Word: bremer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...interview with TIME last week, Bremer, dressed in an ensemble befitting a Washington power broker in a war zone--pinstripe suit, red tie, white pocket square, combat boots--was keen to emphasize the coalition's successes but seemed all too aware of growing Iraqi impatience. "Saddam took 35 years to run the place down, and it's not going to take 35 days to fix it. People need to be patient. And I know that's hard when the temperature's 124° and the electricity goes off. But that's the message, and that's the only message there...
...next few weeks Bremer hopes to quiet grumbling over the U.S.'s delay in putting an Iraqi face on the occupation. He plans to announce the appointment of a 35-member Iraqi advisory council that he says will have control over some former government ministries--the first small step toward handing authority over to a new Iraqi government, which would enable the U.S. to withdraw its troops from the country. Bremer says he hopes Iraqis will vote for a new national government sometime next year. "This place can blossom, as it did in the 1950s," he says...
...warnings about some of the maladies--such as widespread looting and collapse of the country's infrastructure--that continue to plague the nation-building effort. "The war plan was there in spades," says Ron Adams, who served as deputy to Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who briefly preceded Bremer as the U.S. governor in Iraq. "But we didn't see much postconflict stuff in writing until we got into Kuwait" on March 17, two days before the war began. Adams says that as far back as January, when Garner first convened his staff, a sense of foreboding hung over...
While Baghdad burned, American officials in Iraq squabbled over familiar Washington commodities: turf and money. Adams says members of Garner's team wanted to pay former Iraqi soldiers to perform cleanup and security tasks and were stunned when Bremer told them that was not going to happen (a decision he reversed, in part, after a month of turmoil). Garner's 200-member Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq found itself unable to exert authority over the activities of the 146,000 soldiers in Iraq, let alone Iraqi civilians. And part of the problem was Garner himself...
...call went out to Bremer, a former ambassador to the Netherlands and Reagan Administration official with deep ties to the Republican foreign-policy establishment. "It's a very, very tough assignment, and I don't know anyone who could do it better," says Henry Kissinger, for whose international consulting firm Bremer worked after leaving government in 1989. "He's acceptable to both the State and Defense departments because he has no agenda." It helps, too, that he worked for the first President Bush and shares W.'s pedigree and passions: both men attended Yale as undergraduates and received MBAs from...