fdt
05-12-2004, 03:34 AM
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http://gadflyer.com/articles/?ArticleID=97
How Paul Bremer bungled the occupation of Iraq
by Cliff Schecter, Contributor
5.06.04
"You're doing God's work." That is the more than charitable accolade I received several times from Retired Lt. Colonel Bill Cowan, once informed I was writing a piece on the glaring failures of the Paul Bremer regime in Iraq, also known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Lt. Colonel Cowan is a Vietnam Veteran, a military and terrorism analyst for the Fox News Channel, and a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush in 2000. He is also a former member of the Intelligence Support Activity, the Pentagon's most classified counterterrorist organization. Cowan has participated in numerous undercover operations throughout the Middle East, including the rescue of a number of American hostages from Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation. Cowan is no shrinking violet, no anti-war peace activist.
So when he spoke to me about the arrogant, amateurish and inept manner in which L. Paul Bremer has conducted himself in the past, as well as Bremer's current role as Iraq's paper tiger administrator, I listened.
Sadly, Cowan's trenchant analysis of the desperate situation there, much of which was proffered prior to the recent carnage in the Sunni Triangle and the Shia South, is now being echoed throughout the pages of military magazines and major newspapers by erstwhile reliably conservative voices. Most recently, a leaked internal CPA memo, written by a "true believer" of the neocon variety, has painted a very similar picture to Cowan's.
Iraq is bordering on chaos not because it had to be – although nobody could rationally call the transition to democracy from dictatorship an easy task – but because Paul Bremer has exhibited an uncanny ability to mimic the formula of the Bush Administration back here in the homeland (Inexperience + Arrogance + Politics over Policy = Failure).
Bremer's Folly
This distressing story really begins with the Bush Administration choosing a man for an executive position in a Middle Eastern Country who didn't speak the language and had no relevant experience. There was that stint as Ambassador to The Netherlands, but sipping wine at Euro-parties in Amsterdam doesn't seem like adequate preparation for the task of birthing a new democracy in the Arab world.
According to Lt. Col. Cowan, Bremer not only lacked the executive and Middle East qualifications for the job, but "during his years as an aide at the State Department and as Ambassador[-at-large] for counterterrorism was an impediment or downright obstructionist to clandestine counterterrorist operations abroad." Cowan adds that "Bremer has disdain for the military and zero background in nation building."
So how did he get a job that principally entailed nation building and managing the Administration's promise of a seamless military occupation? As with so many of the other plum assignments within the Bush Administration – including a large percentage of those surrounding Bremer at the CPA - the answer is simple: politics.
Currently, according to the Associated Press, "one-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as a senior outpost of Bush's reelection effort." The office is run by Dan Senor, former Press Secretary for Spencer Abraham and recent member of the Carlyle Group, a crony capitalism investment firm that is the Bush family's answer to every military-industrial complex conspiracy theory ever conjured. The press operation is overseen by Rich Galen, a former Press Secretary for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle (I must admit Galen is a man I know and like).
In other words, instead of filling the CPA with qualified Middle East and emerging nation experts, as the British have, political appointees with no idea how to build a country are running the US-Baghdad road show. These Mayberry Machiavellis, as John Dilulio once dubbed this White House's political operation, are in Iraq to control message, with politics and presentation always winning out over policy. For parallel efforts with far less at stake, just think "Healthy Forests" or "No Child Left Behind" in a war zone.
And politics is where Bremer enters the equation with equal gusto. A darling of the neocons and 11-year apostle of Kissinger & Associates, Bremer was granted the job entirely for political control of the situation. In other words, we sent a man who helped companies build business relationships with China to convince Iraqis of our commitment to democracy, and also to groom him, as some believe, for Secretary of State should Bush win a second term. And just as it has on so many domestic issues, when politics trumps policy in this White House, the result is disaster.
Mistakes Were Made
Immediately upon taking over the CPA, Paul Bremer's arrogance, inexperience and political agenda caused a potentially volatile situation to begin spinning out of control. We have seen the results in the counterinsurgency over the past couple of weeks.
According to Cowan, Bremer simply "ignored members of his staff who actually were Middle East experts" for political expediency. A friend of mine who worked with the UN programs in Iraq and regularly interacted with the CPA (and originally supported the war) put it this way: "Bremer and the rest of the CPA are a bunch of gung-ho types who know nothing of development. They fundamentally misunderstood the magnitude and complexity of what they were dealing with. And they didn't care to learn from those who did."
This led to key early mistakes, from which we have never recovered, and have compounded the downward spiral into a violent Iraq. Joseph L. Galloway, a military correspondent for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, laid out the most serious blunders in calling for Bremer's dismissal in a recent piece:
Virtually every major decision he has made in Iraq has been wrong, poorly timed or just plain dumb. Beginning with his decision to demobilize the real army and send them home with their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, no paychecks, no future and heaps of anger. Followed by his decision to purge everyone who ever held a Baath Party card from public life and public employment, thus abandoning many Sunnis to hopelessness and anger. Followed by his decision to close down Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's newspaper and provoke him to anger-without any plan to deal with that anger when it spilled over into the streets and inflamed the Shiite community.
In Cowan's opinion, the disbanding of the Iraqi army directly led to "angry, vengeful and unemployed Iraqi soldiers with weapons" taking up arms against the coalition in Fallujah and other parts of the Sunni Triangle." This error was only exacerbated by the "De-Baathification" of Iraq, or prohibiting anyone with Baathist ties from working to enact the improvements and repairs (education, electricity, plumbing) necessary to get the country moving again.
The result was that we alienated the very people who had the know-how the CPA lacked, knowledge of the Iraqi infrastructure and an ability to get it up and working again. In the past few days, tacitly acknowledging the ignorance underlying this policy decision (Bremer said it was "implemented poorly"; could this finally be someone in the Bush Administration admitting a mistake?), the CPA "eased the restrictions" on Baath Party members going back to work. Yet, as has often been the case with the dictums put out by the CPA, the policy is ambiguous at best and far too late.
But if you thought our comedy of errors was limited to leaving the very soldiers we promised jobs out in the cold but letting them keep their AK-47s (it sounds suspiciously like NRA logic has taken hold), while firing the only people who knew how to provide indispensable services to the Iraqi people, you would be sorrowfully mistaken.
The decision to shut down a Shiite newspaper run by marginal Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr and buttress his anti-American sermons accusing us of permanent occupation, has led to a disaster in many sectors of Southern Iraq and the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad (named for al Sadr's father). It has galvanized opposition from ordinary Shiites, many of whom originally supported the American invasion but have come to see the United States as an occupying force.
This blunder has also put the Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the more moderate and revered Shiite cleric who has tacitly supported the CPA, in a position where he must come out more strongly against the US. The ensuing clashes between al Sadr's militia and coalition forces have led to civilian casualties, and more recruits for al Sadr.
And, according to Cowan, it once again exposed Bremer's "lack of preparation" when al Sadr's followers predictably took up arms, and he took the kind of time in responding to this crisis that our President took to answer that question about his "mistakes" during his annual solitary press conference.
And Then More Mistakes
These three colossal errors have only been compounded by myriad other mistakes made by Bremer's crew. Sunni tribesmen who were not loyal to Iraq, and originally supported the US invasion, were marginalized and ignored by the aristocratic technocrat, and have become part of the broader anti-US insurgency.
Bremer, according to my friend in Iraq, completely ignored the "Futures of Iraq Project," developed by the State Department and representatives from Iraqi civil society. The plan offered prescient advice on what would follow an invasion of Iraq and how to handle it. While it is not overly surprising to learn a neocon favorite would not be too keen on listening to State (just as the Pentagon wasn't), Bremer's giving short shrift to a plan that would protect the members of his team and men and women in uniform seems unbelievable. Kind of like exaggerating the threat of an enemy to start a war or falsely claiming they were a party to the worst attack on US soil in history.
Rounding out the list of easily avoidable mistakes by Bremer's CPA is a brief outline of an internal CPA memo recently used by reporter Jason Vest in a Village Voice article about the emergent quagmire. According to the memo's author, a neoconservative "advocate of transforming the Middle East," the CPA:
Is unwittingly "driving the weapons market" by arming the Iraqi police, who "sell their US-supplied weapons on the black market; they are promptly re-supplied (by the CPA). Interior ministry weapons buy-backs keep the price of arms high."
Has allowed the Iraqi Governing Council to foster cronyism and corruption, with Council members choosing "their sons and brothers-in-law" to staff Iraqi government ministries.
Is isolated from ordinary Iraqis "by [its] security bubble" in the Green Zone, the cordoned-off area of Baghdad where the CPA is headquartered. The memo derides the US government for spending "millions importing sport utility vehicles which are used exclusively to drive the kilometer and a half" between CPA and Governing Council headquarters.
Has enforced a border-security policy that is "completely irrelevant," and is so dysfunctional that "it is undeniable that a crumbling Baathist regime did better than we have" in policing Iraq's borders.
How Do We Recover?
What can we do to rectify the situation? Bremer and company are trying to reverse some of their mistakes, by allowing Baathists to perform some necessary functions in the new Iraq. There is even talk of sending CPA members further out of the Green Zone to excise the appearance of inaccessibility that has angered so many Iraqis. But the genie is now out of the bottle, and as they say, first impressions often last a lifetime.
Meanwhile, the lack of border control is allowing Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters to make it to the Sunni Triangle and the Iranian theocrats to supply al Sadr in the South. And following Spain's example, countries are pulling out of the "coalition of the willing", while others have said that they will if they are attacked, which translates into an invitation to be attacked. All of these factors, in turn, will continue the vicious cycle of hope turning to alienation and eventually violence committed by ordinary Iraqis.
As Lt. Colonel Cowan says, his facing twitching with anger, "this bastard [Bremer] has cost us time and cost us lives."
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/JUNE30/June30gifs/best/britt.gif
http://gadflyer.com/articles/?ArticleID=97
How Paul Bremer bungled the occupation of Iraq
by Cliff Schecter, Contributor
5.06.04
"You're doing God's work." That is the more than charitable accolade I received several times from Retired Lt. Colonel Bill Cowan, once informed I was writing a piece on the glaring failures of the Paul Bremer regime in Iraq, also known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Lt. Colonel Cowan is a Vietnam Veteran, a military and terrorism analyst for the Fox News Channel, and a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush in 2000. He is also a former member of the Intelligence Support Activity, the Pentagon's most classified counterterrorist organization. Cowan has participated in numerous undercover operations throughout the Middle East, including the rescue of a number of American hostages from Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation. Cowan is no shrinking violet, no anti-war peace activist.
So when he spoke to me about the arrogant, amateurish and inept manner in which L. Paul Bremer has conducted himself in the past, as well as Bremer's current role as Iraq's paper tiger administrator, I listened.
Sadly, Cowan's trenchant analysis of the desperate situation there, much of which was proffered prior to the recent carnage in the Sunni Triangle and the Shia South, is now being echoed throughout the pages of military magazines and major newspapers by erstwhile reliably conservative voices. Most recently, a leaked internal CPA memo, written by a "true believer" of the neocon variety, has painted a very similar picture to Cowan's.
Iraq is bordering on chaos not because it had to be – although nobody could rationally call the transition to democracy from dictatorship an easy task – but because Paul Bremer has exhibited an uncanny ability to mimic the formula of the Bush Administration back here in the homeland (Inexperience + Arrogance + Politics over Policy = Failure).
Bremer's Folly
This distressing story really begins with the Bush Administration choosing a man for an executive position in a Middle Eastern Country who didn't speak the language and had no relevant experience. There was that stint as Ambassador to The Netherlands, but sipping wine at Euro-parties in Amsterdam doesn't seem like adequate preparation for the task of birthing a new democracy in the Arab world.
According to Lt. Col. Cowan, Bremer not only lacked the executive and Middle East qualifications for the job, but "during his years as an aide at the State Department and as Ambassador[-at-large] for counterterrorism was an impediment or downright obstructionist to clandestine counterterrorist operations abroad." Cowan adds that "Bremer has disdain for the military and zero background in nation building."
So how did he get a job that principally entailed nation building and managing the Administration's promise of a seamless military occupation? As with so many of the other plum assignments within the Bush Administration – including a large percentage of those surrounding Bremer at the CPA - the answer is simple: politics.
Currently, according to the Associated Press, "one-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as a senior outpost of Bush's reelection effort." The office is run by Dan Senor, former Press Secretary for Spencer Abraham and recent member of the Carlyle Group, a crony capitalism investment firm that is the Bush family's answer to every military-industrial complex conspiracy theory ever conjured. The press operation is overseen by Rich Galen, a former Press Secretary for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle (I must admit Galen is a man I know and like).
In other words, instead of filling the CPA with qualified Middle East and emerging nation experts, as the British have, political appointees with no idea how to build a country are running the US-Baghdad road show. These Mayberry Machiavellis, as John Dilulio once dubbed this White House's political operation, are in Iraq to control message, with politics and presentation always winning out over policy. For parallel efforts with far less at stake, just think "Healthy Forests" or "No Child Left Behind" in a war zone.
And politics is where Bremer enters the equation with equal gusto. A darling of the neocons and 11-year apostle of Kissinger & Associates, Bremer was granted the job entirely for political control of the situation. In other words, we sent a man who helped companies build business relationships with China to convince Iraqis of our commitment to democracy, and also to groom him, as some believe, for Secretary of State should Bush win a second term. And just as it has on so many domestic issues, when politics trumps policy in this White House, the result is disaster.
Mistakes Were Made
Immediately upon taking over the CPA, Paul Bremer's arrogance, inexperience and political agenda caused a potentially volatile situation to begin spinning out of control. We have seen the results in the counterinsurgency over the past couple of weeks.
According to Cowan, Bremer simply "ignored members of his staff who actually were Middle East experts" for political expediency. A friend of mine who worked with the UN programs in Iraq and regularly interacted with the CPA (and originally supported the war) put it this way: "Bremer and the rest of the CPA are a bunch of gung-ho types who know nothing of development. They fundamentally misunderstood the magnitude and complexity of what they were dealing with. And they didn't care to learn from those who did."
This led to key early mistakes, from which we have never recovered, and have compounded the downward spiral into a violent Iraq. Joseph L. Galloway, a military correspondent for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, laid out the most serious blunders in calling for Bremer's dismissal in a recent piece:
Virtually every major decision he has made in Iraq has been wrong, poorly timed or just plain dumb. Beginning with his decision to demobilize the real army and send them home with their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, no paychecks, no future and heaps of anger. Followed by his decision to purge everyone who ever held a Baath Party card from public life and public employment, thus abandoning many Sunnis to hopelessness and anger. Followed by his decision to close down Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's newspaper and provoke him to anger-without any plan to deal with that anger when it spilled over into the streets and inflamed the Shiite community.
In Cowan's opinion, the disbanding of the Iraqi army directly led to "angry, vengeful and unemployed Iraqi soldiers with weapons" taking up arms against the coalition in Fallujah and other parts of the Sunni Triangle." This error was only exacerbated by the "De-Baathification" of Iraq, or prohibiting anyone with Baathist ties from working to enact the improvements and repairs (education, electricity, plumbing) necessary to get the country moving again.
The result was that we alienated the very people who had the know-how the CPA lacked, knowledge of the Iraqi infrastructure and an ability to get it up and working again. In the past few days, tacitly acknowledging the ignorance underlying this policy decision (Bremer said it was "implemented poorly"; could this finally be someone in the Bush Administration admitting a mistake?), the CPA "eased the restrictions" on Baath Party members going back to work. Yet, as has often been the case with the dictums put out by the CPA, the policy is ambiguous at best and far too late.
But if you thought our comedy of errors was limited to leaving the very soldiers we promised jobs out in the cold but letting them keep their AK-47s (it sounds suspiciously like NRA logic has taken hold), while firing the only people who knew how to provide indispensable services to the Iraqi people, you would be sorrowfully mistaken.
The decision to shut down a Shiite newspaper run by marginal Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr and buttress his anti-American sermons accusing us of permanent occupation, has led to a disaster in many sectors of Southern Iraq and the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad (named for al Sadr's father). It has galvanized opposition from ordinary Shiites, many of whom originally supported the American invasion but have come to see the United States as an occupying force.
This blunder has also put the Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the more moderate and revered Shiite cleric who has tacitly supported the CPA, in a position where he must come out more strongly against the US. The ensuing clashes between al Sadr's militia and coalition forces have led to civilian casualties, and more recruits for al Sadr.
And, according to Cowan, it once again exposed Bremer's "lack of preparation" when al Sadr's followers predictably took up arms, and he took the kind of time in responding to this crisis that our President took to answer that question about his "mistakes" during his annual solitary press conference.
And Then More Mistakes
These three colossal errors have only been compounded by myriad other mistakes made by Bremer's crew. Sunni tribesmen who were not loyal to Iraq, and originally supported the US invasion, were marginalized and ignored by the aristocratic technocrat, and have become part of the broader anti-US insurgency.
Bremer, according to my friend in Iraq, completely ignored the "Futures of Iraq Project," developed by the State Department and representatives from Iraqi civil society. The plan offered prescient advice on what would follow an invasion of Iraq and how to handle it. While it is not overly surprising to learn a neocon favorite would not be too keen on listening to State (just as the Pentagon wasn't), Bremer's giving short shrift to a plan that would protect the members of his team and men and women in uniform seems unbelievable. Kind of like exaggerating the threat of an enemy to start a war or falsely claiming they were a party to the worst attack on US soil in history.
Rounding out the list of easily avoidable mistakes by Bremer's CPA is a brief outline of an internal CPA memo recently used by reporter Jason Vest in a Village Voice article about the emergent quagmire. According to the memo's author, a neoconservative "advocate of transforming the Middle East," the CPA:
Is unwittingly "driving the weapons market" by arming the Iraqi police, who "sell their US-supplied weapons on the black market; they are promptly re-supplied (by the CPA). Interior ministry weapons buy-backs keep the price of arms high."
Has allowed the Iraqi Governing Council to foster cronyism and corruption, with Council members choosing "their sons and brothers-in-law" to staff Iraqi government ministries.
Is isolated from ordinary Iraqis "by [its] security bubble" in the Green Zone, the cordoned-off area of Baghdad where the CPA is headquartered. The memo derides the US government for spending "millions importing sport utility vehicles which are used exclusively to drive the kilometer and a half" between CPA and Governing Council headquarters.
Has enforced a border-security policy that is "completely irrelevant," and is so dysfunctional that "it is undeniable that a crumbling Baathist regime did better than we have" in policing Iraq's borders.
How Do We Recover?
What can we do to rectify the situation? Bremer and company are trying to reverse some of their mistakes, by allowing Baathists to perform some necessary functions in the new Iraq. There is even talk of sending CPA members further out of the Green Zone to excise the appearance of inaccessibility that has angered so many Iraqis. But the genie is now out of the bottle, and as they say, first impressions often last a lifetime.
Meanwhile, the lack of border control is allowing Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters to make it to the Sunni Triangle and the Iranian theocrats to supply al Sadr in the South. And following Spain's example, countries are pulling out of the "coalition of the willing", while others have said that they will if they are attacked, which translates into an invitation to be attacked. All of these factors, in turn, will continue the vicious cycle of hope turning to alienation and eventually violence committed by ordinary Iraqis.
As Lt. Colonel Cowan says, his facing twitching with anger, "this bastard [Bremer] has cost us time and cost us lives."