Bouncing around the internet tonight I found
this post from Juan Cole's blog. I don't think this Juan is any relation to Juan the Marine, but I guess only Hank can tell us who the true Juan is.
Anyway, Juan C has an interesting exchange with a U of Chicago prof regarding the admin's decision to avoid early local elections in Iraq because (the writer asserts) it wanted to be able to have ongoing control of the country, particularly the free market economic reforms.
Cole's entry linked to
this interview with Jay Garner, the first guy we installed to run Iraq. I hadn't seen this before, and of course it should be looked at through the disgruntled former employee lens, but I found it interesting that in his estimation he was fired because he wanted these early elections.
Quote:
"My preference was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can, and do it with some form of elections ... I just thought it was necessary to rapidly get the Iraqis in charge of their destiny."
Asked by the reporter Greg Palast if he foresaw negative repercussions from the subsequent US imposition of mass privatisation , Gen Garner said: "I don't know ... we'll just have to wait and see." It would have been better for the Iraqis to take decisions themselves, even if they made mistakes, he said.
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I realize it might be a violation of the TOS to out him like this, but this quote is the final piece in the puzzle which leads me to believe that Hello is actually Jay Garner.
More to the point, whether you believe these guys or not about the motivating factors beind the admin's policy in this regard, it is again tempting to think about how this occupation may have gone more smoothly if there was a more immediate and public focus on getting elected leaders in power, even if the true "sovereignty" of those leaders had to be limited for pratical reasons. I realize the admin feared certain kinds of leaders who could ascend to power, but just like with Bush's nonanswer on Meet the Press you can't use that to dodge the fact that in a democracy, people are allowed to choose those kinds of people to lead them.
The point in the Cole post about the possibility that we would have had a chance to focused Sadr's energy on building political power and a constituency in conventional ways (read: pork spending) rather than building the physical power of the Mahdi Army rings very true, to me at least. Especially now that Sadr's public statements indicate a desire to work within the new political system at the same time as the Mahdi army keeps hanging together despite several agreements from Sadr to disband it.
