Word: bremer
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...Bremer's plan aimed to reassure Iraqis, their neighbors and the American electorate that the occupation of Iraq was nearing an end. Three months later, however, Bremer's plan is in serious trouble, and it's far from clear how and by whom a new one will be authored...
...point to a happy ending in Iraq, the Bush administration at least needs to show Americans that it has a plan for winning the peace. It was that need that brought Washington's point man in Iraq, Ambassador J. Paul Bremer, rushing home last November for unscheduled consultations at the White House. Back then, the U.S. casualty total was climbing steadily and there was no sign of an end to the insurgency; Capitol Hill was reeling from sticker shock over the administration's $87 billion budget request; the Iraqi Governing Council handpicked by Bremer had failed to achieve legitimacy...
...Bremer returned to Baghdad with a new deal: The U.S. would transfer sovereign political authority in Baghdad to an Iraqi provision government by July 1, 2004, by which time it also hoped to have transferred much of the responsibility for maintaining day-to-day order in Iraq to new Iraqi security forces. Recognizing the IGC's legitimacy problem, Bremer proposed that a new government be chosen at regional caucuses convened all across Iraq by bodies picked by the occupation authority...
...Kurds, meanwhile, represent a second, but equally uncomfortable headache for Bremer. They're openly resistant to reincorporating the de facto state they created in northern Iraq under the umbrella of the no-fly zone into a wider Iraq in which they're a minority; instead they want to expand it to take in the northern oil towns of Mosul and Kirkuk and expel the Arab population settled there by Saddam Hussein over the past two decades. A Kurdish statelet in the north is anathema to the Shiites and Sunni, and Turkey - which regards Kurdish self-determination as a mortal threat...
...Bremer's problems are magnified by the binary nature of the conflicts he faces: Each move to accommodate Sistani is greeted with anger by the Sunni and Kurdish representatives on the IGC; each indication of a concession to Kurdish demands raises hackles among Shiite and Sunni leaders. Confronted by an increasingly complex array of political choices in Iraq, the Bush administration is reportedly divided over how best to proceed. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly favor dispensing with the caucus plan to hand over power directly to the Governing Council, expanding its Shiite representation...