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WHEN L. PAUL BREMER, fresh from stepping down as American regent in Iraq, visited the White House on June 30, he was greeted by President Bush with a bear hug. Half-jokingly, Bush insisted a White House photographer take a picture of them and drew attention to the signature soft leather boots Bremer wears with a coat, tie, dress shirt, and cufflinks. As the two walked outside from the Oval Office to the Old Executive Office Building, Bush spotted press photographers and immediately threw his arm around Bremer in a gesture of public support. Later that day, Bremer joined the president for a workout in the presidential gym, just as he had last November during an earlier visit to the White House. Bremer, 62, has many critics, including a few in the Bush administration, but the president isn't among them. Nor should he be, for Bremer is the man who saved Iraq as a single country with a democratic future. True, a lot has gone wrong in postwar Iraq, some of it during Bremer's tenure as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority from mid-May 2003 to last June 28. But the big things went right, thanks to a handful of Bremer's decisions and his political skill. In Iraq, the center held. The country didn't fracture into three separate rump states, Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia. Neither civil war nor warlordism broke out (though terrorism did). Mass killings of former officials and collaborators with Saddam Hussein's regime never occurred, unlike the bloody reprisals in France and Italy after World War II. With Bremer's behind-the-scenes assistance, a strong national leader finally stepped forward in Iraq, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. While Allawi may be no Konrad Adenauer or Nelson Mandela, he is the most clear-eyed and strong-willed politician to emerge from the crowd of ambitious exiles on the now-defunct Iraqi Governing Council. So, absent Bremer, the deluge? Not quite. But it's fair to say that without Bremer, Iraq would be worse off today, far more divided along poisonous ethnic and religious lines. Its prospects for muddling through, for becoming a reasonably stable, mostly democratic country, would be dimmer. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says Iraq would not have been in a position to accept sovereignty last month without Bremer. Iraq as a single national entity "was nurtured" successfully by Bremer, she says. Bremer believes Iraq's chances now of becoming a viable country are roughly three to one. That may be optimistic. But for sure, the odds would be worse had Bremer not served in Iraq. Bremer achieved a number of smaller successes. The new Iraqi currency the CPA created was instantly accepted. Schools, hospitals, and universities are back in operation all over Iraq. Despite infrastructure in Iraq that's ancient and crumbling, the output of electric power is now greater than it was under Saddam--and distributed more fairly. (Still, it hasn't reached the goal Bremer had set.) The production of oil, Iraq's chief export, is back to prewar levels and rising. Hundreds of thousands of automobiles and a massive amount of consumer goods are now in the hands of average Iraqis. Fly over Iraqi cities, suburbs, or rural areas in a helicopter, and you'll find practically every home has a TV satellite dish. Under Saddam, dishes were banned. The problems Bremer leaves behind are well known, the most crippling being security. Terrorist attacks and intimidation of Iraqis are everyday occurrences. Before the war, Saddam emptied his jails. The result: Crime is rampant. The violence has had an enormously harmful impact on the country, preventing work on modernizing the infrastructure from proceeding on schedule and scaring away foreign investors who might otherwise be attracted by Iraq's low taxes and educated work force. Without a drastic improvement in the security situation, political stability and economic growth won't be achieved, and Iraq will be a failed state. Bremer bears part of the blame for the security environment, but only a small part. The fault lies mostly with what happened during the three-week invasion in 2003. The war never reached the Sunni Triangle, home of Baathists with privileged status under Saddam and now a sanctuary for foreign jihadists. Two Republican Guard divisions there never faced American fire, and the troops disbanded with their weapons. Turkey bears some responsibility. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division was supposed to drive southward from Turkey and subdue much of the Sunni Triangle. But Turkey balked, the 4th never came south, and the stronghold of support for Saddam was spared. In hindsight, Bremer erred in endorsing the withdrawal this spring of American Marines from Falluja, the largest city in the Sunni Triangle, as they were on the verge of defeating the antidemocratic forces. Instead, the so-called Iraqi Brigade of ex-members of Saddam's army was given the task. Why? Because Bremer and administration officials in Washington feared a national uprising would be ignited by the killing of too many civilians in Falluja. The Iraqi Brigade has arrested no one and seized no weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld privately refers to Falluja as a "failed" experiment. Indeed, it is. The city is now the base from which terrorists launch attacks throughout Iraq, the same function Afghanistan provided for al Qaeda when the Taliban was in charge. Most of the criticism of Bremer, however, cancels itself out. The Wall Street Journal described him as "autocratic," while others faulted him for conceding too much power. In a single Washington Post article last month, Bremer was said to have both devoted too much time to free-market economic reform and not enough time to removing government obstacles to a thriving market. He's been zinged for focusing on long-range solutions, but also for micromanaging day-to-day work. He's accused of having given both too much and too little authority to the Iraqi Governing Council. Most of the criticism is bogus. So is the charge that Bremer is to blame for the unpopularity of the occupation of Iraq. Military occupations are always unpopular with the occupied. To assess Bremer's performance, consider two things. First, recall conditions in Iraq when he arrived in Baghdad two months after Saddam was toppled. Iraq was in a state of near anarchy. Government facilities from hospitals to military installations had been looted down to the floor tiles and electrical wiring. Saddam and his sons were at large. There weren't enough American soldiers to secure all of Iraq or its borders. No Iraqi governing body had been established, and ministries were not functioning. The relationship of Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, with potential Iraqi leaders consisted of a few meetings with five exiles. Garner had no control over anything. The economy was in shambles. Serious trouble in Falluja had erupted after a dozen civilians were killed by American troops. Second, consider the enormity of the task Bremer undertook. Given the violence and the sullen lack of cooperation by Iraqis, Bremer's job was tougher than that of General Douglas MacArthur in Japan or John J. McCloy in Germany after World War II. For starters, Bremer had to build a new government, an Iraqi army, a functioning police force, an economy, a banking system, a network of utilities, and a political community that promotes compromise. He needed to forge a "new Iraq" as he calls it, different in every way from the old. And he had to keep Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia, who historically have not gotten along, at peace with one another in a country whose borders had been arbitrarily drawn by Europeans after World War I. Nothing on this scale had ever been tried before. Bremer's greatest asset was his political dexterity. He managed to please, satisfy, and get the cooperation of nearly all the significant players in Iraq with his guiding principle of "strategic clarity and tactical flexibility." He recognized the importance of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the respected Shia leader, and acceded to his wishes at critical moments. He lined up the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, as allies. He cleverly recruited United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to bestow legitimacy on Allawi's interim government. He persuaded the president and Congress, which had planned to appropriate nothing for Iraqi reconstruction, to allocate an astonishing $18.4 billion. Bremer's two most controversial decisions--de-Baathification and disbanding the army--were his most consequential. Without them, Iraq was all but certain to fly apart with little chance of becoming even a faintly unified country. Without de-Baathification in particular, Sistani and most if not all of the Shia community--62 percent of the Iraqi population--would have rejected the occupation and a new Iraqi government. The Baathists under Saddam had persecuted the Shia mercilessly for decades. Without officially dissolving Saddam's army, most of which had already disbanded on its own, the Kurds would not have been on board. They held the Iraqi army responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Kurds. The argument against de-Baathification is that it deprived postwar Iraq of government officials with critically needed expertise. It did, but it was a price worth paying. Barred from government were the top three layers of the Baathist party and the top four layers in government ministries under Saddam. These amounted to 15,000 to 20,000 people out of two million party members. Imagine how the new government would look to Iraqis with many of the same senior directors in charge of the ministries. It would appear that nothing had changed. For decades, college professors in Iraq had been kept from attending academic conferences outside the country. Their applications were nixed by the senior education minister. What if that minister were still in office? What would professors think? They would think nothing had changed and they might be right. Thus, de-Baathification was essential on many levels. To utilize the Iraqi army to restore order immediately, Bremer would have had to reconstitute parts of it without fully vetting the officers, many of them Sunnis loyal to Saddam. Yes, some became insurgents, but they would have anyway, despite a payment of $80 to $120 a month to former soldiers. Bremer quickly established a careful system for allowing individual soldiers to join the new army. As a result, 100 percent of the officers and NCOs in the post-Saddam army and more than 70 percent of the soldiers are veterans of the old army. In a June 29 editorial, the Wall Street Journal said this: "Mr. Bremer behaved as if he had all the time in the world to stand up Iraqi forces and rebuffed offers from Kurdish, Shiite, and Iraqi National Congress parties to supply loyal anti-Baathist fighters." Bremer had good reason to reject these offers. Accepting them would not have created a national army, which Iraq needs, but a collection of private armies that were anti-Baathist but loyal only to their ethnic or political group. This would have promoted warlordism and impeded the emergence of a united Iraq. The strategic goal was, as Bremer often said, a free and democratic Iraq, at peace at home and with its neighbors. Reaching that goal required tactical flexibility, including an abrupt change of plans last fall to accommodate Sistani. Bremer has never met Sistani, but he communicated with him, effectively it turned out, through intermediaries. Sistani wants a democratic Iraq in which Shia will obviously be politically dominant. Because he has favored elections as early as possible, Sistani loathed Bremer's seven-step plan that would have required, first, the selection by caucuses of an assembly to write a constitution, after which Iraq would get its sovereignty back and, finally, hold a real, direct election. At Sistani's behest, members of the Governing Council lobbied Bremer to come up with a speedier plan. To Bremer, this was a tactical matter, meaning he had flexibility. He traveled to Washington, met with Bush, and produced the November 15 agreement, which required an interim government, a temporary constitution, the handover of sovereignty by June 30, and an election by next January. Sistani was satisfied with everything but the section of the constitution that would have allowed Kurds to veto it. Bremer refused to buckle on that point, and Sistani backed down. Bremer's most misunderstood move was the luring of Brahimi to Iraq to set up the interim government. Brahimi is an Arab nationalist from Algeria, a socialist, and a Sunni. Sistani was initially sympathetic to inviting Brahimi, until the United Nations, after a quick investigation last fall, found that a snap election in Iraq wasn't feasible. Bremer brought Brahimi in anyway, then played him like a violin to get the political result he wanted. This included the selection of Allawi, who'd become close to both Bremer and his spokesman Dan Senor, as prime minister. Brahimi knew little about Iraq, even less about the emerging crop of politicians. So, as Bremer suspected, Brahimi had to rely heavily on him and his CPA aides to find the top officials for the interim government. In this process, Allawi stayed one step ahead of Brahimi. Knowing where Brahimi was going for consultations, Allawi would get there first, talk to local leaders, and persuade them to recommend him to Brahimi. Meanwhile, Bremer was talking up Allawi in private sessions with the U.N. envoy. Brahimi was whipsawed. After the envoy's first choice for prime minister was quickly shot down by Allawi's backers, it was inevitable Allawi would be chosen. The Brahimi scheme was misunderstood in two ways. Some American conservatives were alarmed the U.N. was being given broad authority in Iraq. And many in the media claimed the president had reversed a policy of keeping the U.N. out entirely. But Brahimi's role was minimal. He exerted little influence while bestowing the imprimatur of the U.N. on Allawi's government. Bush and Bremer had all along insisted a U.N. role in Iraq was "vital." In fact, Bremer and the late U.N. envoy Sergio de Mello had worked together to select members of the Iraqi Governing Council. De Mello was killed when the U.N. building in Baghdad was bombed on August 19, 2003. That same day, Bremer called U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to urge him to keep a U.N. presence in Iraq. Annan promised he would. Two days later, Annan ordered all U.N. personnel out. Bremer's final act was his most audacious: the handover of sovereignty on June 28, two days early. It was cooked up by Bremer and Allawi. The idea was to flummox the Baathists and terrorists, upset their plans for attacks on June 29 and 30, and demonstrate the readiness of Allawi to take charge. Nine months earlier, Bremer had sought to cede more power to the Governing Council if only it would name a single leader--in effect, a prime minister. Instead, it named nine rotating presidents, an unworkable system. Now there was a single leader whom Rice calls "competent, tough, plain-spoken, and very brave." Hours after Allawi took over as leader of a sovereign Iraq, Bremer left, his job done, not perfectly, but well enough to warrant a president's grateful embrace.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard. |
