinces to the north and west of Baghdad.

The decisions on the constitution and political process, meanwhile, put Mr Bremer at odds with the Shia clerics, who have lobbied intensively for elections to choose a constitutional assembly and a provisional government. Mr Bremer's decision to ignore demands for elections by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the paramount Shia leader, may have fed the flames of Shia discontent that erupted this week, though Mr Sistani has appeared to stay neutral in the conflict.

Mr Bremer may have a last chance to redeem his reputation. The uprising this week has demonstrated, conclusively, that there is no military solution for the problems afflicting postwar Iraq. Ultimately, it is Mr Bremer's political skills as a diplomat and broker that are now needed to see an end to violence and allow peace to move forward.