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| Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope , by L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell. Simon & Schuster, 2006. 419 pp. $27.00, hardcover.
Robert Dreyfuss
professor, University of Louisiana
A wag once said, “We didn’t invade Iraq. We invaded the Iraq of our dreams” [L. Patrick Lang, Middle East Policy, Vol. XII, No. 1, 2005]. It is into that dream that we step gingerly with L. Paul Bremer III, a.k.a. “Jerry,” the man who presided over Iraq from just after the invasion in 2003 until the creation of the interim government under Iyad Allawi a year later. Some would say that this was a period of just about nonstop bungling and mismanagement and that, if we have to blame anyone for it, we might as well blame Bremer. But Bremer disagrees –– and he takes more than 400 pages to do so.
President Bush is fond of saying that running the country is “hard work.” You can’t read Bremer’s account of his year as U.S. proconsul in Baghdad without acknowledging that that was also hard work. The looming civil war in Iraq, itself partly the result of a U.S. effort emphasizing ethnic and religious sectarian identities above all after 2003, seemed like not much more than a juggling act for Bremer. As he was getting ready to leave Iraq, Bremer had a final powwow with Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum, the Shiite cleric. “These gray hairs are from Sunnis. The ones on the back of my head are from the Kurds, and these here, on top, come from Shia like you,” he told Bahr al-Uloum. I guess that is supposed to be proconsul humor, but I don’t find it very funny.
Bremer could be serious, too. In his farewell meeting with Iyad Allawi, he told the secular, former Baathist leader who aligned himself with the CIA and MI-6 in exile, “You have your country now. It’s in your hands. Take good care of it.” This was, of course, in the summer of 2004. Two more years of insurgency and civil war would follow. There were 130,000-plus U.S. troops in Iraq. One can only imagine Allawi’s thoughts at that moment: In my hands?
Right at the start, Bremer admits he didn’t know anything about Iraq. His qualifications to handle the job were, in 2003, well, murky. His wife, Francie, said it best. When told by Bremer that he had been chosen by the president to run Iraq, she blurted out: “You?” Still, he quickly tried to get up to speed, holding “a frenzied series of meetings at the Pentagon” and hooking up with Brian McCormack, an aide to Vice President Cheney, who eagerly told Bremer that he could “be ready to leave in a week” for Baghdad. So, right from the start, Bremer was getting his education from the other know-nothings at the Department of Defense and hiring a special assistant to Cheney as the resident spy in his ranks for the vice president.
In his memoir, Bremer tells us that he was a skeptic about the neoconservatives’ view that Iraq could be fixed easily by installing the neocons’ favorite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) cohorts. “Some people thought we could get away with a short occupation and quickly turn full authority over to a group of selected Iraq exiles,” writes Bremer, who calls that a “reckless fantasy.” He reports numerous run-ins with Chalabi, and he names Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and John Hannah in Cheney’s office as among those pushing Chalabi’s demands, but not once in the book does Bremer question the ideological motives behind the views of Wolfowitz, Feith, Hannah and others. Interestingly, he lambastes Zalmay Khalilzad, the current U.S. ambassador in Iraq, for believing in the notion that Chalabi’s INC could run Iraq, going so far as to describe how he, Bremer, had to disabuse the exiles of the idea that Washington was planning to hand Iraq over to them. “The situation was complicated by the fact that in his last meeting with [them] two weeks earlier, ‘Presidential Envoy’ Zal Khalilzad had left them with the impression that we would turn over governing power to them by mid-May.” (Note the ironic quotes around “presidential envoy.”)
Of course, Bremer then proceeded to do exactly that –– to turn Iraq over to the exiles –– and, though he took his sweet time about it, it had the same effect. In the interim, Bremer made sure he supervised the two dumbest decisions made by U.S. authorities in 2003: the abolition of the Iraqi army and the “de-Baathification” of Iraq. Though both decisions were pushed intensely by the Pentagon’s neocon big thinkers, above all Douglas Feith in the Pentagon’s policy office, Bremer vigorously defends both. (CPA Order No. 1 was “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society;” CPA Order No. 2 was “Dissolution of Entities.” The latter included the defense ministry, the armed forces, and all “national security ministries and offices.”)
Bremer then turned around and promised Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and commander of the fearsome Badr Brigade, that the Shiites would run things:
"We hoped to draw some of his party’s 10,000-member Badr Corps militia into the New Iraqi Army…. “I promise you this, Sayyid,” I said, using his honorific title. “The commander of the first battalion will be a Shiite.” The Coalition kept that promise."
Indeed they did. Nowhere in the book does Bremer suggest that the leaders of the Shiite parties, all of them exiles (in the case of the Shiites, most had spent years in Iran), were too religious, sectarian or fanatical to run Iraq. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who made a good first impression on Bremer, was the leader of the terrorist underground Shiite party Al Dawa. “Jaafari,” Bremer assures us, “was not a religious zealot.” (Ironically, Ahmed Chalabi, who later cast his lot with the Islamists only to break with them again in 2005, told Bremer that he was putting “too many ‘Islamist’ candidates” on the proposed Governing Council.) Later, Bremer cites public-opinion polls about the attitudes of the Shiites, concluding: “From everything we can tell so far –– though I wouldn’t bet my bottom dollar at this stage –– it seems very few Shia want a theocratic government.” Oops.
Bremer says that he was skeptical not only of the neocons’ insistence on handing power to Chalabi, but of what he said was the Pentagon’s desire to get out of Iraq as soon as possible. That policy, he says, was part and parcel of the idea that the exiles could run things and that the U.S. armed forces could afford to leave Iraq in their capable hands. But he realized that the insurgency, which was growing in the “Sunni triangle,” had to be defeated first. “I’d sensed that the Pentagon did not grasp the need to crush a mounting Baathist-jihadi insurgency, and to crush it early on,” writes Bremer, who warns the DOD not to “draw down our forces too soon”:
I had the impression that the armed services, and possibly Rumsfeld himself, were in a hurry to get our troops home. … “In my view,” I’d told [Condi Rice], “the Coalition’s got about half the number of soldiers we need here, and we run a real risk of having this thing go south on us.
Of course, the north did “go south.”
But Bremer’s skepticism about the Pentagon’s strategy in Iraq raises a lot more questions than he answers in this unsatisfying book. Did he insist that President Bush’s Iraq policy was fatally flawed? Did he agree with CIA and U.S. intelligence estimates that the Iraqi insurgency was spreading (conclusions that got more than one CIA Baghdad station chief fired)? Did he believe that the enterprise in Iraq was failing? Did he try to reverse CPA Orders No. 1 and No. 2? He did not. Bremer was President Bush’s man; he told the president what he wanted to hear. In fact, he seemed a bit too interested in keeping Bush happy. Bremer’s verbatim discussions with Bush, reproduced in the book, offer some of its most comical moments. After he presented the president with his 2003 “Strategic Plan” –– at precisely the same time he claims he was warning Rice that the U.S. forces were not sufficient to secure Iraq –– Bremer quotes Bush thus: “It’s a good paper, Bremer! You folks are sure thorough.”
The bulk of the book is Bremer’s account of wheedling, cajoling and manipulating Chalabi, Allawi, Hakim, Jaafari and the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, into going along with one or another of his initiatives. In retrospect, his constant rearranging of chairs on the Governing Council seems like the same futile effort aboard the Titanic. He makes much of his back-channel contacts with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani but downplays Sistani’s power grab, which guaranteed that the SCIRI-Dawa axis got the lion’s share of power in postwar Iraq. He provides a blow-by-blow account of the battle to suppress Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and of the first battle of Fallujah. And, in case we had any doubt, he describes how he strong-armed Lakhdar Brahimi, the skilled Algerian diplomat and UN envoy, who wanted a government of technocrats rather than the tired collection of exiles whom Bremer supposedly disdained. Brahimi also resisted giving too much power to the Shiites. In a masterpiece of understatement, Bremer says: “Brahimi came to see the usefulness of consulting the Governing Council on finding people for senior positions in the new government.”
In the end, whether despite Bremer or because of him, Chalabi’s INC begat the Governing Council, which begat the Interim Government, which begat the transitional government, which begat the Iraqi Constitution, which begat the elections of December 15, 2005, that elected the “permanent” government. The cast of characters has pretty much remained the same. As a result, Iraq may not have a happy ending. But Bremer managed one. The book’s closing words:
"After a ninety-minute flight, we landed at the military airport in Amman, Jordan. I called Francie, who by now had seen reports of the early transfer of sovereignty. “I’m safe and free,” I said. “And I’m coming home.”
Now it was Zal’s problem.
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