Bremer exits Iraq with long record of bad decisions

Posted on Wed, Jun. 30, 2004
Bremer exits with long record of bad decisions
By Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, did a stealth hand-over of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government early this week, and left Dodge City with zero fanfare and not even the thanks of a grateful nation.

For most Iraqis and for most uniformed Americans the only gratitude was over the fact that Bremer was gone and the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA - the American troops with their usual acerbity swiftly translated those initials to "Can't Provide Anything" - was now history.

Inheriting the CPA's mantle and largely undone mission is the largest U.S. embassy in the world, with more than a thousand employees. Finally, after 14 excruciating months of bungled civilian administration under the auspices of the Department of Defense and its secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, the mission of nation building in Iraq passes to the State Department and its secretary, Colin Powell.

It is ironic, indeed, that it was the State Department that did the only serious planning for operations in post-war Iraq, plans that Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative operatives ignored entirely in favor of an exercise in hope.

They hoped that things would go well; that the Iraqi people would welcome the conquering Americans as heroes; that the Iraqi army would surrender in place and go right to work for their new bosses; in short, that all the rosy predictions they had been fed by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress exiles would come true.

In the words of a former Army chief of staff, Gen. Gordon Sullivan, hope is not a method. And all the DOD neo-conservatives' hopes were dashed against the realities of Iraq.

As late as last summer Rumsfeld was privately insisting that our purpose in Iraq was not to build or even repair a nation, that this was up to the Iraqis themselves.

The CPA was largely staffed in the beginning by young Republican volunteers, congressional and White House staffers who signed up for 90-day tours in Baghdad. Half a dozen of them, none older than their mid-20s, were for a time in charge of spending the $18 billion Congress had voted for Iraqi reconstruction.

What should have been Job One within the first month of taking Baghdad, setting up a satellite television broadcast station so the American message could be passed to the Iraqi people, in other words fighting the Information War that is all-important in any counter-insurgency, is only now beginning to happen.

Virtually every major decision Bremer made in his position as the American czar in Iraq was wrong - from disenfranchising every member of the Baath Party from a future in Iraq, to discharging and sending home the entire Iraqi army, with their AK-47s and explosive anger, to shutting down the newspaper and arresting the chief lieutenant of Shiite dissident cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and not preparing for a mini-war with him and his followers.

Throughout all this the U.S. soldiers and Marines have done their job splendidly. The weary soldiers of the 1st Armor Division, who were on their way home after a year, got turned around and sent to root out al-Sadr's guerrillas in Najaf and other cities. It was done brilliantly and without provoking a general uprising among the Shiite population. Every combat assault was instantly followed up with civil action teams who had the cash to rebuild or repair what had been blown up while the rubble was still smoking.

But as the commander of U.S. Central Command has said from the beginning: We cannot win this by military force alone. It takes a combination of effective civil action and military might.

So Bremer leaves with a D-minus grade for his time and trouble, and the American soldiers and Marines, who remain to do the fighting and dying, get an A-plus.

The job passes to Ambassador John Negroponte, a veteran of diplomacy in war- and revolution-ravaged countries in South and Central America, whose report card in Iraq is blank but won't remain so for long.

More important, the responsibility for their own future has now passed into the hands of Iraqis. It's easy enough to blow things and people up and condemn the foreign occupiers. What's hard is taking a hand at rebuilding your own country and making a good-faith effort to ensure that all, no matter what their faith or tribe or region, have a place and a future in Iraq.
---------------------------------

ABOUT THE WRITER

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045.