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 A Mix of 'President . . . and Pope' |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
A Mix of 'President . . . and Pope'
MOSUL, Iraq -- Lifting off in a helicopter from the grounds of a Mosul palace that he has made his headquarters, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus began a tour of all that he commands, a vast northern Iraqi kingdom of desert and wheat fields, military installations and Bedouin camps, where poetry and strife fill the smallest corners.
"Look at that -- gas trucks," said Petraeus, pointing out the window of his UH-60 Black Hawk as the journey progressed. A convoy was arriving from Turkey with U.S.-bought gasoline to help alleviate severe shortages here in Iraq's third-largest city. Farther along, he nodded toward combines harvesting wheat in the fields below. The agreement he brokered that sets grain prices for farmers and distributors was holding.
Escorted by two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, the Black Hawk skimmed low over sand on its way to Rubiyah, a dusty town on the Syrian border. In plumes of sand, the helicopters landed there and Petraeus, with a stroke of his pen, formally opened a border crossing that had been closed since the start of the war.
More than 1,000 tribal dignitaries sat in silence as he spoke at a feast that followed. He explained that another crossing would mean more money for all and cheaper chickens in Mosul because of competition. Ushered by sheiks in flowing white robes, he then moved to tables groaning under ceramic dishes; he tore off chunks of lamb with his hands and scooped up handfuls of rice.
"Amazing, isn't it?" Petraeus said later as he waved to the mob from his departing Black Hawk. "It's a combination of being the president and the pope."
In normal times, Petraeus is the wiry, intellectual commander of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles of military lore. During the Iraq war, his division fought along the Euphrates River, pounding through an epic sandstorm and subduing the cities of Najaf, Karbala and Hilla. His unit arrived in this walled city 220 miles north of Baghdad last month after U.S. soldiers killed at least 10 Iraqis during anti-American demonstrations.
Now Petraeus is the face of the 18,000-troop occupying army in Iraq's northern tip, a viceroy in a land of competing interests and uncertain loyalties. His job, and those of the other division commanders in Iraq, is to win the peace as deftly as they did the war, building the beginnings of democracy in a country with no experience in representative government. The Bush administration has given them enormous authority, with the expectation they will remake Iraq into a regional showcase.
Petraeus, 50, a West Point graduate with a PhD in international relations, acknowledged that "we haven't quite stopped fighting." But he has mostly turned his attention to other matters. Now, as a recent two-day visit revealed, Petraeus worries about building new armies and disarming old ones, taxi rates and gas supplies, the state of Mosul's amusement park and anti-American sentiment in its mosques. He also confronts questions over how much freedom to allow Iraqis, even though freedom is precisely what the United States has promised a country still somewhere between war and peace.
"Combat is hard because you are losing soldiers, killing people. But at the end of the day you are destroying things, and we know how to do that," Petraeus said. "This work requires inordinate patience. There are incredible frustrations. And you can't just pull a trigger and make it all go away."
The general receives his visitors in an upstairs salon at the Mosul palace, the Tigris River a ribbon of blue in the middle distance. The walls and floor are white marble, the ceiling made to resemble the drooping folds of a tent. He has added elements of the army's utilitarian design. Plywood panels serve as doors, closed with a strand of wire, and a plastic sheet substitutes for a window blown out during the war.
Gen. Babeker Bederkhan was his first guest on a recent morning, an ally about to get an earful. The pesh merga, a Kurdish militia force that Bederkhan helps lead, worked effectively alongside U.S. troops in the war. But in victory Kurds have displaced hundreds of Arabs who were paid by then-President Saddam Hussein's government years ago to come from the south and settle here to alter the ethnic balance.
Bederkhan's pesh merga fighters have, at times, appeared to support the "de-Arabization" campaign even after promising Petraeus they would work to stop it. The day before, in the village of Zamar west of Mosul, thousands of Kurds and Arabs had squared off in a confrontation that left one Arab dead and another wounded before U.S. troops arrived.
"Unless you are careful, you will lose the support of the United States, even though we have been allies for years," Petraeus told Bederkhan, adding that in the long term, "I want what you want" but only through a national legal process. "I saved your soldiers yesterday from killing more people."
Petraeus calls his heavy hand, even with allies, the "Big Man concept" and he often follows even his simplest instructions to Iraqis with the phrase "those are my orders." In a culture used to centralized power, he has employed the technique to begin the difficult task of assembling a multi-ethnic army and a functioning city government.
Two weeks ago, Petraeus invited 250 city leaders to a convention to choose a new interim mayor and council in Mosul, crimping the invitations with his division's notary seal in a country where stamps are signs of power. "They think it's a super-secret Pentagon thing," he said. The all-day convention produced a 24-member council consisting of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, various tribal leaders, an Islamic imam -- and two retired Iraqi generals, an irksome constituency of special importance here because Mosul produced so many of them during Hussein's rule.
The local government is the first to be "democratically selected" in Iraq, although Petraeus still sits next to the mayor in semiweekly council meetings. Using the Army division's money, he has carpeted and furnished the mayor's suite in the looted downtown government building.
The final four mayoral candidates were interviewed individually by Petraeus, who was mostly interested in their past ties to Hussein's Baath Party. Ghanin Bassook, a major general in the Iraqi army who was forced to resign in 1993 after his cousin and brother were executed for treason, emerged the winner. He was given a Kurdish deputy to bring ethnic balance to the top of the administration.
The Baath Party dominated Mosul, as it did the rest of Iraq, and deciding who should remain in government has been a mystifying process.
Some measures are symbolic. Police recruits must sign an agreement to disavow their membership in the Baath Party or a statement denouncing the party if they never belonged. Others are more delicate. Bassook, who has been accused of ties to the former government, wanted to know what to do with the president of the University of Mosul, a senior Baath official kept on after the war.
"You should congratulate him for being selected to the position of president emeritus," Petraeus told the mayor. "He can either accept the position gracefully with an office and a salary or he can be fired."
The mayor agreed, put the item on the next day's council agenda, and asked when elections would be held for the job. Petraeus explained that the president would be named, not elected, just as he informed puzzled employees at the Telecommunications Ministry days earlier that they would not be voting for a new boss.
"There's really no understanding of what democracy is here," he said later.
Nonetheless, political parties have flowered since the Baath Party was toppled. Kurdish and exile parties have arrived, Islamic political organs have sprung up, and a variety of homegrown organizations with few ideological underpinnings and even fewer constituents have hung banners. But most of them have armed mini-militias that they have used to take over government buildings. Now they fly partisan flags outside them and keep a few men with worn AK-47 assault rifles on the sidewalks in front.
Mishaan Jabouri, a returned exile, now claims to be the real power in Mosul. He has taken over, for his Fatherland Party, the riverfront compound of Ali Hassan Majeed, known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in gas attacks on Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988. The Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress occupies the mayor's house.
"I need permission for another bodyguard to carry a gun," Mahdi Duleimi, a retired general who is the INC's representative in Mosul, said to Petraeus during a recent meeting. "Right now I only have the one."
"No more bodyguards, no more guns," Petraeus answered. "We have too many guns. And I believe your offices are in the mayor's house? Well, I think he's going to want to live there again soon."
The potentially explosive process of evicting the parties and disarming their followers will come later. For the moment, Petraeus has opted for a strategy of accumulating "small wins." The power is on, telephones work, the water is running. He has used operational funds to resurrect the amusement park. (He expressed concern at his recent morning security briefing about the color of the pool's water.) He plans to replant the soccer fields in the days ahead.
Few public employees, however, have been paid since the war began. But a chipper man named Doug Hamilton, a Congressional Budget Office employee assigned to the reconstruction effort, recently arrived with $5 million to do so.
Trash is piling up on street corners. Sporadic gunfire rings out at night. Taxi fares have risen; Petraeus sent a one-star general to the transportation companies to coax down prices. Long gas lines and rationing pose a huge problem here.
"I waited three days for my share of 25 liters," complained Ayad Mohammed, a 40-year-old taxi driver, who said the supply lasted him three hours. "You see there is order in these lines. But it is only because the Americans are here with weapons. If not, there would be chaos."
With unrest near the surface, Petraeus monitors the mosques for strains of anti-American feelings. Lately, he has not liked what he has heard. So he has turned for help to Saleh Khalieh Hamoodi, a Sunni cleric and city council member who issued his own prewar call for Iraqis to resist U.S. forces. Hamoodi, who was jailed a decade ago, said he was forced to do so by the government.
Now he is the general's link to the city's powerful clerics. The two met recently in the mayor's suite to see how they could help each other. Sweating in long gray robes, Hamoodi was the first to ask for assistance. Kurds were trying to drive members of the Iraqi Islamic Party out of their offices, he said. Could the general send some help?
"I'm not going to secure Islamic Party headquarters if the imams say bad things about coalition forces," Petraeus told him. "And some of your colleagues are. It hurts me and my men to hear that."
Hamoodi smiled. He took the names of six imams identified by U.S. intelligence as potentially problematic and assured the general he would speak to them at once.
Perched above a former Baath Party parade stand, Mosul's only television station has been a U.S. Army post for almost a month. Shirtless soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of the 327th Infantry Brigade played touch football on a recent evening in the courtyard outside the small, concrete station.
Never before has Ahmed Jasim, the station manager, been allowed to pick his own programming. Pudgy with a gray comb-over, Jasim is still not entirely free to do so. He said U.S. Marines entered the station and seized a videotape of Jabouri, the returned exile claiming authority, while it was on the air in the days after last month's deadly riots.
More recently, Petraeus sent the station manager a letter telling him to give fair access to all political parties, not just Jabouri's, and censor anti-American messages. Petraeus's next step, he said, would be to review material before it airs.
"I am the occupying power, make no mistake," Petraeus said, arguing that censorship to preserve public order was his "obligation" under the Geneva Conventions. "I am responsible for this place."
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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