Word: cpa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even those who for professional reasons might be expected to support the council often knock it. "The Governing Council is composed of prima donnas," says an official of the CPA. Qubad Talabani, Jalal Talabani's son and chief political adviser, bluntly describes the organization as "a large body that is unable to make decisions. Everything gets clogged up in hours-long debates. It's paralysis." Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor who is on the council's constitutional committee, says, "We've been going around and around in circles. We have lost three months that we could have spent...
...fair to the council, its poor performance is not all its fault. The CPA has micromanaged what the Iraqis can decide and which Iraqis can be trusted. "The problem with Americans," says a U.S. official, "is that we are control freaks. We need to let them make their own mistakes. It's their country. We are either about the business of being a valuable, competent adviser, or we are occupiers...
...birth, is the most senior Shi'ite religious leader in Iraq. There was no chance that the council would openly oppose his will, and--because his tolerance of the occupation acts as a buffer between coalition forces and potential unrest among the Shi'ites--no chance that the CPA would force the council to do so. "Al-Sistani," says Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, "is seen as apolitical, so he carries a lot of respect...
...little appetite among Iraqi Shi'ites for an Iranian-style constitutional theocracy, there is a growing recognition that the new Iraq will look more like a confessional state than many in the Administration had hoped. "Islam's going to be in [the constitution], no matter what," says a CPA OFFICIAL. Says an adviser to the Administration: "We don't have to make Iraq look like the U.S. If we get [a stable country] that's more Islamic than we would like, that...
Apparently, along with market capitalism and the one-man-one-vote principle, the Administration intends to export to Iraq America's delicious sense of irony. As reported in the New York Observer, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) plans to begin a 24-hour broadcast service, dedicated to reporting the Iraq news it deems important. The broadcast will be live and unfiltered--unfiltered, at least, by meddlesome journalists. Dorrance Smith, a CPA media adviser and a former ABC News producer, told the Observer that the network's model was the wartime broadcasts from Centcom headquarters, which frustrated journalists with their lack...