Like Kos, I was a little surprised to see a Reuters report on Republicans looking to June 30 as the day when Bush’s political future will be secured.
Republicans said the key to Bush’s rebounding is to bring a sense of stability in Iraq. The Bush administration is hoping that process will be aided by the scheduled June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government.
“They need to have a successful handoff of the government and show the American people that there’s an end game,” said Republican strategist Scott Reed.
There are any number of reasons this doesn’t make any sense, but I’d like to focus on just one of them — the notion that there will a real “handoff of the government” on the last day of June. There won’t be; it’s a myth.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran an excellent report last week on how the U.S. is “tightening its grip” on Iraq’s future, not loosening it in anticipation of a June 30 transfer.
As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq’s new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.
In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan.
We’re not handing over power in Baghdad, we’re consolidating it in Washington.
Why Republicans think this arbitrary date of a symbolic transfer will somehow put Bush in the clear is a mystery. The alleged “handoff” is public relations, not political science.