El New Yorker tiene un larguísimo (20.641 palabras, nada menos) artículo sobre la ocupación de Irak, y las expectativas de la administración Bush en el país. Le tengo verdadera alergia a una nota tan larga, y creo que la entradilla y primeros (49) párrafos de George Packer confunden un poco sobre la temática.
El caso es que explica cómo se alcanzó el plan de invasión (lamento el inglés original, pero hoy no tengo ganas de traducir):
The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld’s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn’t coördinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith’s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld’s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war.
O sea, en secreto y sin consultar con expertos «pesimistas», porque entonces se hubiera filtrado su pesimismo a la prensa y el público no se lo hubiera creído tanto.
El turbio Ahmad Chalabi «vendió» un escenario en el que «los iraquíes recibirían a las tropas de EE.UU. con flores y bombones». A lo mejor esto es un error de traducción, pues ya sabemos que en este mundo a veces sólo hay un paso entre los bombones y las bombas...
«This was the view held by exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi. The exiles told President Bush that Iraqis would receive their liberators with “sweets and flowers.” Their advice led policymakers to assume that Iraqi soldiers and policemen would happily transfer their loyalty to the Americans, providing a ready-made security force. “There was a mistaken notion in certain circles in Washington that the Iraqi civil service would remain intact,” Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdish administration and a strong advocate for the overthrow of Saddam, said. A week before the war, he discussed the problem of law and order with a senior member of the Administration. “They were expecting the police to work after liberation,” Salih told me. “I said, ‘This is not the N.Y.P.D. It’s the Iraqi police. The minute the first cruise missile arrives in Baghdad, the police force degenerates and everybody goes home.’”.
Qué chapuza, Dios mío. Por lo menos el imperio romano eviaba a Galba y a Trajano a invadir como mandan los canones. Estos no son profesionales ni a la hora de crear imperio.
Hace casi un año, otro escritor del New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, expuso las razones detrás de la invasión. Eran maquiavélicas pero sólidas. Es decir, ya que vas a invadir un país porque te sale de las narices, hazlo bien.
