Imperial Life in the Emerald City

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

  The school had two adjoining campuses built in a square, one for boys and the other for girls, with a courtyard in the middle. Mazaka had carefully selected the venue. Saddam’s government had stored weapons in one of the classrooms during the American shock-and-awe campaign. The headmistress of the girls’ campus supported the American invasion. There was no electricity or running water in either campus. Students relieved themselves behind the building.

  “Salaam alaikum,” Bremer said as he entered the courtyard. Peace be upon you.

  “Alaikum salaam,” the teachers replied. And upon you be peace.

  The headmistress took Bremer on a tour of the girls’ campus. Her 635 students had to be taught in two shifts because there were not enough desks. She showed Bremer several rooms with no lights, fans, or chalk for the blackboard. After the camera crews had finished filming, the CPA team churned out the sound bites.

  “Engineers will visit in the next few weeks to work with you to rehabilitate the school,” Mazaka said.

  “We are committed to helping you,” Bremer added.

  Then we walked to the boys’ campus. Bremer strolled into a classroom of fifteen young boys, none of whom spoke English. The cameramen followed behind.

  “We are working to be sure the school is completely renovated,” Bremer said. Curriculum revision was a “matter for Iraqis to decide,” but he promised that paeans to Saddam would be expunged. An interpreter was summoned. “What’s your favorite sport?” Bremer asked the kids. Soccer, one boy said. “Well, we’ll bring you some soccer balls in a few days,” Bremer said with a flourish. He turned to one of his aides. He said nothing, but his look conveyed the message. Get someone to get some soccer balls down here pronto!

  By the time he walked out of the classroom, word had gotten out in the neighborhood that the viceroy was there. Hundreds of people crowded around the campus.

  “Please help us,” one woman shouted in broken English as she gripped the arm of her son. “We are very worried about security. There are people kidnapping our children.”

  “Security is a big problem,” another woman said. “We are scared.”

  Bremer walked up to the women. “We understand your concerns,” he said. “We are working very hard to restore security. We’re arresting people every day.”

  The women nodded, but the crowd didn’t give up. Several teachers joined in the questioning.

  “Can we have security around the school during the exams?” one asked.

  “We’ll talk to the military about that,” he said.

  “Please, mister,” another teacher yelled. “We want to be paid.”

  “We’re paying salaries as fast as we can,” he said.

  Bremer’s guards hustled him back into the Suburban. “Good luck,” he said as the door closed.

  “Inshallah,” the headmistress replied.

  As we sped off, I asked Bremer if, given the continuing looting, he thought there were enough American troops in Baghdad. Bremer would later write in his book My Year in Iraq that in May 2003 he sent Rumsfeld a copy of a draft report by the Rand Corporation, a military-affiliated think tank, that estimated that five hundred thousand troops were needed to stabilize Iraq—more than three times the number of foreign forces then in the country. According to Bremer, Rumsfeld did not respond. Bremer also wrote that he raised his concerns with President Bush at a lunch that month, and again in June in a video link with a National Security Council meeting chaired by Bush. But Bremer never acknowledged these efforts when queried by journalists about force levels at the time.

  “I think we’ve got as many soldiers as we need here right now,” he told me. The problem, in his view, was getting Iraqi police officers back on the job. Many still had not reported to their stations.

  “You know, it’s Saddam who’s responsible for this problem,” he said. “He released tens of thousands of criminals from prison before the war.” But Bremer suggested that they alone were not responsible for the looting; it was a communal reaction to the repression. “When you get here and you see the rage and the pain on people’s faces, it’s very clear how very evil the old regime was.”

  “What’s your top priority?” I asked.

  Economic reform, he said. He had a three-step plan. The first was to restore electricity, water, and other basic services. The second was to put “liquidity in the hands of people”—reopening banks, offering loans, paying salaries. The third was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises,” and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.” Saddam’s government owned hundreds of factories. It subsidized the cost of gasoline, electricity, and fertilizer. Every family received monthly food rations. Bremer regarded all of that as unsustainable, as too socialist. “It’s going to be a very wrenching, painful process, as it was in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said.

  “But won’t that be very complicated and controversial?” I asked. “Why not leave it up to the Iraqis?”

  Bremer had come to Iraq to build not just a democracy but a free market. He insisted that economic reform and political reform were intertwined. “If we don’t get their economy right, no matter how fancy our political transformation, it won’t work,” he said.

  As we talked, I was struck by his zeal to help the people of Iraq. While Washington remained focused on Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and the human rights abuses of his government, Bremer’s emphasis on the future was refreshing. I wondered if his aspirations would change once he heard from more Iraqis, or if he would demonstrate a missionary’s unshakable commitment to doctrine from the home country, but those thoughts were soon eclipsed by the viceroy’s vision of a new Iraq. It sounded like he wanted America to be as ambitious in Iraq as it had been in Germany and Japan after World War II. After fifteen minutes of conversation, I found myself believing in Bremer.

  By then, we had arrived at Baghdad University, a sprawling campus of fifty thousand students on the eastern side of the Tigris River. Bremer was there for a meeting with the deans. Like the elementary school teachers, they complained about security. They also griped about a Saddam-era regulation that prevented professors and deans from traveling abroad. Saddam had been afraid they’d never return. Bremer listened intently. This was something he could fix.

  The next day, he issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 8.

  Any statute, regulation, instruction or policy of the former Iraqi government that imposes restrictions or procedures on faculty, employees or students of public universities, colleges or other institutions of higher education who desire to travel abroad for educational purposes is hereby rescinded.

  As the viceroy, Bremer need only put down his signature to impose a new law, or to abolish an old one. He wasn’t required to consult with Iraqis or even seek their consent. “As long as we’re here, we are the occupying power,” he said as we drove back to the Green Zone. “It’s a very ugly word, but it’s true.”

  As we pulled up to the palace, I asked Bremer if he saw himself as another General Douglas MacArthur, the obsessive, all-powerful American ruler of Japan for three years after World War II.

  “I’m not MacArthur,” he said as he exited the Suburban. “I’m not going to be anybody but myself.”

  Shortly after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, Henry Kissinger dropped by to see Colin Powell in his vast, wood-paneled office at the State Department. Kissinger, who had been secretary of state in the 1970s, visited Powell occasionally for wide-ranging chats. The conversation that day soon turned to Iraq, and Powell asked Kissinger about Bremer’s management style. Bremer had spent fifteen years working for Kissinger, as his special assistant when he was secretary and then as a managing director of Kissinger’s consulting firm.

  “He’s a control freak,” Kissinger replied.

  Powell snorted grimly. If Kissinger, a legendary micromanager, thought Bremer was one too, then Bremer had to be a control freak without parallel.

  Over at the White H
ouse, Rice and her deputy, Steven Hadley, had come to a similar conclusion. In his Oval Office interview with President Bush, Bremer had made it clear that he wanted complete control of the reconstruction and governance of Iraq. He didn’t want Washington, as he would say later, to micromanage policy “with an eight-thousand-mile screwdriver.”

  A few weeks after he landed in Iraq, Bremer informed Hadley that he didn’t want to subject his decisions to the “inter-agency process,” a bureaucratic safety valve that allowed the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSC to review and comment on policies. Bremer said he couldn’t wait around for approval from the home office. Rice and Hadley were reluctant to remove Bremer’s very long leash, but he was the man on the ground. And after the Garner debacle, the White House wanted a take-charge guy. All right, Hadley told him, you don’t have to go through the interagency process. But make sure you run the big stuff by us first.

  Bremer told confidants in Baghdad he didn’t want to “deal with the Washington squirrel cage.” He was a presidential appointee who reported to the president through the secretary of defense. He had no obligation to answer to anyone else. When Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith sent messages to him, Bremer directed his deputies to respond.

  If Washington wanted something from Bremer’s underlings, the request had to be approved by Bremer himself. The rule even applied to queries from the White House. Bremer’s executive assistant, Jessica LeCroy, dispatched an e-mail to every senior adviser titled, “CPA Senior Advisors May Not Accept Taskings Directly from the NSC/Inter-agency Process.”

  Bremer didn’t view the palace as an American embassy that had a responsibility to report developments on the ground to the State Department and the NSC. He gave his updates directly to the president and Rumsfeld in a weekly video teleconference. Although Powell and Rice usually participated in the calls, they and their staffs yearned for more information. Powell’s aides quietly encouraged State personnel working for the CPA to write back-channel memos to the State Department. To avoid detection, the authors used personal Hotmail and Yahoo e-mail accounts to send their dispatches. At the NSC, one of Rice’s senior deputies began checking the CPA’s Web site every day to see what new orders Bremer had issued. It was faster than waiting to receive reports through official channels.

  In his first several months in Baghdad, Bremer had no formal deputy. Although he brought along three veteran diplomats to serve as advisers—one of them, retired ambassador Clayton McManaway, was an old friend, and another, Hume Horan, was one of the State Department’s foremost Arabists—their roles were soon eclipsed by a coterie of sycophantic young aides who rarely challenged Bremer’s decisions. Most of them had never worked in government before, and those who had were too junior to be beholden to anyone back home. They had no preconceived notions other than an unfailing belief in building a democratic Iraq, and their only loyalty was to the viceroy.

  Before he even arrived in Iraq, Bremer sidelined Zal Khalilzad, the White House’s envoy working on the political transition. The Afghan-born Khalilzad, who would eventually become an American ambassador to post-occupation Iraq, had spent months interacting with Iraq’s exiled political leaders. He knew more about them than anyone else in the U.S. government, and he had their trust. When Bush tapped Bremer to be the viceroy, Powell and others in the State Department assumed Khalilzad would become Bremer’s top deputy and would remain in charge of assembling an interim government. But Bremer didn’t want someone in Baghdad who had preexisting relationships with Iraqi leaders. Bremer regarded Khalilzad as a potential threat—someone who knew more about the players and the country than he did, and could disagree with the viceroy’s agenda.

  Bremer insisted on approving every substantive CPA policy. Staffers sent him thousands of one-to-two-page documents titled ACTION MEMO or INFORMATION MEMO, because he required it. He read them over breakfast, in the late hours of the night, and on helicopters. One staffer remarked to me that history was repeating itself: Saddam signed off on even the most insignificant decisions because nobody else wanted to, lest they mistakenly contradict the dictator’s whims. “Nothing’s changed,” the staffer said. “We can’t do anything without Bremer’s okay.”

  Bremer tolerated, and even welcomed, differing opinions in policy debates. But once he arrived at a decision, he expected everyone to get on board. Public questioning of his edicts was verboten. And nobody was above reproach. When Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British prime minister Tony Blair’s personal representative in Baghdad, dared to suggest at a meeting with Powell and Bremer that one of Bremer’s edicts might have been too severe, the viceroy snapped at him. The message was clear: Don’t contradict me.

  In a 2002 article for Directors & Boards magazine, Bremer wrote that in a crisis, “quick decisive action is vital, even though decisions have to be taken in ‘fog of war’ conditions.” He practiced what he preached. Paperwork never languished on his desk. The same staffers who complained about having to write endless memos were amazed at the speed with which Bremer sent those memos back, often with comments scrawled in the margins.

  Bremer’s article should have been required reading for everyone in Washington dealing with Iraq. “Crisis management plans cannot be put in place ‘on the fly’ after the crisis occurs,” he wrote. “At the outset, information is often vague, even contradictory. Events move so quickly that decision makers experience a sense of loss of control. Often denial sets in, and managers unintentionally cut off information flow about the situation.”

  In his first few weeks, Bremer slept on a twin-size cot on the palace’s second floor, in a room with no air-conditioning. He soon moved into a trailer and, eventually, into his own villa, which Halliburton had furnished with plush sofas, a dining table for a dozen, and a study.

  After his morning run, a quick shower, and breakfast, he was in his office by six-thirty, sitting behind a large wooden desk on top of which was a telephone, a Dell computer with a flat-panel screen, and a stack of memos. In front of the desk was an octagonal coffee table, around which aides gathered for meetings. Maps of Iraq’s power grid and administrative districts were tacked to the walls. Bremer’s bookshelves were nearly empty, save for a guide to the management of financial crises, Rudy Giuliani’s book Leadership, and a box of Raisin Bran. On one shelf was a framed photo of Bremer finishing the 1991 Boston Marathon in three hours and thirty-four seconds. He was fifty then, and the time was good enough to place him in the top ten for his age group, although he often joked that “those thirty-four seconds”—which kept him from finishing in less than three hours—“I will take with me to my grave.” On his desk was a wood carving that looked like a large nameplate. It read SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS. When a visitor noted, during his first weeks on the job, the second line of the aphorism—“failure is an orphan”—Bremer tensed. “There won’t be any failure,” he said.

  He ran the CPA like a mini–White House. At seven-fifteen, he received a security and intelligence briefing. At seven-thirty, he huddled with Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq. At eight, he gathered his senior staff for the cabinet meeting. Then it was time to play the role of front man for the occupation. He met with Iraqi leaders. He visited hospitals, schools, and power plants. He posed for photos. There was usually a working lunch and formal dinner with prominent Iraqis. Sometimes he played host in the al-Rasheed Hotel, where black-jacketed waiters served four-course meals. Or he traveled to the home of an Iraqi politician. The evenings brought more meetings, more paperwork, and the videoconferences with Washington. He rarely crawled into bed before midnight.

  It was clear that Bremer was a workaholic, but other appearances could be deceiving. He often wore blue chinos with his navy pinstripe suit jacket. It looked like a matching ensemble from afar, and it was much easier to launder. He wolfed down the dining hall fare, leading many to conclude he saw food only as fuel. In fact, he was a French-trained chef who had taught cooking classes in Vermont and once spent thirty-six ho
urs making a sauce. His antipathy toward French government policy on Iraq didn’t diminish his love of French cuisine, the French language, or the French countryside. He owned a house in France, and he was, perhaps, the only Bush appointee to have studied at the Institut d’études politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris.

  He’d grown up in Hartford, Connecticut, gone to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1963. He went on to earn a master’s in business administration from Harvard University before entering the Foreign Service. His initial posting was in Kabul in the 1960s, where he famously set up Afghanistan’s first ski run, in the mountains near the capital, jury-rigging a loop of rope to a tractor motor to pull skiers up the hill. After his studies in Paris, he was stationed in Malawi before returning to Washington, where he was tapped to be Kissinger’s special assistant.

  Even in his early years, Bremer was work-obsessed. He traveled with Kissinger as he engaged in shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. That year, during which his daughter, Leila, was born, he was away from home for two hundred days. His wife, Frances Winfield Bremer, eventually wrote a book titled Coping with His Success: A Survival Guide for Wives at the Top. “One day he came home and said he had had lunch with Kissinger and David Rockefeller,” she told a Washington Post reporter in 1982. She’d had peanut butter sandwiches with Leila and their son, Paul. As Jerry described the lunch, Francie, who studied at Harvard, sat there thinking, “I’m as smart as he. Why am I sitting here with peanut butter?” She took a qualifying test for Mensa as well as the Foreign Service entrance exam, passing both, and it “defused the whole question of competition” with her husband. A year after the Post article appeared, the family moved to the Netherlands, where the Dutch named a tulip variety after Francie.

  In 1994, the couple converted to Roman Catholicism. Jerry, who was born an Episcopalian, had been visibly moved watching television coverage of Pope John Paul II at World Youth Day celebrations in 1993. “Yet another influence was our exposure, while living in Europe, to the historical beauty of a Church of saints, shrines and simple people at prayer, a Church that was truly the bedrock of western civilization,” the Bremers wrote in their parish newsletter.