RE: "I believe the genius of the plan is yet to unfold."
Posted on Wed, Apr. 09, 2003
U.N. role in postwar Iraq urged
EX-SECURITY ADVISER WARNS DEMOCRACY PUSH COULD ANGER MUSLIM WORLD
By Walter Gibbs
New York Times
OSLO, Norway - Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, urged the United States on Tuesday to let the United Nations organize the postwar administration of Iraq and warned that a quick push for democratic transformation could explode into sectarian violence or civil war.
Scowcroft made his remarks as President Bush, meeting in Northern Ireland with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, indicated that the United States and Britain should play the dominant role in establishing an interim governing authority.
Scowcroft suggested that this approach could provoke the ``wrath and enmity'' of the Muslim world.
``The security burden ought to stay with the British and the Americans, but the complete process of trying to put together a government ought to be a broader attempt,'' Scowcroft said, specifying the United Nations.
He also said Americans ought to reduce their expectations for sweeping democratic change.
``I'm a skeptic about the ability to transform Iraq into a democracy in any realistic period of time,'' Scowcroft said, noting the lack of functioning institutions and a surplus of ill will among different religious and tribal groups. ``I don't think the Middle East is just waiting for someone to blow a democratic wind in there.''
He said the Iraqi experiment could turn out like the 1992 Algerian parliamentary elections, which the country's military-backed government canceled when it became clear that a party committed to imposing Koranic law would win. Tens of thousands of people have died in the civil war that followed.
``What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win?'' Scowcroft asked. ``What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take over.''
Addressing an audience at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, Scowcroft said Iraq's postwar benefactors would be lucky to find moderate Iraqi nationals able to maintain order.
``What's likely to happen is that the meanest, toughest ones will rise to the top, at least for a couple of generations,'' he said.
In August, Scowcroft, 78, who was also the national security adviser to President Ford, declared before the war against Iraq that it was an unwarranted and divisive distraction from the struggle against global terrorism. He reiterated that sentiment Tuesday.
Scowcroft said the elder President Bush's patient assembly of coalition partners and his respect for the U.N. Security Council before the 1991 Persian Gulf War had been intended as a model for challenging aggressors in the post-Cold War era. He said he regretted that the model had not held up.
``We're moving uncertainly down paths nobody has gone down before,'' he said. ``The structures we've built to handle our security are under significant stress and may not survive to serve us in the future.'' |
