ENTREVISTA A L. PAUL BREMER

 en “The Washington Post” del 27.08.2003

Excerpts of remarks by L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, during an interview yesterday with Washington Post editors and reporters:

BREMER: STAKES 'EXTREMELY HIGH' IN IRAQ 

The importance of success in Iraq: "I think the stakes are extremely high in getting it right in Iraq. . . . This has become one of the main fields of battle against global terrorism, and we cannot allow the terrorists to have their way there. Secondly it is an important place to succeed because it does provide a new model of how governments in that region can organize themselves to be responsive to the needs of their people, in short, democracy."

Water and power systems: "The U.N. estimates that to get a more or less satisfactory potable water system in the country will cost $16 billion over four years. The 2,000 megawatts we need to add now just to meet current demand will cost $2 billion, and the engineers tell me we probably should spend about $13 billion over the next five years to get the power system [in good order]."

Oil industry: "We intend to get our oil production back to prewar levels, which was between 2.5 and 3 million barrels a day of production. We intend to get back there by October of next year. We may get there earlier if we're lucky, we may get there later if we have more sabotage. What is important is that the Iraqi people realize that the oil revenues belong to them."

The 25-member Iraqi Governing Council: "I think they're doing okay. They basically have several important tasks: to appoint a cabinet, to approve a budget for 2004, [and] they are responsible for figuring out how to get a new constitution written. We can't have elections at the moment because there is no constitutional provision for elections. So they're going to have to figure out how to get a constitution written."

Timetable for elections: "I've said don't think it's unrealistic to think you could write a constitution in six or eight months. If it took them six or eight months to write a constitution and then it takes a couple of more months to organize elections, you could imagine that happening next year, but it's not my timetable."

Security: "There are three elements to the security situation. There is first of all the attacks on the coalition forces themselves. There is secondly terrorism and there is thirdly crime. On the attacks on the coalition force themselves, these attacks have been small-scale. They pose no strategic threat to the United States or to the coalition forces. . . . They are being conducted by Baathists. . . . The second security threat and the one that is I think now of considerable concern is the growing terrorist threat. We have seen it in the last six or eight weeks, essentially two elements of the terrorist threat. One, of the arrival of what you could call foreign terrorists, foreign fighters, who carry documentation from places like Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and who may be linked in some ways to elements of the Baathist types. It's not very clear. And then of course we have the arrival in the country of scores of Ansar al-Islam terrorists who are associated with al Qaeda."

Protecting U.S. forces: "First of all we are trying to get a much better sense of the enemy, and that involves getting better intelligence, whether it is against the guys attacking our forces, the terrorists or the criminals. And in order to do that, I've got a more focused effort within the U.S. government on intelligence, and we are encouraging more cooperation from the Iraqis. One of the encouraging things in the last month or so has been the number of Iraqis who have been willing to come in and give us information. The second thing we are doing is we are reconfiguring our forces. We need forces and we're moving toward forces which are lighter, which are more mobile, which can move around the country and strike at will against the enemy."

Training police and security personnel: "We are making a major effort to get the Iraqis more involved in their own security, and this has basically four dimensions. First, get a competent, large Iraqi police force on the ground. Secondly, we are calling back the border police and the border patrols so that we can start to get better controls over our borders. Thirdly, we have recruited a new force called the facilities protection service. Their job is to protect fixed sites, around banks, or a university or a ministry. Fourthly, we have started to recruit the new Iraqi army. Fifth, we have begun to raise an Iraqi civil defense corps. The intention is to have a battalion of Iraqi civil defense in each of the 18 governances within the next six months. We now have probably just short of 60,000 Iraqis already involved in defending their own country, and it will be well over 100,000 a year from now."

Search for weapons of mass destruction: "[CIA adviser] David Kay has now got about 1,200 people in country working for him on weapons of mass destruction. He's making progress. . . . I'm confident we will find evidence of the biological and chemical programs."

Capturing Saddam Hussein: "Obviously, we'd like to have him, dead, or capture him. He moves around, we think, a fair amount. We keep after him. We'll get him and it is important to get him, because it's important to draw the curtain down on the Baathist history in this country."