US: Much is at stake in Iraq, said Paul Bremer after his urgent White House talks on Wednesday, writes Conor O'Clery
The US representative in Baghdad has not been an advocate of a quick handover of sovereignty to Iraqis. He has been working on the assumption that his Coalition Provisional Authority would be running the country for over a year while Iraqis worked out a constitution and organised elections.
For American business investment, much indeed is at stake if this timetable is foreshortened.
US authorities in Washington are in the process of selecting prime contractors, possibly only three, by February 1st to handle $15 billion worth of public works projects in Iraq, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The work is to be overseen by a Pentagon Infrastructure Reconstruction Office which will hold a conference at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia on Tuesday to explain the contracting process to industry representatives, and another in London on Thursday. With Iraq becoming more dangerous for foreigners - an American contractor was killed yesterday - firms may have trouble finding staff willing to go there.
But what is more to the point, any serious move to give Iraq sovereign powers in the short term could jeopardise the free market conditions which Mr Bremer wants to create through shock therapy.
A new Iraqi authority with real power could nullify for example Order 39, the instrument signed by Mr Bremer in September which abolishes Iraqi laws against foreign investment and permits foreign ownership of Iraqi companies and assets other than natural resources, and the repatriation of 100 per cent of profits.
Order 39, which the Economist calls a "capitalist's dream", may be deemed illegal by a new Iraqi government. Under the Hague Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War the occupying power is not permitted to change a country's laws, and Iraq's old Constitution forbids foreign ownership of Iraqi companies and prohibits the privatisation of key state assets.
Up to now the US could argue that it has to take economic initiatives as the occupying power since, as in post-war Germany, no viable alternative power exists.
Faced with a growing insurgency - and a looming presidential election - the Bush administration is now hastening to create a viable locus of Iraqi power, which means it may not be able to guarantee to the industrialists in the Marriott Hotel this week that their companies will not be nationalised and their contracts torn up - without legal remedy - sometime next year.
What is fundamentally at stake is George Bush's attempt at nation building, something he criticised when running for the presidency but has been implementing in Iraq.
Last week Mr Bush advocated democracy and regime change throughout the Arab world, declaring in a major speech that America's post-second World War policies in the Middle East had been on the wrong track, and that "the advance of freedom is the calling of our time". This recalled Woodrow Wilson's 1917 declaration, as he committed American troops to war against Germany, that the "world must be made safe for democracy".
The speech has been attacked from the left and the right.
Liberal commentator Michael Kinsley wrote: "Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago." The post-Communist idea that the advance of freedom led to peace was challenged by Bosnia and Kosovo, he said.
On the right Pat Buchanan asked incredulously if the President had thought through the implications of a new Wilsonian crusade, recalling that the last time kings, shahs and emperors fell in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran, "we got Nasser, Saddam, Khadafi, Mengistu and Khomeini".
If Bush's Middle East policy was morally superior to all those dating back to 1945, "why is his administration the most detested in the Arab world of any US administration ever?" asked Buchanan, adding that "unlike Dwight Eisenhower, who forced the Israelis out of Sinai, Bush has proven feckless in his failure to face down Ariel Sharon, whose rampages are making enemies for us all over the Arab world."
US television yesterday showed pictures from Rome of Italian military chiefs saluting the returning coffins of carabinieri and soldiers killed in Iraq.
State funerals will be held in Italy on Tuesday. We haven't seen many such pictures here. There have been no state funerals, the President has not attended any requiems for soldiers, and the media has been barred from covering the arrival of the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The Pentagon has cited a rule not enforced for a decade, claiming it is protecting the family's privacy. The decision to ban camera crews from Dover was first taken during the First Gulf War when the White House was concerned at the effect of such images on the public perception of the war.
This week long-ignored regulations have also been revived to keep reporters from getting too close to military funerals at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia.
The orders came directly from the Pentagon, according to the cemetery superintendent, Jack Metzler.
The gulf between the media and the Pentagon is growing.
Increasing confrontations between reporters and the US military in Iraq led to the president of the Associated Press Managing Editors, representing 1,700 newspapers in the US and Canada, to protest to the Pentagon last week.
AP says that media personnel have been detained and subjected to verbal and physical abuse while trying to report on events. Stuart Wilk, who is also managing editor of The Dallas Morning News, said the effect has been to deprive the American public of "crucial images" from Iraq.
Meanwhile in Washington, the bureau chiefs of 30 media organisations have written to the Pentagon expressing their dismay about the harassment of journalists in Iraq. One of the most serious cases was a Reuters television cameraman, Mazen Dana, killed by US troops outside Baghdad in August.
Some television reporters have been "embedded" again to witness US forces bombarding parts of Baghdad in Operation Iron Hammer, and have been allowed to ask questions of commanders such as one broadcast yesterday: "What is it like sir being able to hit back at the bad guys?" The answer: "Real good!"
These reporters are presumably getting better treatment.