In May 2003, 12 days after President Bush's declaration of the end of major hostilities in Iraq, a 63-year-old former ambassador to the Netherlands was flown into Baghdad on remarkably short notice.
Paul (Jerry\) Bremer was to assume administrative control of the Coalition Provisional Authority. His assignment: to rectify the rapidly deteriorating security situation, resuscitate an atrophied economy and arrange for an amicable transfer of sovereignty in approximately a year's time.
The citizens of Iraq are the rightful arbiters of his performance, but we may have a look at his account of his 13 months as the highest placed U.S. government official on foreign soil since World War II, ""My Year In Iraq."" It is a chronicle of spin, sincerity and score-settling from ""the only paramount authority figure other than Saddam Hussein that most Iraqis [have] ever known.""
Ghostwritten (with dubious success) by military-memoir specialist Malcolm McConnell, Bremer's diaristic narrative is a series of addendums to, explications of and excuses for his administrative decisions. Bremer insists his decisions like disbanding the Iraqi army and banning the Baath party were correct, saying that it was impossible to do anything about an Iraqi army he claims disbanded on its own, and that the de-Baathification edict only started blocking skilled professionals from participating in the new Iraqi government after Ahmad Chalabi was allowed to officiate over its enforcement. In case you do not believe him, Bremer studs the rest of the text with Iraqis praising his judgment and meticulously documents his coordination of the matter with his boss, Donald Rumsfeld.
Bremer's description of the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution makes for the best portion of the book, as he plays the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds against one another and gets played himself by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Riveting stuff, but not entirely flattering; Bremer is prone to aloof pedantry in both reality and his description of it, and his seemingly elementary rhetorical maneuvers win over far too many Iraqis for us not to wonder what remains untold.
The inability of Coalition troops to maintain law and order is unquestionably the memoir's sad motif. Bremer's stance toward the Pentagon moves from bewilderment at ""the lack of precise intelligence on the nature of the enemy"" to unmitigated frustration with its focus on troop-rotation levels and the search for weapons of mass destruction. As late as November 2003, Bremer suggests ""that there was no overall strategy for defeating the enemy."" The friction between military and civilian authority in occupied Iraq gets more abrasive with each turn of the page, and the military brass at U.S. Central Command is depicted as weak-kneed and all but duplicitous.
Bremer doggedly resisted Defense Department efforts to replace American soldiers with hastily trained Iraqis and claims to have sent a memo Rumsfeld's way pleading for more troops, only to receive no response. Why the ambassador did not directly ask President Bush, whose ear he clearly had, remains a mystery.
Depending upon your political persuasions, you will either be delighted or aghast at the portrayal of our commander-in-chief. Jocular and always upbeat, the president asks questions like ""Don't [the Sunnis] want to live in peace like everyone else?"" and concludes conversations and meetings with one of about five permutations of ""And we are not going to fail in Iraq."" Bush and Bremer are not determined, they are deterministic; their view is that divinely sanctioned national infallibility will always trump a few nasty particulars in an endeavor whose outcome was fixed the instant it began. For Bremer, having written a memoir mostly void of credible manifestations of this infallibility, this is a most idealistic leap indeed.
Asked why he wrote this book, Bremer invariably responds, ""in case we have to do this again."" Assuming the next generation of regime change advocates finds the memoir worth their time, they might do well to soberly engage the question conspicuously absent from its pages: Did we have to do this?
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