THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 46, March 6, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
MEMOIRS OF A PRESIDENT'S MAN:
A BOOK REVIEW
By Dr. Michael Rubin
L. PAUL BREMER'S ADMINISTRATION & LEADERSHIP IN POSTWAR IRAQ: BREMER'S DETERMINATION TO CONCENTRATE
FORMAL DECISION-MAKING AUTHORITY AS NARROWLY AS POSSIBLE, HIS GLIB & CONFUSED APPROACH TOWARD
ACTUALLY USING THAT AUTHORITY, HIS DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE U.S. MILITARY, HIS DISMISSIVE
ATTITUDE TOWARD THE NASCENT IRAQI LEADERSHIP, & HIS GENERAL LACK OF VISION & INSIGHT
FULL STORY:
"I would be the only paramount authority figure — other than dictator Saddam Hussein — that most Iraqis had ever known."
So reflected L. Paul Bremer, as an Air Force C-130 began its spiral descent into Baghdad International Airport on May 12,
2003, signifying the imminent start of his 13-month tenure as U.S. Presidential Envoy to Iraq and Administrator of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, or CPA.
A year and a half after his departure from Baghdad and the dissolution of the CPA, Bremer has produced a memoir that seeks
to recast and rehabilitate his leadership of postwar Iraq. There is a fitting irony in this. The CPA was always a paper universe,
a place where orders and diktats flew about with little reference to reality. That Bremer would seek to rewrite his place in
history, then, is wholly appropriate.
Despite its self-interest, however, his book, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (Simon & Schuster,
2006), offers some valuable insights into Bremer's administration. In particular, the book's narrative captures well the twin,
contradictory impulses that afflicted so much of U.S. policy under the CPA: a fierce determination to concentrate formal
decision-making authority as narrowly as possible and, simultaneously, a glib and confused approach toward actually using it.
Much like America in Iraq, Bremer's memoir takes responsibility for everything and for nothing.
Bremer came to Iraq as the consummate Washington insider. A friend of Donald Rumsfeld from his first tour as U.S. Defense
Secretary during the Ford administration, Bremer had long experience as a Foreign Service officer, rising to the rank of
Ambassador and working in Washington under six Secretaries of State.
Given his service in the bureaucracy, Bremer's instinct to see "unity of command" as the key to ending the chaos unfolding
in Iraq is hardly surprising. Upon his appointment to head the CPA, he swiftly moved to sideline such individuals such as
Presidential Envoy and current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, whom Bremer feared might meddle in Iraqi affairs
or otherwise detract from his authority. My Year in Iraq takes pains to make clear that Bremer answered to the Oval
Office. "I was neither Rumsfeld's nor Powell's man," he writes. "I was the President's man."
Such attitudes also help explain Bremer's notoriously poor relationship with his U.S. military counterparts, especially Lt. Gen.
Ricardo Sanchez, Commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 7 and the highest-ranking officer in Iraq during Bremer's term
in Baghdad. While lauding his decision to co-locate offices with Sanchez for its recognition of the "crucial importance of
close civilian-military coordination," Bremer marshals scant evidence of cooperation between the CPA and the U.S. military
under his watch — certainly much less than the close tête-à-têtes that have more recently characterized the interactions of
Ambassador Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey. Whether Bremer had a clear notion of how the division of power between
Central Command and the CPA should work, either going into Iraq or coming out of it, he doesn't say.
In fact, many prominent military officers are notable in Bremer's account largely for their absence. While My Year in Iraq
includes a picture of its author with then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, the book makes no other reference to the former
Commander of the 101st Airborne Division. It is a telling and problematic omission. Petraeus' division, based in Mosul, was
responsible for much of northern Iraq through early 2004, and the animosity that developed between the 101st and the Green
Zone was legendary. Petraeus countermanded Bremer's orders on issues ranging from de-Ba'athification to negotiations with
neighboring states, attracting media attention that Bremer wanted to monopolize. Similarly, the book's only mention of Maj.
Gen. Ray Odierno, Commander of the 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, comes when Bremer sends him a congratulatory
note on the capture of Saddam Hussein.
The diminished profile of Sanchez, Petraeus, and Odierno in My Year in Iraq is all the more striking, given how much
emphasis Bremer places on his discussions with a small inner circle of civilian advisers. These were, for the most part, savvy
subordinates who realized that the key to success in the CPA was to keep quiet and not challenge their boss. In My Year
in Iraq, they are celebrated as "personable," "cheerful," and "brilliant." Others who occasionally questioned his positions,
such as senior British representative Jeremy Greenstock, barely appear in the narrative. Had Bremer welcomed criticism, rather
than bristled at it, his legacy might be far different.
Bremer is likewise dismissive toward the nascent Iraqi leadership. He derides the Iraqi Governing Council as ineffective on 18
different pages, despite the fact that their squabbling mirrored real political debate and was, in any case, hardly distinguishable
from the bureaucratic jockeying that characterized the CPA. Even in retrospect, Bremer is unable to see that Iraqi politicians
were not simply maneuvering for their own interests, but were often reflecting subtle changes of public mood.
Governing Council members, in turn, bristled at Bremer's self-aggrandizement, balking at demands that they receive him at the
airport upon his return from a trip to the United States. "Does he think he is a potentate and we his courtiers?" one Shi'ite
politician complained. Bremer describes in great detail his public appearances, apparently unaware of how they antagonized
Iraqi pride and attracted ridicule beyond the Green Zone's cement blast walls. In teahouses across Baghdad, Iraqis joked that
the CPA stood for "Can't Provide Anything."
Bremer's unwillingness to address difficult decisions in his narrative also detracts from the historical value of My Year in
Iraq. No doubt, the Iraq he inherited was chaotic. Upon his arrival at the palace, he describes a "warts-and-all" briefing in
which the staff of his predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, laid out the situation: little electricity, failing water treatment,
schools closed, rampant looting. But rather than discuss prioritization and strategies to regain control, Bremer is glib. After
what he depicts as an inspiring pep talk, he counsels, "We all have to avoid arrogance, either individual or institutional."
Bremer's subsequent behavior, though, even as depicted in My Year in Iraq, suggests a failure of introspection and
self-perception.
Bremer's lack of vision and analysis is especially frustrating, given his unique bird's-eye view of Iraq's reconstruction. He
describes various difficulties as they unfold, but, too often, he fails to offer explanations about either why they emerged or
how they might have been avoided. Likewise, in the book's version of reality, problems have a tendency to fade after the CPA
holds a meeting and proclaims a solution.
Take looting. "When the American-led forces occupied Haiti in 1994," Bremer relates to his staff shortly after arriving in
Baghdad, "our troops shot six looters breaking curfew and the looting stopped." There is little mention of looting after this
point in the book, leading the reader to think that the issue had been effectively addressed. It had not. On the contrary, well
into the Autumn of 2003, looters continued to topple electric pylons to strip copper wire. This was evident to any patrol
driving past Musayib, site of a major power station south of Baghdad.
It is possible that Bremer, insulated as he was by his aides, was unaware of the extent to which Green Zone orders failed to
translate into Iraqi realities. In October, 2003, CPA Chief of Staff Pat Kennedy refused to put forward telephone calls from
Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who had queries regarding growing infringement on religious freedom. Three months later,
members of religious militias still posted themselves in front of public schools, refusing entry to girls who did not conform to
their notions of religious dress.
In January, 2004, similarly, reports reached Bremer's office that showed the Iraqi-Syrian frontier remained porous. Tire tracks
marked breaches in the barbed wire delineating the border. But Bremer's Chief of Staff dismissed these findings; Bremer had
received assurances months before that the border was secure. Bremer's front office also ignored multiple reports, first from
staff and then in the open press, detailing Iranian infiltration into southern Iraq.
Bremer's treatment of the April, 2004, uprising of Shi'ite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr is especially superficial. Bremer provides
little description of the decision to arrest al-Sadr. "Frustrated with Washington's inaction, I asked General Sanchez if he
couldn't round up some of Muqtada's cronies," does not suffice. True, al-Sadr had grown increasingly violent. His Jaysh
al-Mahdi militia harassed Coalition forces and ordinary Iraqis. But any chronicler could relate the decision. What's lacking
from Bremer is reflection. How, for instance, did the Jaysh al-Mahdi militia infiltrate so far and wide outside the notice of
provincial CPA teams and the CIA? The sterility of Bremer's account does not appear to be the result of any desire to
protect classified information. Pentagon sources say his book's revelation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had urged
Sistani to support al-Sadr's uprising was an unauthorized disclosure.
Despite these faults, My Year in Iraq does provide a service in correcting certain false narratives that have achieved
popular currency. Bremer reveals, for instance, that it was the U.S. State Department, and not the Pentagon, that dismissed
the Future of Iraq Project. "It was never intended as a postwar plan," Deputy Assistant of State Ryan Crocker tells him
shortly after he assumes command of the CPA. Bremer also provides an in-depth, and badly needed, review of the state of
Iraqi police and military forces upon his arrival, countering the entrenched notion that the dissolution of the old Iraqi Army
sparked the insurgency. As he details, the Iraqi Army had disbanded itself weeks before his arrival.
Ultimately, however, Bremer's occasional willingness to dip into frank and honest debate about the more controversial
decisions of his tenure makes the book's broader analytic failure to do so all the more frustrating. Bremer presided over the
U.S. government's most ambitious reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan, but his lack of introspection, at least as
chronicled in My Year in Iraq, is striking. Events overwhelm and analysis falls short. Institutional and systemic
problems within the CPA — including the dysfunctional relationship between Bremer and the U.S. military — go largely
unaddressed. While historians will debate Bremer's record for many years to come, My Year in Iraq sheds
considerably less light than one otherwise might wish.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Middle East & the Problem of Iraq
Page Two
Page One
The Problem of Rogue States:
Iraq as a Case History
National Strategy for Victory in Iraq
Dr. Michael Rubin, a Ph.D. in History (Yale University) and a specialist in Middle Eastern politics, Islamic culture and Islamist
ideology, is Editor of the Middle East Quarterly and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public
Policy Research. Dr Rubin is author of Into the Shadows: Radical Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, 2001) and is co-author, with Dr. Patrick Clawson, of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005). Dr. Rubin served as political advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad (2003-2004); staff
advisor on Iran and Iraq in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense (2002-2004); visiting lecturer in the Departments of
History and International Relations at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2001-2002); visiting lecturer at the Universities of
Sulaymani, Salahuddin, and Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan (2000-2001); Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy (1999-2000); and visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University (1999-2000). He has been a fellow at
the Council of Foreign Relations, the Leonard Davis Institute at Hebrew University, and the Carnegie Council on Ethics and
International Affairs.
The foregoing book review by Dr. Rubin was originally published in the Armed Forces Journal, March, 2006, and can
be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
March 6, 2006
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