Paul Bremer, former American proconsul in Iraq, recently recalled his first impressions of the country he came to govern in May last year. ”As I drove from the airport, Baghdad was on fire,” he said. ”There was no traffic, and not one policeman on duty in the country.”
Now, after transferring power to an Iraqi government on Wednesday, he leaves a city again in flames, torn by car bombs, assassinations and kidnappings. Police are on the streets, but they are targets of insurgents to a degree he cannot have imagined when sent to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
On the helicopter trips he made to military bases and heavily guarded CPA regional headquarters around Iraq to say farewell, Bremer continually claimed all was not bad.
”Iraq is in a very exciting period. We’re on the verge of a sovereign government,” he told the governor of Muthana province. ”After the government was announced many Iraqis said it is the best for 50 years.”
Relentless public optimism has been Bremer’s hallmark, as flashy and inappropriate as the sand-coloured combat boots he wears with his blazer and dark trousers.
His high point was when he walked into the Baghdad press room in December to announce: ”Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”
The capture of Saddam Hussein was a huge morale booster for him and the US military — but did not bring the reduction of resistance they expected.
Bremer also counts the hammering out this March of an interim constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law, after weeks of discussion with Iraqi members of the governing council, as a notable achievement. With its promise of a federal Iraq with a Bill of Rights and protection of minorities, he hopes it will be the cornerstone of the permanent democratic constitution Iraqis will write for themselves next year.
Some critics shift the blame for the many failures to people around Bremer. ”He thinks clearly, based on facts he has,” said an Iraqi who attended governing council meetings. ”But he had no experience of the Middle East and was surrounded by people who didn’t understand Iraq.”
The CPA, in an ex-minister’s view, consisted of three types of Americans. ”There were the idealists with great enthusiasm for change according to the neo-conservative world-view,” he said. These often included very young people linked to a conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, who ended up taking important decisions .
”The second group were the career bureaucrats who were not doing very well in Washington but got higher-grade jobs here. Or retired officials urged back into service. Finally you had the adventurers. When the US army moves, all kinds of people live off its massive budget.”
Other Bremer troubles are put down to Washington, and particularly Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s top two men, who failed to plan for peacekeeping. Iraq was already in chaos when Bremer arrived six weeks after the regime was toppled.
The decision to disband the Iraqi army and police and purge the top layers of the Ba’ath party without screening the real killers and crooks is widely seen as a key reason for discontent and insurgency in Sunni areas. Although the decisions were taken over Bremer’s head, he vigorously defended them.
”It was like disbanding the whole state without an alternative. This created a vacuum, administrative, political, and on security,” said one Iraqi.
Other council members, like the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi, then still well regarded by the Pentagon, supported the measures.
Bremer showed classic imperial characteristics in being slow to hand power to Iraqis and wanting to pre-empt decisions.
Under pressure from then-UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, he agreed to form the purely advisory governing council last June. It submitted a Cabinet for Bremer’s approval, but US and other CPA-hired foreign advisers sat in every key ministry, taking the big decisions.
Bremer’s next mistake was to want to draft a constitution for Iraq and delay elections until afterwards. His plans were derailed by the top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who insisted only a directly elected body could draft a permanent constitution.
Hamid Majid Mousa, general secretary of the Communist Party and a governing council member, added: ”They’ve done little about unemployment. Why didn’t they use Keynesian methods like in post-war Germany? Most people in the militias are jobless.”
The security portfolio was not under Bremer’s direct control, being left to US commanders. But on the biggest military challenge to face US troops — the uprising in the Sunni city of Falluja — Bremer wanted military victory but was undercut by Washington.
”One word characterises the year of US occupation: incoherence,” said one ex-minister. ”They had one foot on the accelerator, and the other on the brake; you got constant lurching.”
But Bremer had his hands on the wheel. He must carry the can for a peacekeeping mission that failed. — Â