Editorial de The New York Times del 29.06.2003
Almost two months have passed since L. Paul Bremer took over as chief administrator in Iraq, and American authorities are still digging themselves out of a very deep hole. Water and electricity haven't been fully restored and are subject to continuing sabotage. Millions whose livelihoods depended on the old regime remain unemployed and unpaid. Living standards haven't recovered even to depressed prewar levels. Plans for an Iraqi-run interim administration have been shelved. Meanwhile, in too many places, police duties are being carried out by foreign soldiers untutored in local mores and trained to respond to threats with overwhelming force, not calming words.
The common theme here is the failure to involve Iraqis more deeply in their own recovery. By working more closely with Iraqi professionals and civil servants, occupation authorities can speed the country's reconstruction, reduce unemployment and look less like a colonial administration.
One problem is how to view the millions of former Baath Party members. In mid-May Mr. Bremer issued an edict saying that all senior party members would be "banned from future employment in the public sector." Yet it seems clear that he needs to act judiciously. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, party membership often signaled neither ideology nor criminal complicity, just normal human instincts for survival and family advancement. A party card was needed by anyone who wanted to work for the government, send children to college or follow a profession. Sometimes one was needed just to avoid arbitrary arrest.
Senior party leaders, torturers and those now organizing attacks on American and British troops must obviously be excluded from all positions of authority and held accountable for their crimes. But hundreds of thousands of other Iraqi Baathists can and should be involved in rebuilding their country. Sorting out nominal Baathists from notorious ones is similar to the problems American occupation successfully overcame in postwar Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan. There are also parallels to debates over the role of former low-level Communist Party members in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. In each example, some people were cleared who probably shouldn't have been, but never to a large enough extent to endanger the newly established democracies.
Mr. Bremer seems to understand the dimensions of the problem. He talks about banning up to 30,000 senior Baathists from public employment. That would leave well over 90 percent of lower-ranking members still eligible. He has also proposed a new criminal court that could include former Baathist judges.
In a related area, Mr. Bremer last week agreed to pay the salaries of up to 250,000 former Iraqi soldiers indefinitely, and announced plans to create a new, smaller Iraqi army over the next few years that could eventually absorb some of these demobilized veterans. Other army and police veterans should be organized, under new leadership, into local police forces that can take over urban patrol duties from American and British troops.
For the sake of its current reputation, future security and plans for the Middle East generally not to mention the well-being of Iraqis Washington needs to do a better job of reviving Iraq. That will require more attention from the White House, more money from Congress and an end to America's costly ideological resistance to a larger United Nations role. Most of all, it will take a broadened effort to enlist the participation of the Iraqi people.