Page 3 of 5 WAR OF THE
IMAGINATION, Part 2 The third act in
Iraq By Mark Danner
dissolving the Iraqi Army - together with
Bremer's decision, taken also during his first
days, to downgrade to that of a figurehead the
status of the group of Iraqi politicians known as
the Iraqi Governing Council, transformed what had
been the Pentagon's plan for a quick victory and
quick departure into a long-running and open-ended
occupation that would perforce involve the
establishment of a new Iraqi
Army.
The political implications within
Iraq were incalculable, for the de-Ba'athification
and the dissolution of the army both appeared to
the Sunnis to be declarations of open warfare
against them, convincing many that they would be
judged not by standards of individual conduct but
by the fact of their membership in a group judged
not according to what they had done but according
to who they were. This in itself undermined what
hope there was to create the sine qua non
of a stable democracy: a loyal opposition, which
is to say an opposition that believes enough in
the fairness of the system that it will renounce
violence. "You Americans, you know," as a young
Sunni had told me in October 2003, when the
insurgency was already in full flower, "you have
created your enemies here."
It is unlikely
that the Pentagon's vision of a rapid departure
ever could have worked, Bremer or no Bremer. What
is striking, however, is the way that the most
momentous of decisions were taken in the most
shockingly haphazard ways, with the power in the
hands of a few Pentagon civilians who knew little
of Iraq or the region, the expertise of the rest
of the government almost wholly excluded, and the
president and his highest officials looking on.
In the event, the Bush administration
seems to have worked hard to turn George F
Kennan's (American advisor, diplomat, political
scientist and historian)problem of knowing the
facts on its head: the systemic failures in Iraq
resulted in large part from an almost willful
determination to cut off those in the government
who knew anything from those who made the
decisions. Woodward tells us, for example, that
Stephen Hadley, then Rice's deputy and now her
successor,
first learned of the orders on
de-Ba'athification and disbanding the military
as Bremer announced them to Iraq and to the
world. They hadn't been touched by the formal
interagency process and as far as Hadley knew
there was no imprimatur from the White House.
Rice also had not been consulted. It hadn't come
back to Washington or the NSC for a decision ...
One NSC lawyer had been shown drafts of
the policies to de-Ba'athify Iraq and disband
the military - but that was only to give a legal
opinion. The policymakers never saw the drafts,
never had a chance to say whether they thought
they were good ideas or even to point out that
they were radical departures from what had
earlier been planned and briefed to the
president.
As for the uniformed
military, the men who were responsible for
securing Iraq and whose job would thus be
dramatically affected both by de-Ba'athification
and by the dissolution of the Iraqi Army, they
were given no chance to speak on either question.
Woodward writes:
General [Richard] Myers, the
principal military adviser to Bush, Rumsfeld and
the NSC, wasn't even consulted on the disbanding
of the Iraqi military. It was presented as a
fait accompli.
"We're not going to just
sit here and second-guess everything he does,"
Rumsfeld told Myers at one point, referring to
Bremer's decisions.
"I didn't get a vote
on it," Myers told a colleague, "but I can see
where Ambassador Bremer might have thought this
is reasonable."
Since it is the
cashiered Iraqi troops who, broke, angry and
humiliated ("Why do you Americans punish us, when
we did not fight?" as one ex-soldier demanded of
me that October), would within days be killing
Myers's soldiers with sniper fire and the first
improvised explosive devices, one has to regard
the general's expressed forbearance as uncommonly
generous.
At the time, the civilians in
the Pentagon had attained their greatest power and
prestige. Rumsfeld's daily press conferences were
broadcast live over the cable news channels, with
an appreciative audience of journalists chortling
at the secretary's jokes on national television.
No one then seems to have questioned what Woodward
calls his "distrust of the interagency". Instead,
Woodward writes,
from April 2003 on, the constant
drumbeat that Hadley heard coming out of the
Pentagon had been "This is Don Rumsfeld's thing,
and we're going to do the interagency in
Baghdad. Let Jerry run it".
"Jerry",
it might be said at this point, seems a
well-meaning man, but he had never run anything
larger than the United States Embassy in the
Netherlands, where he served as ambassador. He
spoke no Arabic and knew little of the Middle East
and nothing of Iraq. He had had nothing to do with
the meager and inadequate planning the Pentagon
had done for "the postwar" and indeed had had only
a few days' preparation before being flown to
Baghdad. He apparently never saw the extensive
plans the State Department had drawn up for the
postwar period. And as would become evident as the
occupation wore on and he became more independent
of the Pentagon civilians, he had no particular
qualifications to make and implement decisions of
such magnitude, decisions that would certainly
prolong the American occupation and would
ultimately do much to doom it.
For
Rumsfeld, however, Bremer's supposed independence
in Baghdad has had its uses:
Rumsfeld later said he would be
surprised if [Paul] Wolfowitz or [Douglas] Feith
gave Bremer the de-Ba'athification and army
orders. He said he did not recall an NSC meeting
on the subject. Of Bremer, Rumsfeld said, "I
talked to him only rarely..."
It is
impossible to believe, even in this
administration, that Bremer decided on his own, on
his second day in Baghdad, to dissolve the Iraqi
Army, and it is unlikely that Rumsfeld's own
involvement in a matter of such magnitude would
have slipped the defense secretary's mind. To the
"skilled bureaucratic infighter", however,
especially one with little or no oversight from
president or
