“A key factor in the change of heart may have been the lobbying by Paul Bremer, the US administrator for post-war Iraq, for a swift release of much-needed funds. “We had to act because the international community was stonewalling us on aid,” an administration official told the New York Times. The official added that Mr Bremer said: “I need the money so bad we have to move off our principled opposition to the international community being in charge.”<\/em><\/p>\nIn other words, these arrogant hawks are very, very desperate, so desperate that they will even let the UN have a seat at the table of Iraq reconstruction. Why does Bremer think that excluding everyone but the US from Iraq rebuilding is “principled”? “<\/strong><\/p>\n
Bremer probably understands, as do the hawks, that the intention of some European states in Iraq is to use the UN as a wedge to prevent the decentralization of Iraq’s statist economy and adoption of free-market reforms – an eventuality that Professor Cole himself regards with some degree of consternation. A second concern would be the delay of truly democratic governance in Iraq ( not that we have been terribly vigorous ourselves in that regard but France wants a Baathist lite dictatorship in Iraq and the U.S. out with undue haste). A third concern, to which I would give much credence given the history of EU reluctance to recognize that their financial aid to the Palestinian Authority ended up funding suicide bombing operations -is the UN obstructing American security operations in Iraq.<\/p>\n
Objecting to letting bad faith actors muck things up in Iraq worse than they are already might be more practical <\/strong>than principled <\/strong>opposition I admit but he concerns of the hawks are legitimate. The French aren’t there to be helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BREMER AND UN RECONSTRUCTION AID Juan Cole has observations on the recent vote in the UN and Paul Bremer’s role in convincing the administration to concede a role to the UN in reconstructing Iraq. Here is a quote: “[ NYT quote] “A key factor in the change of heart may have been the lobbying by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}