Iraq's third and final act?
Americans are war-weary and hungry for an answer to a single question: How do we get out of Iraq?
Editor's note: This is Part 2 of an article appearing in the Dec. 21, 2006, issue of the New York Review of Books. Read Part 1 here.
By Mark Danner
Read more: Opinion
L. Paul Bremer
Nov. 25, 2006 | 6.
So there would be no President Chalabi. Unfortunately, the President, who thought of himself, Woodward says, "as the calcium in the backbone" of the U.S. government, having banned Chalabi's ascension, neither offered an alternative plan nor forced the government he led to agree on one. Nor did Secretary Rumsfeld, who knew only that he wanted a quick victory and a quick departure. To underline the point, soon after the U.S. invasion the secretary sent his special assistant, Larry DiRita, to the Kuwait City Hilton to brief the tiny, miserable, understaffed, and underfunded team led by the retired General Garner which was preparing to fly to a chaotic Baghdad to "take control of the transition." Here is DiRita's "Hilton Speech" as quoted to Woodward by an army colonel, Paul Hughes:
"We went into the Balkans and Bosnia and Kosovo and we're still in them ... We're probably going to wind up in Afghanistan for a long time because the Department of State can't do its job right. Because they keep screwing things up, the Department of Defense winds up being stuck at these places. We're not going to let this happen in Iraq.
"The reaction was generally, Whoa! Does this guy even realize that half the people in the room are from the State Department? DiRita went on, as Hughes recalled: 'By the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq.'"
DiRita spoke these words as, a few hundred miles away, Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq were taken up in a thoroughgoing riot of looting and pillage -- of government ministries, universities and hospitals, power stations and factories -- that would virtually destroy the country's infrastructure, and with it much of the respect Iraqis might have had for American competence. The uncontrolled violence engulfed Iraq's capital and major cities for weeks as American troops -- 140,000 or more -- mainly sat on their tanks, looking on. If attaining true political authority depends on securing a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans would never achieve it in Iraq. There were precious few troops to impose order, and hardly any military police. No one gave the order to arrest or shoot looters or otherwise take control of the streets. Official Pentagon intentions at this time seem to have been precisely what the secretary of defense's special assistant said they were: to have all but 25,000 or so of those troops out of Iraq in five months or less.
How then to secure the country, which was already in a state of escalating chaos? Most of the ministries had been looted and burned and what government there was consisted of the handful of Iraqi officials who Garner's small team had managed to coax into returning to work. In keeping with the general approach of quick victory, quick departure, Garner had briefed the President and his advisers before leaving Washington, emphasizing his plan to dismiss only the most senior and personally culpable Baathists from the government and also to make use of the Iraqi army to rebuild and, eventually, keep order.
Within weeks of that meeting in the Kuwait Hilton, L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad, replacing Garner, who had been fired after less than a month in Iraq. On Bremer's first full day "in-country," in Woodward's telling, one of Garner's officials ran up to her now-lame duck boss and thrust a paper into his hand:
"'Have you read this?' she asked.
"'No,' Garner replied. 'I don't know what the hell you've got there.'
"'It's a de-Baathification policy,' she said, handing him a two-page document."
The document was Bremer's "Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1 -- De-Baathification of Iraqi Society," an order to remove immediately from their posts all "full members" of the Baath Party. These were to be banned from working in any government job. In every ministry the top three levels of managers would be investigated for crimes.
"'We can't do this,' Garner said. He still envisioned what he had told Rumsfeld would be a 'gentle de-Baathification' -- eliminating only the number one Baathist and personnel directors in each ministry. 'It's too deep,' he added."
Garner headed immediately to Bremer's office, where the new occupation leader was just settling in, and on the way ran into the CIA chief of station, referred to here as Charlie.
"'Have you read this?' Garner asked.
"'That's why I'm over here,' Charlie said.
"'Let's go see Bremer.' The two men got in to see the new administrator of Iraq around 1 PM.
"'Jerry, this is too deep,' Garner said. 'Give Charlie and I about an hour. We'll sit down with this. We'll do the pros and cons and then we'll get on the telephone with Rumsfeld and soften it a bit.'
"'Absolutely not,' Bremer said. 'Those are my instructions and I intend to execute them.'"
Garner, who will shortly be going home, sees he's making little headway and appeals to the CIA man, who "had been station chief in other Middle East countries," asking him what will happen if the order is issued.
"'If you put this out, you're going to drive between 30,000 and 50,000 Baathists underground before nightfall,' Charlie said ... 'You will put 50,000 people on the street, underground and mad at Americans.' And these 50,000 were the most powerful, well-connected elites from all walks of life.
"'I told you,' Bremer said, looking at Charlie. 'I have my instructions and I have to implement this.'"
The chain of command, as we know, goes through Rumsfeld, and Garner gets on the phone and appeals to the secretary of defense, who tells him -- and this will be a leitmotif in Woodward's book -- that the matter is out of his hands:
"'This is not coming from this building,' [Rumsfeld] replied. 'That came from somewhere else.'
"Garner presumed that meant the White House, NSC or Cheney. According to other participants, however, the de-Baathification order was purely a Pentagon creation. Telling Garner it came from somewhere else, though, had the advantage for Rumsfeld of ending the argument."
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