MY YEAR IN IRAQ: THE STRUGGLE TO BUILD A FUTURE OF HOPE
By L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell
Simon & Schuster, $27, 417 pages
REVIEWED BY GARY ANDERSON
Many, if not most, veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom call the period from May of 2003 to May 2004 the “Lost Year.” Not surprisingly, Ambassador Paul Bremer did not choose that as the title of his memoir of his time as proconsul in Iraq.
The lost year exactly coincided with his tenure there. The book is an unapologetic defense of his stewardship. Mr. Bremer undoubtedly made some bad calls on his watch, but having read his account, I come away with a clearer understanding of why he did what he did and how he came to his decisions.
Mr. Bremer made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decisions during his tenure. The vast majority of them were good for Iraq, but several of the really big ones were disastrously wrong; they were made early on, and we are still trying to recover from them. His edicts on disarming the Iraqi Army and on de-Baathification had an impact that helped fan the nascent insurgency into a roaring bonfire.
However, given Mr. Bremer’s explanation, it is hard to see that someone in his position, and with the information that he had available, could have done better. The intelligence estimates from the military played down the potential of the insurgency and stated flatly that the Iraqi armed forces had disintegrated beyond recall.
We now know that both of these estimates were disastrously wrong, but that is the information he had to work with. In addition, he claims that he had firm guidance from his bosses in Washington to carry out both missions.
Mr. Bremer had a mandate to act decisively because Washington was under extreme pressure to bring to chaos that followed Saddam’s ouster to an end. He believed that, by acting decisively, he could reverse the perception that the Coalition had lost control of events.
However, the loss of the Baathist technocratic leadership and the security expertise of military officers provided fuel to the insurgency. Worse still, many of these unemployed officials became leaders in the diverse but surprisingly well-funded insurgent movement.
Much the same can be said with the nearly fatal events of April 2004 when he decided to near-simultaneously crack down on Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Muqtada Sadr, the Shiite firebrand, thus instigating a near perfect storm of Sunni-Shiite reaction. The disturbing thing that remains unexplained is that Mr. Bremer made these decisions with little or no consultation with coalition field commanders who had better working knowledge of the situation on the ground.
In fairness to Mr. Bremer, he was not a proconsul in the Roman sense of the word. He lacked control over the military aspects of the occupation; in other words he lacked unity of command.
His partner in this enterprise was Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo “Rick” Sanchez. Neither man was prepared by background or training to lead an Arab nation or fight an insurgency.
In addition, despite the ambassador’s diplomacy on the subject, they cordially despised each other and the attitude of their staffs reflected that fact. No one who spent time in the Presidential Palace that they co-occupied could believe that the Coalition Provisional Authority and Combined Joint Task Force Seven were fighting the same war, and their subordinate field commanders believed that neither was fighting the real war.
Mr. Bremer is at his best when describing the laborious attempts to build a new Iraqi government inside the walls of the Green Zone. He is at his worst when describing what was happening in the real Iraq outside.
By January of 2004 one could meet very few CPA staff, military or civilian, who had been outside the Green Zone compound due to the security situation. Worse still, the average civilian tenor was 90 days; that was, in the words of one staffer, “just enough time to become dangerous.”
The worst mistake of the Bremer-Sanchez partnership is glossed over in the book. This was the early policy of not involving the New Iraqi Army in internal security leaving counterinsurgency work in the hands of the coalition military and the woefully inadequate Iraqi Police.
This would have worked well in a peaceful occupation but not in Iraq. This was finally reversed in Washington, not Baghdad, in mid-winter of 2004. We are still playing catch up today.
There are books in the making that will attempt to tell a more balanced story. I hope the authors take the time to include Mr. Bremer’s account in the research. He deserves his day in court. He worked incredible hours and inspired the same in his staff in a near impossible environment, and he accomplished much. I believe history will be kinder to him in the long run than present judgments.
Gary Anderson visited Iraq on several occasions as a Pentagon advisor on Iraqi security matters during Ambassador Bremer’s tenure.
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