MY YEAR IN IRAQ, by L. Paul Bremer III

The Charlie Rose Show featured a full hour with Mr. Bremer, who I knew and disliked from my long-ago days in the State Dept and continued to blame for much of the hardships our foreign policy faces in Iraq.

Although Bremer did not convert me, his cogent replies to Rose’s excellent probing inquiries did put a different perspective than the one conveyed by the MSM.

First, the two big "mistakes" that Bremer allegedly made were disbanding the Iraqi armed forces and de-Baathification of the governing class of the country.

Bremer insists that the Iraqi Army deserted the instant Baghdad fell three weeks after the start of the invasion, that they had been asked to "stand to" by Tommy Franks at their barracks for payment of their meager wages, but that the conscript army of 300,000 were mainly lowly Shi’ites who had already looted the barracks and long since gone south toward home. The mainly Sunni officer class and the elite Republican Guard were stationed north of Baghdad and were supposed to be handled by the American forces coming from the north, the same forces that the Turks forbade transit at the last minute. The Guard melted away, though they too were offered paychecks, according to Bremer. Some of the Guard are suspected to have formed the backbone of the nascent insurgency, so we can thank the Turks for their stab-in-the-back at the last minute. {They’ll fit right into the EU, but I hope they get rejected for EU membership just because of their inconstancy.]

On the de-Baathification issue, Bremer says that only about one percent, or 20,000 of the top Baathists ranked high enough to be denied jobs in the new governing body. The rest were about 2 million mostly Sunni careerists who had joined the Party to get jobs or avoid threats.

Bremer says in his book that he did have disagreements with Rumsfeld and Feith and Wolfowitz, but only over modalities and shades of policy nuance. He did mention that Gen. Sanchez mentioned that forty thousand more American troops would have made Baghdad much safer, but says the trade-off would have been higher American casualties.

Bremer thinks Ahmed Chalabi played several dangerous games both with DC Beltway types after the invasion opposing Bush policies in late 2003; more tantalizingly, the overly clever Chalabi also played the Iranian card, but Bremer refused to go into details. In any event, Chalabi’s party was repudiated in the recent elections.
Chalabi may remain in politics, but mainly as a skilled technocrat.

Even though the Iraqis have inherited the Arab gift of fractious factionalism in spades, the recent elections were a milestone because the Sunnis did participate in sufficient numbers to give them a voice in the new set-up.

However, the Sunnis still want more than their electoral representation and the Al Sadr militia among the Shi’ites also gives cause for future grave concerns. Al Sadr did win about 30 seats in Parliament, so he does not need to play the military card. However, the Sunnis are somewhat delusional in their hopes to attain a footing in the new constitutional regime anywhere near their former paramount position under Saddam's dictatorship.

Bremer makes no claims to be either a regional expert nor a military expert, but his explanations have a ring of verisimilitude, if not truth, concerning the present and future of Iraq. He says that he relied greatly on State and DoD advisors to keep things on an even keel during his time at the helm in Iraq.

He insists, as of course one would expect him to, that the Iraqis have gone a great distance from the ruined-by-sanctions and by malfeasance country liberated from Saddam to stable currency, central bank, improved security forces and improving economy of today. The insurgency is slowly diminishing in impact, though daily incident rates still remain high.

Finally, Bremer notes that the US is not a country noted for its patience and consistency in foreign policy matters. But he believes that the security forces are now reaching a capability that will enable the US to depart in an orderly fashion over the next several years. This will not be fast enough for those who believe that the US should just pull up the covers and leave the rest of the planet alone, but Bremer was kind enough not to mention the eight years of relative Clintonian neglect of the Middle East, save to gain a Nobel Prize for solving the Arab/Israel conflict.

Although Bremer makes a convenient straw man or scapegoat, the NYT's best Iraq reporter, John Burns, believes that Bremer was the single most respected American among the Iraqi elites and streets. Burns says that Bremer's incredible work ethic and honest attempt to work out the kinks in the Gordian Knot he inherited with the job make him a person to commend, if not admire.

History may be kinder to Bush and Bremer and Rumsfeld than the MSM and the flamers on the left. The right is not without fault in its presumptions and the Cheney doctrine of pigheaded wrong-footed clumsy overstatement and talking like a simpleton Pollyanna.

But Prez Bush 41 left Afghanistan in the lurch, Clinton let Osama leave Sudan without grabbing him as the Sudanese wanted him to [too many legal hurdles for this obsessive-compulsive legal beagle] and Bush 43 went after Iraq because 9/11 needed a strong response or he was political carrion.

All may be blamed by historians, but Bremer’s book is the first out of the box by a man on the ground during the difficult reconstruction of a country ruined by 30 years of dictatorial misrule.