Wright and Milbank team up to
report on the Bush-backed Pentagon memo that forbids contracts to companies from countries that haven't provided troops to the war in Iraq.
Not only does this undermine efforts underway by Bush family fixer James Baker to convince Russia, France and German to forgive Iraq's massive debts to them, but it may make it more difficult for Bush to implement an exit strategy come June:
U.N. diplomats are cautioning that the ban will make it harder to get a concrete statement of support from the Security Council for the U.S. exit strategy when an Iraqi delegation presents the transition timetable and plan at the United Nations next week. Annan, speaking in Berlin, called the U.S. decision "not unifying."
There will be no unilateralism when it comes down to the nitty gritty of Iraqi democratization -- we need the U.N. for this. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in charge of running Iraq simply doesn't have people who know what the heck they're doing when it comes to manufacturing democracy, the U.N. does.
In fact, the CPA apparently doesn't know much about how to do most of everything it's supposed to, as the Washington Monthly reports:
In the last decade particularly, many American officials acquired a great deal of expertise in post-conflict reconstruction in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and in post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe and around the globe--expertise that could have been put to good use at the CPA.
....
Yet according to experts in the field, few of those with experience in these various deployments got the call to serve or even had their opinions solicited.
In their place, the architects of the war chose card-carrying Republicans -- operatives, flacks, policy-wonks and lobbyists -- for almost every key assignment in the country.
Of course, this is all because Bush is running his reelection campaign globally:
"Everything is seen in the context of the election, and how they will screw the Democrats," said one CPA official. "It was really pretty shocking to hear them talk."
"They are all on the campaign trail," said another official. "They see this as a stepping stone to a better job in the next Bush administration." "I don't always know if they are Republicans," said yet another senior CPAer. "But what is clear is that they know nothing about development, and nothing about transitional economies."
The Wright/Milbank piece (from which all following quotes are taken) has a bit hinting that the new policy blocking countries that don't contribute troops to Iraq from Iraqi contracts is more of the same:
"Domestically this works, but diplomatically it makes it very tough," added a U.N. diplomat in New York.
It's clear that the Bush adminstration doesn't appear the least bit interested in the best interests of the Iraqi people, but rather in its own. Of course, if the Iraq exit strategy is blown by Bush's foolish decision to further alienate our allies, it's hard to see how this helps his reelection.
Karl Rove probably realizes this and at one point must have told Bush so, because the weirdest part of all of this is that Bush initially opposed limiting Iraqi contracts:
The White House vigorously opposed a similar policy when lawmakers tried to add it to legislation earlier this year, according to congressional officials. In April, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice personally lobbied Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) to drop from a Pentagon spending bill a proposal to block France and Germany from Iraq contracts.
So if Rice and Bush opposed this initially, why have they changed their minds? Who convinced them? We can't finger the neocons:
The White House came under scathing criticism even from supporters, who called the policy [blocking German and France from Iraqi contracts, proposed in Congress in April and last fall] a blunder. In a memorandum distributed to U.S. opinion leaders, neoconservative writers William Kristol and Robert Kagan said the policy should be abandoned sooner rather than later to minimize the diplomatic damage.
"A truly wise American administration would have opened the bidding to all comers, regardless of their opposition to the war -- as a way of buying those countries into the Iraq effort, building a little goodwill for the future and demonstrating to the world a little magnanimity. But instead of being smart, clever or magnanimous, the Bush administration has done a dumb thing," they wrote.
So we're certainly left with Paul Wolfowitz, who wrote the recent memo that is the center of the current uproar. Did he do an end-around a consensus decision? Or was he put up to it by our shadow president of the U.S. and behind the scenes foreign policy maker Dick Cheney?
Whatever's going on, the Bush administration is clearly in a great deal of disarray on Iraq. And that can't be good for either our troops or the eventual outcome.