Word: bremer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Have we got anyone in this country that's not us?" That's the question vexing Paul Bremer--veteran American diplomat, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and current occupant of the world's toughest job--as he convenes a morning meeting inside the dusty, sprawling Baghdad palace that serves as his office and home. As is usually the case, Bremer has a crisis on his hands. An explosion at a mosque in the city of Fallujah last week killed 10 Iraqis, including the mosque's imam. U.S. soldiers who surveyed the scene say the blast was probably...
...sensible idea, with one small problem: finding a third party. An aide suggests dispatching troops from Singapore deployed in Iraq to the site, but they don't have bomb-damage-assessment experience. Someone else brings up the U.N.'s antimine unit. "The Mozambicans," Bremer ventures, referring to a group of mine-clearing specialists from Mozambique. "Are they working for us?" The idea is discussed for a few more minutes before Bremer moves on. Like so many problems in the new Iraq, this is one the U.S., for the moment, has little choice but to leave unresolved...
Three months after the fall of Baghdad, a grim fact of life for Bremer as well as his 600-member civilian staff and the 146,000 American soldiers is that they are still struggling to police Iraq's streets, restore electricity, fix the economy, rebuild schools, monitor local elections and nudge the country toward democracy--all while waging a counterinsurgency campaign against an increasingly brazen assortment of militants who have killed more than 30 U.S. and British soldiers in the past two months. It's not going well. In Baghdad recent attacks on infrastructure targets left the power and water...
...Pentagon officials say they have no plans to send more troops to Iraq, though the Administration is actively pushing its allies to send up to 30,000 more of their troops there by the end of September. For the foreseeable future, cleaning up the mess has fallen entirely to Bremer, 61, the proconsul in whom the Bush Administration has vested complete authority for getting the country running again, winning 25 million hearts and minds and eventually making Iraq safe for democracy. "We are the government of Iraq, and that's big, scary stuff," Andy Bearpark, Bremer's chief of operations...
...would welcome a change more than Bremer. Since taking control of the U.S.'s postwar operation in early May, Bremer has earned near unanimous backing inside the Administration, thanks to his toughness, pragmatism and devotion to the job. Bremer has become so attached to the country he runs that he speaks of it in the first-person plural. "We are eventually going to be a rich country," he told reporters last week. "We've got oil, we've got water, we've got fertile land, we've got wonderful people." But few Iraqis have seen tangible results, in part because...