Iraq's third and final act?

Such tactics are presumably what mark Rumsfeld as a "skilled bureaucratic infighter," the description that has followed him through his career in government like a Homeric epithet. In fact, according to Bremer, he had received those orders at the Pentagon a few days before from Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's undersecretary for policy. In Bremer's telling, Feith gave him the draft order, emphasizing "the political importance of the decree":

"We've got to show all the Iraqis that we're serious about building a New Iraq. And that means that Saddam's instruments of repression have no role in that new nation."

The following day, Bremer's second in Iraq, the hapless Garner was handed another draft order. This, Woodward tells us, was Order Number 2, disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam's bodyguard and special paramilitary organizations:

"Garner was stunned. The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster. Garner had told the president and the whole National Security Council explicitly that they planned to use the Iraqi military -- at least 200,000 to 300,000 troops -- as the backbone of the corps to rebuild the country and provide security. And he'd been giving regular secure video reports to Rumsfeld and Washington on the plan."

An American colonel and a number of CIA officers had been meeting regularly with Iraqi officers in order to reconstitute the army. They had lists of soldiers, had promised emergency payments. "The former Iraqi military," according to Garner, "was making more and more overtures, just waiting to come back in some form." Again, Garner rushed off to see Bremer:

"'We have always made plans to bring the army back,' he insisted. This new plan was just coming out of the blue, subverting months of work.

"'Well, the plans have changed,' Bremer replied. 'The thought is that we don't want the residuals of the old army. We want a new and fresh army.'

"'Jerry, you can get rid of an army in a day, but it takes years to build one."

Again Bremer tells Garner that he has his orders. The discussion attains a certain unintended comedy when the proconsuls go on to discuss the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, which Bremer has also announced he will abolish:

"'You can't get rid of the Ministry of the Interior,' Garner said.

"'Why not?'

"'You just made a speech yesterday and told everybody how important the police force is.'

"'It is important.'

"'All the police are in the Ministry of the Interior,' Garner said. 'If you put this out, they'll all go home today."

On hearing this bit of information, we are told, Bremer looked "surprised" -- an expression similar, no doubt, to Rice's when she and the President learned from the secretary of state that the civilian occupation authority would not be reporting to the White House but to the Pentagon. Unfortunately, within the Pentagon there coexisted at least two visions of what the occupation of Iraq was to be: the quick victory, quick departure view of Rumsfeld, and the broader, ideologically driven democratic transformation of Iraqi society championed by the neoconservatives. The two views had uneasily intersected, for a time, in the alluring person of Ahmad Chalabi, who seemed to make both visions possible. With a Chalabi coronation taken off the table by President Bush, however, determined officials with a direct line to Bremer were transforming the Iraq adventure into a long-term, highly ambitious occupation. Presumably as Garner woke up on May 17, reflecting that "the US now had at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before -- the 50,000 Baathists [and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers," he could take satisfaction in having managed, by his last-minute efforts, to persuade Bremer to "excise the Ministry of Interior from the draft so the police could stay."

7.

One can make arguments for a "deep de-Baathification" of Iraq. One can make arguments also for dismantling the Iraqi army. It is hard, though, to make an argument that such steps did not stand in dramatic and irresolvable contradiction to the Pentagon's plan to withdraw all but 30,000 American troops from Iraq within a few months. With no Iraqi army, with all Baath Party members thrown out of the ministries and the agencies of government, with all of Saddam's formidable security forces summarily sacked -- and with all of these forces transformed into sworn enemies of the American occupation -- who precisely was going to keep order in Iraq? And who was going to build that "new and fresh army" that Bremer was talking about?

These questions loom so large and are so obvious that one feels that they must have some answer, even if an unconvincing one. The simple fact is that these two enormously significant steps -- launching a "deep de-Baathification" of the government and dissolving the Iraqi army -- together with Bremer's decision, taken also during his first days, to downgrade to that of a figurehead the status of the group of Iraqi politicians known as the Iraqi Governing Council, transformed what had been the Pentagon's plan for a quick victory and quick departure into a long-running and open-ended occupation that would perforce involve the establishment of a new Iraqi army.

The political implications within Iraq were incalculable, for the de-Baathification and the dissolution of the army both appeared to the Sunnis to be declarations of open warfare against them, convincing many that they would be judged not by standards of individual conduct but by the fact of their membership in a group -- judged not according to what they had done but according to who they were. This in itself undermined what hope there was to create the sine qua non of a stable democracy: a loyal opposition, which is to say an opposition that believes enough in the fairness of the system that it will renounce violence. "You Americans, you know," as a young Sunni had told me in October 2003, when the insurgency was already in full flower, "you have created your enemies here."

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