Perhaps you think I'm making too much of a word.
Here's a view of Mr. Bremer from this week's TIME cover story.
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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. "
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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."
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In public Bremer has adopted an almost presidential air, moving about in motorcades flanked by Secret Service agents, wearing a suit and tie despite the heat, positioning himself behind a podium at press conferences. "Everything Jerry Bremer's done has been to give the impression that he's in charge, that someone is running things," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "And after the disorder, that's exactly what you need." On Bremer's desk sits a plaque that reads success has a thousand fathers.
Yes, but are any of them going to be Iraqis?
Did Bremer assume no one in Iraq would be reading TIME? If so, Steve Gilliard says Bremer's wrong. And wrong about more than that.
The TIME article is fairly damning of the entire Bush administration. Apparently, they were unprepared for on-going resistence once the "war" was over, and unprepared for the problems of law and order that are not unknown in post-war circumstances.
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So testy is the White House about the violence in Iraq that President Bush last week was reduced to school-yard posturing. "There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on," he said, an outburst that seemed particularly ill-advised the following day, when 20 soldiers were wounded in attacks across Iraq.
Despite the President's bluster, Bush Administration officials are privately worried that U.S. forces are caught in a dangerous loop. The persistence of attacks has forced the U.S. to remain on a combat footing, which has diverted attention and resources away from the reconstruction effort.
Maybe the President's Clint Eastwood moment isn't playing that well after all. Not in the face of this, anyway.
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Recent Iraqi attacks on U.S. troops have demonstrated a new tactical sophistication and coordination that raise the specter of the U.S. occupation force becoming enmeshed in a full-blown guerrilla war, military experts said yesterday.
The new approaches employed in the Iraqi attacks last week are provoking concern among some that what once was seen as a mopping-up operation against the dying remnants of a deposed government is instead becoming a widening battle against a growing and organized force that could keep tens of thousands of U.S. troops busy for months.
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"The increasing enemy activity in Iraq is very unsettling," said retired Marine Lt. Col. John Poole, a specialist in small-unit infantry tactics. "It could mean that the situation has started to escalate into a guerrilla war."
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Poole says he worries that the aim of the Iraqi attacks is not to defeat U.S. forces as much as it is to provoke them. He says the Iraqi intent is to wage a war of attrition, causing enough casualties that U.S. commanders "use an increasingly heavy hand." In that way, the U.S. forces "will automatically alienate the local populace."
That's always been the conundrum, hasn't it? How could the people whose idea this war was not have anticipated the always ambivalent relationship between occupied and occupier? How could they know so little about Iraqi nationalism that it didn't occur to them to avoid an American imperial presence.
I don't doubt that a majority of Iraqis don't want us to leave yet. They expect us to help them put back together what we broke. But this top down approach is nuts.
Bush/Cheney/Wolfewitz are using the Japan/Germany model they were warned not to. We've moved from liberators to conquerors. Questions keep being asked about our committment to stay there. I'm much more worried about how much longer Iraqis are going to tolerate being treated as a defeated people.