Page 2 of 5 WAR OF THE
IMAGINATION, Part 2 The third act in
Iraq By Mark Danner
Garner gets on the phone and appeals to
the secretary of defense, who tells him - and this
will be a leitmotif in Woodward's book - that the
matter is out of his hands:
"This is not coming from this
building," [Rumsfeld] replied. "That came from
somewhere else."
Garner presumed that
meant the White House, National Security Council
or Vice President Dick
Cheney. According to other
participants, however, the de-Ba'athification
order was purely a Pentagon creation. Telling
Garner it came from somewhere else, though, had
the advantage for Rumsfeld of ending the
argument.
Such tactics are presumably
what mark Rumsfeld as a "skilled bureaucratic
infighter", the description that has followed
him through his career in government like a
Homeric epithet. In fact, according to Bremer,
he had received those orders at the Pentagon a
few days before from Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's
under secretary for policy. In Bremer's telling,
Feith gave him the draft order, emphasizing "the
political importance of the decree":
We've got to show all the Iraqis
that we're serious about building a new Iraq.
And that means that Saddam's instruments of
repression have no role in that new nation.
The following day, Bremer's second in
Iraq, the hapless Garner, was handed another draft
order. This, Woodward tells us, was Order Number
2, disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and
Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of
Saddam's bodyguard and special paramilitary
organizations:
Garner was stunned. The
de-Ba'athification order was dumb, but this was
a disaster. Garner had told the president and
the whole National Security Council explicitly
that they planned to use the Iraqi military - at
least 200,000 to 300,000 troops - as the
backbone of the corps to rebuild the country and
provide security. And he'd been giving regular
secure video reports to Rumsfeld and Washington
on the plan.
An American colonel and
a number of CIA officers had been meeting
regularly with Iraqi officers in order to
reconstitute the army. They had lists of soldiers,
had promised emergency payments. "The former Iraqi
military," according to Garner, "was making more
and more overtures, just waiting to come back in
some form." Again, Garner rushed off to see
Bremer:
"We have always made plans to bring
the army back," he insisted. This new plan was
just coming out of the blue, subverting months
of work.
"Well, the plans have changed,"
Bremer replied. "The thought is that we don't
want the residuals of the old army. We want a
new and fresh army."
"Jerry, you can get
rid of an army in a day, but it takes years to
build one."
Again, Bremer tells
Garner that he has his orders. The discussion
attains a certain unintended comedy when the
proconsuls go on to discuss the Iraqi Ministry of
the Interior, which Bremer has also announced he
will abolish:
"You can't get rid of the Ministry
of the Interior," Garner said.
"Why
not?"
"You just made a speech yesterday
and told everybody how important the police
force is."
"It is important."
"All the police are in the Ministry of
the Interior," Garner said. "If you put this
out, they'll all go home today."
On
hearing this bit of information, we are told,
Bremer looked "surprised" - an expression similar,
no doubt, to then national security advisor
Condoleezza Rice's when she and the president
learned that the civilian occupation authority
would not be reporting to the White House but to
the Pentagon. Unfortunately, within the Pentagon
there coexisted at least two visions of what the
occupation of Iraq was to be: the quick victory,
quick departure view of Rumsfeld, and the broader,
ideologically driven democratic transformation of
Iraqi society championed by the neo-conservatives.
The two views had uneasily intersected,
for a time, in the alluring person of Chalabi, who
seemed to make both visions possible. With a
Chalabi coronation taken off the table by Bush,
however, determined officials with a direct line
to Bremer were transforming the Iraq adventure
into a long-term, highly ambitious occupation.
Presumably as Garner woke up on May 17, reflecting
that "the US now had at least 350,000 more enemies
than it had the day before - the 50,000 Ba'athists
[and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers,"
he could take satisfaction in having managed, by
his last-minute efforts, to persuade Bremer to
"excise the Ministry of Interior from the draft so
the police could stay".
One can make
arguments for a "deep de-Ba'athification" of Iraq.
One can make arguments also for dismantling the
Iraqi Army. It is hard, though, to make an
argument that such steps did not stand in dramatic
and irresolvable contradiction to the Pentagon's
plan to withdraw all but 30,000 American troops
from Iraq within a few months. With no Iraqi Army,
with all Ba'ath Party members thrown out of the
ministries and the agencies of government, with
all of Saddam's formidable security forces
summarily sacked - and with all of these forces
transformed into sworn enemies of the American
occupation - who precisely was going to keep order
in Iraq? And who was going to build that "new and
fresh army" that Bremer was talking about?
These questions loom so large and are so
obvious that one feels that they must have some
answer, even if an unconvincing one. The simple
fact is that these two enormously significant
steps - launching a "deep de-Ba'athification" of
the government and
