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REVIEW Bremer: 'Marching as to war' My Year in Iraq by L Paul Bremer
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Reviewed by Alexander Casella
"Baghdad was burning." These are the opening words in L Paul Bremer's My Year in
Iraq, his account of the 14 months he spent as administrator of the
Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and de facto US proconsul in the
country.
Bremer does not skirt the question of why Baghdad - or more specifically the
part of town where most government ministries
were located - was burning. US forces had, on paper, occupied the city a few
weeks before, but the Americans did not have the necessary number of troops
actually to control it.
The Iraqi police had disappeared, giving looters the run of the town. Thus
Baghdad was burning because there was no one to maintain order. The question
Bremer doesn't raise is why the Iraqi police disappeared and why no efforts had
been made by the Americans to keep them in place. Had Bremer done so, he
would have had to acknowledge that he was taking over a disaster.
It wasn't all his fault, as the disaster had been in the making weeks if not
months before his appointment. All he did was to turn the disaster into a
catastrophe.
There were gasps of disbelief in Washington when Bremer was chosen for the job.
A veteran of three decades with the State Department, his career was that of a
reliable albeit undistinguished bureaucrat and included the posts of US
ambassador to the Netherlands and ambassador at large for counter-terrorism.
After leaving the State Department he served as managing director of Kissinger
and Associates before moving to another private firm. It was from that
position, at the age of 62, that he was chosen by the administration of
President George W Bush as the de facto governor of Iraq, a position for which
he had no apparent qualifications or background.
Who within the administration actually identified him for the job, and for what
reason, is something Bremer leaves the reader in the dark about. All he
ventures is that the man who initially approached him was I Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who is now under
indictment for allegedly lying to federal authorities about his role in
"outing" a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative.
Another issue Bremer does not credibly address relates to the first US team
that had been assembled prior to the invasion with the task of taking over
administration of Iraq. Initially, it was the Pentagon's Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA) under General Jay Garner that
was to assume this responsibility.
Garner had been in charge of humanitarian operations in northern Iraq in 1991
and was credited with doing an outstanding job. Supported by a team assembled
in the weeks before the invasion, Garner arrived in Baghdad at the end of April
2003 and announced he was planning to appoint an interim Iraqi government by
May 15. Barely three weeks after his arrival, Garner was ousted from his post
and replaced by Bremer, who arrived in Baghdad on May 12.
Washington never intended for Garner to be the US proconsul in Iraq, Bremer
contends. If correct, his contention raises another question: Why was Garner
put there and for only three weeks?
According to sources in Washington, extensive plans had been made by the State
Department before the invasion regarding the managing of a conquered Iraq.
While the details of these plans remain unknown, they relied heavily on the
experience of Arabists within both the State Department and the CIA, and
reportedly warned against excessive optimism concerning the managing of a
post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
This was at variance with the view of the White House and, in particular, of
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The decision was therefore made at the
highest level to shelve the State Department plans on the grounds that they did
not conform to the ideology of the Bush administration. The same happened to
the ORHA team, which while nominally under the Pentagon, bore the imprint of
Garner, who was also considered ideologically unreliable.
The result was Garner's removal and the last-minute choice of Bremer, whose
deep Christian commitment was viewed as ideologically reassuring by the White
House.
While it is difficult to imagine that Bremer was not aware of the divergence of
opinions in Washington about how and by whom a conquered Iraq should be
governed, the fact that he completely overlooks the issue does not contribute
to the credibility of his book.
Ultimately his memoir is more of a diary - and a somewhat boring one at that -
than a substantive piece of analysis, and is spattered with irrelevant
information in an attempt to be folksy. For instance, the reader learns that
his wife has blue eyes and he wears Timberland boots with his suits, hardly
contributions to our knowledge of Iraq.
More to the point, he does concede, while skirting the issue as to why, that
when he arrived in Iraq the US had simply no more plans regarding the managing
of the country. What in most cases would be considered a major policy flaw is
dismissed with the quip that it was not that the US had "no plans", but rather
that it had planned for the "wrong contingency".
That this wrong contingency was the doing of the Bush administration is an
issue that Bremer fails to raise; and while one can assume that this reticence
is because he was an appointee of that same administration, the suspicion
lingers that it was also through sheer intellectual deficiency.
This inability to look at reality in an analytical perspective and to identify
reasons before advocating solutions runs like a red thread through Bremer's
book.
Thus regarding the disbanding of the Iraqi army by the US - a decision many
viewed as a critical error that deprived hundred of thousands of trained
soldiers of their livelihood and drove them toward the resistance - Bremer
claims that "not a single Iraqi military unit remained intact" after the
invasion and there was nothing left to disband, given that the Iraqi army fell
apart by itself.
The army was composed of some 400,000 Shi'ite draftees, 11,000 generals and
"several hundred thousand officers", he says. Based on these data, Iraq would
have had an army composed of some two draftees per officer, a technical
impossibility at best.
While the Iraqi army might well have collapsed as an organized entity, why it
did so, what steps the US could have taken before and during the war to preempt
such a development, and the consequences of the vacuum it created are issues
that obviously never occurred to Bremer.
The same myopia applies to the issue of public order. The three weeks of
looting that followed the US invasion and which went unchecked by the US forces
was probably the first indication the control exercised on the ground by the
invading forces was tenuous, and would remain so.
And yet the means to preempt the looting were available. According to Bremer
there were about 4,000 "poorly trained " Iraqi police officers in Baghdad -
what is meant by "poorly trained" is not explained - a figure he then upgrades
to 14,000. Why no attempt was made to use them is a question that is not even
raised.
The same tunnel-vision approach applies to "de-Ba'athification". According to
Bremer, the Ba'ath Party had some 2 million members, of whom about 20,000 were
in "top positions". While de-Ba'athification was to be selective, it did not
appear so to individual members, most of whom had joined the movement as a
matter of survival, which meant that another segment of the Iraqi society was
marginalized.
Marginalizing large sections of Iraqi society, whether the former army,
intelligence services or Ba'ath Party members, was obviously of no concern to
Bremer.
Unlike in Germany and more so in Japan after 1945, where reconstruction
entailed the reintegration both of high-level Nazis and practically the whole
bureaucracy of imperial Japan, Bremer and his masters in Washington had other
ambitions. The aim was not only "regime change" but also the creation of a "new
Iraq dedicated to a free-market economy", which would "stir a democratic wind
throughout the region". Ideology, not realpolitik, was the moving force behind
Bremer's pronouncements as he sought to export US neo-conservatism to the
shifting sands of Mesopotamia.
As he struggled with the Shi'ite, Kurds, Sunnis and their various leaders as
well as Iraq's governing council and interim government, Bremer's faith
remained unwavering. Onward went this Christian soldier, marching as to war,
unmovable in his belief that he was fighting the good fight.
And when he left Baghdad on June 28, 2004, it was with the unshakable certitude
that he was leaving behind an "Iraq united by a shared vision of freedom", thus
giving added credence to the well-worn but never disproved dictum that nothing
is more terrifying than ignorance in action.
My Year in Iraq by Paul Bremer. Simon & Schuster (January 2006).
ISBN: 0743273893. Price US$27, 417 pages (hardcover).
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