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5 WAR OF THE IMAGINATION, Part
2 The third act in
Iraq By Mark Danner
(This article, which appears in the
December 21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books,
is posted here with the permission of the editors
of that magazine.)
So
there would be no president Ahmad Chalabi in the
new Iraq. Unfortunately, President George W Bush,
who thought of himself,
journalist Bob Woodward says,
"as the calcium in the backbone" of the US
government, having banned Iraq exile Chalabi's
ascension, neither offered an alternative plan nor
forced the government he led to agree on one.
Nor did secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, who knew only that he wanted a quick
victory and a quick departure. To underline the
point, soon after the US invasion, the secretary
sent his special assistant, Larry DiRita, to the
Kuwait City Hilton to brief the tiny, miserable,
understaffed and underfunded team led by retired
Lieutenant General Jay Garner which was preparing
to fly to a chaotic Baghdad to "take control of
the transition". Here is DiRita's "Hilton Speech"
as quoted to Woodward by an army colonel, Paul
Hughes:
We went into the Balkans and Bosnia
and Kosovo and we're still in them ... We're
probably going to wind up in Afghanistan for a
long time because the Department of State can't
do its job right. Because they keep screwing
things up, the Department of Defense winds up
being stuck at these places. We're not going to
let this happen in Iraq. The reaction was
generally, Whoa! Does this guy even realize that
half the people in the room are from the State
Department? DiRita went on, as Hughes recalled:
"By the end of August we're going to have 25,000
to 30,000 troops left in Iraq."
DiRita spoke these words as, a few
hundred miles away, Baghdad and the other major
cities of Iraq were taken up in a thoroughgoing
riot of looting and pillage - of government
ministries, universities and hospitals, power
stations and factories - that would virtually
destroy the country's infrastructure, and with it
much of the respect Iraqis might have had for
American competence. The uncontrolled violence
engulfed Iraq's capital and major cities for weeks
as American troops - 140,000 or more - mainly sat
on their tanks, looking on.
If attaining
true political authority depends on securing a
monopoly on legitimate violence, then the
Americans would never achieve it in Iraq. There
were precious few troops to impose order, and
hardly any military police. No one gave the order
to arrest or shoot looters or otherwise take
control of the streets. Official Pentagon
intentions at this time seem to have been
precisely what the secretary of defense's special
assistant said they were: to have all but 25,000
or so of those troops out of Iraq in five months
or less.
How then to secure the country,
which was already in a state of escalating chaos?
Most of the ministries had been looted and burned
and what government there was consisted of the
handful of Iraqi officials who Garner's small team
had managed to coax into returning to work. In
keeping with the general approach of quick
victory, quick departure, Garner had briefed the
president and his advisers before leaving
Washington, emphasizing his plan to dismiss only
the most senior and personally culpable Ba'athists
from the government and also to make use of the
Iraqi Army to rebuild and, eventually, keep order.
Within weeks of that meeting in the Kuwait
Hilton, L Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad,
replacing Garner, who had been fired after less
than a month in Iraq. On Bremer's first full day
"in-country", in Woodward's telling, one of
Garner's officials ran up to her now lame duck
boss and thrust a paper into his hand:
"Have you read this?" she asked.
"No," Garner replied. "I don't know what
the hell you've got there."
"It's a
de-Ba'athification policy," she said, handing
him a two-page document.
The document
was Bremer's "Coalition Provisional Authority
Order Number 1 - De-Ba'athification of Iraqi
Society", an order to remove immediately from
their posts all "full members" of the Ba'ath
Party. These were to be banned from working in any
government job. In every ministry the top three
levels of managers would be investigated for
crimes.
"We can't do this," Garner said. He
still envisioned what he had told Rumsfeld would
be a "gentle de-Ba'athification" - eliminating
only the number one Ba'athist and personnel
directors in each ministry. "It's too deep," he
added.
Garner headed immediately to
Bremer's office, where the new occupation leader
was just settling in, and on the way ran into the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief of
station, referred to here as Charlie.
"Have you read this?" Garner asked.
"That's why I'm over here," Charlie
said.
"Let's go see Bremer." The two men
got in to see the new administrator of Iraq
around 1pm.
"Jerry, this is too deep,"
Garner said. "Give Charlie and I about an hour.
We'll sit down with this. We'll do the pros and
cons and then we'll get on the telephone with
Rumsfeld and soften it a bit."
"Absolutely not," Bremer said. "Those
are my instructions and I intend to execute
them."
Garner, who will shortly be
going home, sees he's making little headway and
appeals to the CIA man, who "had been station
chief in other Middle East countries", asking him
what will happen if the order is issued.
"If you put this out, you're going
to drive between 30,000 and 50,000 Ba'athists
underground before nightfall," Charlie said ...
"You will put 50,000 people on the street,
underground and mad at Americans." And these
50,000 were the most powerful, well-connected
elites from all walks of life.
"I told
you," Bremer said, looking at Charlie. "I have
my instructions and I have to implement this.
The chain of command, as we know,
goes through Rumsfeld, and
