The End of Iraq (4)

By Peter Galbraith
The End of Iraq - part 1
The End of Iraq - part 2
The End of Iraq - part 3

Americans Incompetence (1)

At the end of April, Rumsfeld told Garner that his services were no longer required. John Sawers, the British ambassador to Egypt who was in Baghdad as the eyes and ears of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, cabled Downing Street about the change: "Garner's outfit, ORHA [Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance], is an unbelievable mess. No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure, and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. ...Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired Generals are well-meaning but out of their depth." The British used professionals in Iraq and saw the occupation disaster much sooner than the ideologues in the Pentagon and the White House. Blair, uniquely, was a foreigner that the Bush Administration could not afford to ignore.

Bremer is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, December 14, 2004

To replace Garner, Rumsfeld contacted L. Paul Bremer III, known as Jerry ...
Bremer had never been to Iraq, did not speak Arabic, had never served in a post-conflict society, and had no experience in nation building. And he had less than two weeks to "read into" his new assign­ment, a process of oral and written briefings that normally lasts several months even for a routine ambassadorial assignment such as the Netherlands. For a full year before the war, the State Department had spent millions of dollars working with Iraqi exiles and experts to pre­pare a fifteen-volume blueprint for how Iraq might be governed after the war. The Administration was so disorganized and so faction ridden that the Defense Department (for which Bremer would work and which handled his briefings) did not tell him that this State De­partment study existed. He would learn of it in the press sometime after arriving in Baghdad.
...
Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003. On May 16, he in­formed the Iraqi Leadership Council that there would be no interim government and no early handover of power. This came exactly eleven days after Jay Garner-speaking for the United States-had announced that the core of an interim government would be in place by May 15. The same day, Bremer issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1. It banned persons serving in the top four levels of the Ba'ath Party from holding government employment, now and in the future. On May 23, Bremer signed CPA Order Number 2. It dissolved Iraq's army, its air force, its navy, its secret police, its intelligence services, the Republican Guards, the Ba'ath Party militia, and the Ministry of Defense.

For eighty years, Sunni Arabs were the guardians of Iraqi unity, keeping the country together by force. The American invasion ended Sunni Arab rule. Now, in a few strokes of a pen, Bremer completed Iraq's revolution by destroying the pillars on which Sunni Arabs had relied to rule Iraq-the military, the security services, and the Ba'ath Party.
Although he did not know it, Bremer had sealed Iraq's fate as a uni­tary nation. All the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. This did not stop Bremer from spending the next fourteen months trying to do just that.
The End of Iraq, page 117-119.

Bremer's decision to assume all power for himself rather than trans­fer authority to an Iraqi government was probably the most fateful of his decisions. Every Iraqi leader, including the most pro- American, says it was Bremer's decision to keep power that changed the United States from being seen by many as liberator to being universally regarded as an occupier.
The End of Iraq, page 122.

To be continued...
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