By Robert D. NovakA bus full of 15 Iraqi lawyers carrying a four-page, single-spaced letter to President Bush arrived at the White House on Tuesday. Their mission was to request less U.S. help in building prisons and more in establishing the rule of law. There was no immediate official response, and the experiences of the past four years indicate nothing will be done.
Aswad al-Minshidi, president of the Iraqi Bar Association, led the delegation. The lawyers had hoped to confer with White House counsel Fred Fielding, with perhaps a drop-in by George W. Bush. But the president was campaigning in New Albany, Ind., and the Iraqis had to be content with meeting Special Counsel Emmet Flood, a staffer well down the chain of command. He could promise only that the letter pleading for overdue help would be conveyed to Fielding.
"America’s rule of law effort in Iraq has focused almost entirely on police, prisons and prosecution," said the letter to Bush, which was signed by Minshidi. In post-Hussein Iraq, detained terrorism suspects are still in jail after being cleared by the courts, and the lawyers complained about "a policeman and prosecutor’s definition of what rule of law means." Today it means a policy limited to law enforcement.
This faulty allocation of U.S. funds is part of a broader problem in Iraq: Americans are not good at nation-building. The huge embassy in Baghdad is run by Foreign Service officers on the same model as U.S. missions worldwide whose function is reporting, not managing. Similarly, legal policy in Iraq is handled by assistant U.S. attorneys who focus on arrest and detention…
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