Indications are that Iraqi political/ethnic groups are restless. Standing still may lead to unraveling. Progress toward an IIA may be essential to retard centrifugal forces... . Regime remnants are coalescing to some degree and stepping up sabotage. Their dream is a guerrilla insurgency. But guerrilla insurgencies depend on popular support. Progress toward an IIA will help neutralize if not dry up that popular support.12
Patience among Iraqis was wearing thin, and an insurgency was gaining momentum. Bremer gave no indication to me that he disagreed with my analysis that the best way to avert an escalating insurgency was to give Iraqis the opportunity to govern themselves.
By July, however, Bremer, echoing Colin Powell, apparently had concluded that a power-sharing arrangement between the coalition and Iraqis would not work. He asserted that there could only be one government at a time—the CPA or an Iraqi one, but not both.13 Bremer then announced he would appoint an advisory “political council” of thirty-five Iraqis called the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and indicated that he would be making all the decisions.14
Even as mere advisers, the Iraqis on the council seemed to irritate Bremer. He frequently complained about their leadership abilities. “Those people couldn’t organize a parade, let alone run the country,” he wrote later.15 From my perspective, the leaders could not be judged on their administrative skills when they were not given real authority to administer anything. If the CPA had treated the governing council as something resembling an embryonic Iraqi government, the members might have been motivated to work more energetically and productively. Indeed, I thought one of the most important roles these leaders could play was to put an Iraqi face on the postwar administration, rather than an American one. I suggested to Bremer that the Iraqi Governing Council send someone approximating an ambassador to the United States: “It seems to me it could help our cause if there were a talented, articulate Iraqi available for the media every day explaining the views of the Iraqis who favor freedom and self-government.”16 This was typical of my guidance to Bremer. Contrary to popular perception, I was not inclined to issue direct, detailed, not to be questioned orders to those who work for me. I have found that people at senior levels generally do better when given broad guidance and the leeway to exercise their judgment as changing circumstances arise. In Bremer’s case, he had too much leeway.
I wondered if it would have been better for the CPA to promote self-government first and foremost at the local level, and to diffuse power out of Baghdad’s insular Green Zone complex. Our military division commanders across Iraq were tailoring their operations to the unique circumstances in their parts of the country. General David Petraeus, for example, held local elections in the northern city of Mosul soon after liberation. That was an action-oriented, aggressive approach that worked in that part of Iraq but may or may not have worked in other areas. I believed that one template was unlikely to fit the whole country. Iraq was too ethnically and geographically diverse for a nationwide model. But the CPA was a Baghdad-centric organization that too often handed down decrees for the whole country without regard for the differences from province to province.
When a U.S. Marine commander recommended holding local elections in June 2003 in Najaf, a city they judged was ready for an elected town council, Bremer objected.17 He did not seem to favor organic political development at the local level. It wasn’t until April 2004 that Bremer approved an order on the operations of provincial and local councils. He also seemed to see little value in engaging Iraq’s tribes, which I considered key forces for stability in Iraqi history.
I learned much later from Admiral Giambastiani that Bremer was uncomfortable with the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP). CERP was an enormously valuable way to allow American military commanders across Iraq to help fund small-scale development projects in their area of responsibility (AOR).18 The local military commanders knew which projects were needed to earn local support to make headway against the insurgency. Our military commanders were convinced the funds were often more valuable than bullets, but Bremer refused to allocate CERP money to the military from the Saddam government’s seized assets.
In July 2003, Bremer announced a new program for the CPA called “Achieving the Vision to Restore Full Sovereignty to the Iraqi People.” The document listed as the primary goal the “early restoration of full sovereignty to the Iraqi people” and added that the CPA “will not leave until we have succeeded in carrying out the President’s [Bush’s] and Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair’s] vision.”19 Bremer’s interpretation of that vision included improving water resource management, improving health care services, reforming the tax system, building a welfare safety net, improving education and housing, and creating a vibrant civil society.20 I was struck by the reality that our own country was still working on some of those areas two centuries after our independence.
Bremer’s ambitions went far beyond the limited role for the United States that the Department of Defense and the interagency process had planned for and well beyond the role that had been resourced. CENTCOM had planned to liberate Iraq and set up the rough framework for the country to govern itself. The military had not planned to occupy every corner of Iraq with an American soldier or to try to impose a Western-style democracy on the country. The result was that the CPA and Iraq ended up with the downsides of an occupation strategy and few of the benefits—and without the resources that might have allowed some mitigation. The means were not well linked to the ends. It would be several months before those of us in Washington fully recognized that such a shift in policy had occurred.
It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that there would be missteps in the aftermath of liberation in so unfamiliar a country. But in those critical early days, the ambiguities in fundamental strategy were harmful. Bremer’s arrival marked an unfortunate psychological change in Iraq—from a sense of liberation, with gratitude owed to the American military and our allies, to a growing sense of frustration and resentment that Iraq had come under the rule of an American occupation authority.*
The failure to establish an Iraqi interim government quickly was not the cause of every problem we faced in post-Saddam Iraq. The legacy of tyranny, the harmful actions of ill-intentioned neighbors, the catastrophic state of its infrastructure, the mistrust of foreigners, the ethnic and sectarian tensions, and the political vacuum all contributed to the instability. Nonethe-less, I am persuaded that many of these difficulties became worse as a result of the delay in ceding authority to the Iraqis. The CPA’s top-down approach inadvertently stoked nationalist resentments and fanned the embers of what would become the Iraqi insurgency. Many Iraqis associated the CPA with imperiousness and heavy-handedness. In his book War and Decision, Doug Feith argues that the main problem with the CPA was not the commonly cited decisions on de-Baathification or the disbanding of the Iraqi army that gave rise to an insurgency. He suggests that the CPA’s policies and methods fueled the insurgency in other, more subtle ways.21 The broader impression of an overbearing U.S. authority issuing edicts to the Iraqi people buttressed the anticoalition arguments of militants like Muqtada al-Sadr and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This played well into propaganda that the United States was trying to dominate and exploit Iraq rather than liberate it and return it promptly to Iraqi control.
Bremer issued two important orders soon after he arrived in Baghdad. In subsequent years both orders became characterized as the two original sins of the occupation and the cause of the difficulties in the years that followed. At the time, however, they were greeted with approval by a great many Iraqis and were put into place with the best of intentions.
CPA Order Number 1 concerned the policy of de-Baathification—the removal from the government of officials in the top layers of Baath Party.22 Many were minority Sunni Arabs who had run Iraq for three decades. The Baath Party was less of a political party than a symbol of the state, much like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union or the Nazis in Germany. As such, it had become a widely hated vestige of S
addam’s regime. Bremer, rightly in my view, thought it was important to make clear to Iraqis that the Baathists who had served a regime that had terrorized the citizenry, deployed the secret police, murdered regime opponents, and authorized torture chambers and rape rooms were not going to return to power.
But we knew that many thousands of Iraqis had been forced into the Baath Party and were members in name only. Under Saddam, almost anyone who wanted to advance professionally had to join, including schoolteachers, doctors, and engineers. There was no desire or intention to punish everyone in the system. As I had noted immediately after my trip to Baghdad at the end of April 2003, in certain sectors Baathists were keeping the fragile Iraqi infrastructure from collapsing.23 The goal of de-Baathification was to target those at the top of the party, the ones who were so closely linked with the former regime that they could not be trusted to serve in the post-Saddam government. The de-Baathification policy in fact was akin to the Allies’ de-Nazification policy in Germany after World War II, which barred some 2.5 percent of the German population from postwar government service. In Iraq, by contrast, DoD officials intended the policy to cover only one tenth of 1 percent of the population.24
Though the policy later found few defenders at the top level of the administration, de-Baathification initially had broad support among the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. The approach was promoted in the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project that, as noted, later became touted in the media as the neglected plan for postwar Iraq.25 Two weeks before the war began, an NSC staff member briefed the President on the policy. He explained that there were 1. 5 million members of the Baath Party in Iraq but proposed removing only the 1 to 2 percent who were what he called “active and full members.” All told, there were some twenty-five thousand people who could lose their government jobs. There were no objections from any of the principals present at the NSC meeting. However, the President did express some skepticism. “It’s hard to imagine punishing twenty-five thousand people,” Bush said. He then asked the critical question: “Who will do the vetting?”26 The President understood that there was a good deal of pent-up rage against the ruling Sunnis by Iraq’s Shia and Kurdish populations. In the wrong hands, it would be easy for de-Baathification to be an ax rather than a scalpel.
After Bremer announced the policy in May, he appointed Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Shia majority, to administer it. With Chalabi in charge, just as the President had feared, de-Baathification gained a reputation for score settling. Stories circulated about schoolteachers who were fired, former Baathist officials who were beaten in the streets, and even murders—acts that the CPA had not authorized, condoned, or had even minimal control over.
De-Baathification inflamed the minority Sunnis, who saw it as an act of vengeance against them as a group. Sunnis justifiably argued that while many of them had been forced to participate in the Baathist government, they were not all complicit in Saddam’s crimes. The policy, and how it was administered, led some Sunnis to become embittered against the American presence in Iraq.
CPA Order Number 2—the decision to disband the Iraqi army—has since become one of the most criticized decisions of the war. Of the dozens of important decisions made during that week in May 2003, it was not one that stuck out with unique prominence at the time. But in hindsight, its importance is unmistakable.
Disbanding the army was not my instinct. Everything I wanted to do in Iraq was tied to the thought that we should have the Iraqis doing as much for themselves as possible. If we disbanded the army, it would mean that as many as four hundred thousand young Iraqi men would be put out of jobs and onto the streets. Some were armed, had military training, and could become susceptible to calls for resistance against the United States, coalition forces, and the new Iraqi government.
Before the war I had agreed it would be wise to keep the Iraqi army as a reconstruction corps—something loosely resembling FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. In January 2003, Feith and his staff, working with the Joint Staff, drafted a briefing called “Rebuilding the Iraqi Military” that recommended retaining the regular army.27 One month later, at a February 26 meeting, Pentagon representatives briefed the NSC principals on the DoD plans for what they called “the reintegration of the regular army.” Under the plan, those structures of the military that were tainted with the crimes of the Baath regime—the Republican Guard and secret police among them—would be dissolved, but the regular army would be retained to assist in keeping security. The proposal would use the army “as a national reconstruction force during the transition phase.”28 The assumption was that they had structure and manpower as well as skills and equipment that could be valuable assets. By March, the brief was updated with the recommendation that following combat operations in Iraq, the army “should ‘maintain its current status in assembly areas and permanent garrisons.’”29 In short, the Iraqi army would be retrained and used as an instrument of defense of the new Iraqi state.
But I was aware that there were some downsides to keeping it in the form we found it. Controlled by Sunni officers loyal to Saddam, the army had been an instrument of terror against many Shia and Kurds. It was bloated with senior officers—eleven thousand generals, almost all of them Sunnis.30 (By comparison, the U.S. Army, about the same size as Saddam’s, had about three hundred generals.) Corruption was deeply ingrained. The Kurds and Shia, together composing 80 percent of Iraq’s population, would also vehemently oppose any attempt to retain Saddam’s army. We had to ask whether it made sense to risk alienating the vast majority of Iraqis by trying to keep and reconstitute the army. I concluded that the benefits outweighed the risks, and that we would keep it intact to help with security and reconstruction.
The calculus changed, however, as coalition troops drove north to Baghdad. Faced with the prospects of death or capture if they engaged our coalition forces, many members of the Iraqi army removed their uniforms and deserted. Undoubtedly, large numbers of the army’s conscript soldiers—most of them Shia—had never wanted to serve the Saddam regime in the first place and didn’t plan to stay any longer than necessary. CENTCOM was operating on the U.S. intelligence community’s judgment that the Iraqi army would remain intact after the invasion, and that the largely Shia conscripts at lower levels of the military would be available to actively work with coalition forces to secure and reconstruct the country.* That judgment turned out to be incorrect.
The Iraqi army, in Bremer’s words, “disbanded itself.”32 The evolving situation called to mind the John Maynard Keynes quote, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Few, if any, of the arguments in favor of using the army continued to be applicable, while most of the reasons against using it remained. Bremer recommended a change of course.33 He made the decision in close coordination with his senior adviser on defense issues, Walter Slocombe, who had served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Clinton administration and who at my request had agreed to assist the CPA.
Bremer and Slocombe championed a proposal to create an entirely new Iraqi army. The training and equipping of the army would fall under the control of the CPA and not, as commonly assumed, under the United States military. Bremer briefed me and several other Defense officials about the outlines of the plan on May 19, 2003 and then other members of the National Security Council three days later. His decision, particularly its specifics, did not receive the full interagency discussion it merited.34 We were told that each of the soldiers was to receive a stipend while the army was reorganized, so that they would not be aimless, unemployed, and on the streets.35 Unfortunately, there was a month delay before Bremer’s office announced the payments and another month before the CPA could issue them.36 Many members of the Iraqi army became embittered. The initial pace of training the new army was also excruciatingly slow.37
Later I revived the question of whether it might be desirable or possible to reassemble units of the old Iraqi army and bring them into service in some form.38 I asked Gen
eral Abizaid for an assessment. But Bremer strenuously objected to this idea, apparently on the grounds that Iraqis would not want any remnants of the old army reconstituted.39 Whether or not disbanding the Iraqi army was ultimately a good idea, the failure to reform and reconstitute it quickly was costly.
Bremer’s plan for a new Iraqi army focused on defending Iraq from an external threat rather than on using it for internal security.* This decision stemmed from his certain view that the Iraqi people would never trust or tolerate any version of Saddam’s army patrolling their streets. Yet the far greater threat to Iraqis was not from outside invaders but from the insurgency being waged from within. The army was being trained to fight the wrong war.
For nearly a year Abizaid made efforts to get the training of the Iraqi army transferred from the CPA to the military, which had vastly more experience. Bremer finally relented in the spring of 2004. In the meantime, Abizaid and Sanchez had built up the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a force of military units that remained in their communities, but the size of Iraq’s national security forces was still too small to deal with the insurgency.
It is fair to ask why differences between the CPA and CENTCOM, and more broadly between State and Defense, were not better resolved. I have asked it myself as I look back. The fact was that Bremer’s views on Iraqi governance and occupation reflected those of the State Department. Those key differences were never clearly or firmly resolved in the NSC. Only the President could do so.
As time went on, Bremer’s pride of ownership in his policy concerning the Iraqi army wavered. In 2005, Bremer said the decision had been his, calling it “the most important decision I made, and it had the effect of avoiding a civil war in Iraq.”40 However, by September 2007, as criticism of his decision intensified, Bremer wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, “How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army.”41
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