About face: bringing back the UN and the Baathists.
nytimes.com
"...The new tactics include ceding substantial power to the United Nations to pull together a transitional government; easing the ban on Baath Party members in the new government; and reopening the question of whether the United States should have disbanded the Iraqi Army....
Presented with a short list of the most notable recent reversals — the abandonment of Mr. Bremer's plan for the transfer of power; the pullback from declarations that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite leader in Najaf, must be arrested or killed; a last-minute decision to allow former Iraqi Army soldiers to quell the insurgency in Falluja — the official shrugged....
From the military to the State Department, where many feel frozen out of a strategy developed largely at the White House and in the Pentagon, officials say Mr. Bush and his aides badly underestimated what it would take to pacify Iraq, and have stubbornly refused to admit that mistake....
After initially keeping the United Nations largely on the sidelines, Mr. Bush is now relying heavily on it to build a transitional government. Since last fall, he has abandoned or substantially reshaped most of the major elements of his proposal for drafting a constitution and holding elections....
Other critics said that administration officials had expected an unrealistically warm reception from Iraqis during the occupation, that they had put too much stock in the opinions of Iraqi exiles who turned out not to represent the broad strains of Iraqi public opinion, and that they had not fully appreciated the deep divisions between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
"Whatever the plan was, there would have had to be constant improvisation and adaptation," said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But the fact is the administration went into this war with something approaching a fantasy world." |
