It’s payback time for Bush’s former Iraq point man

ONE of the more interesting details in “My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope,” L. Paul Bremer III’s account of serving as the highest American official in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion, is the acknowledgment to his agent who came to Baghdad -- presumably while Bremer still wielded “all executive, legislative and judicial functions” -- to begin discussing plans to write this book. Every great man in American public life these days, it seems, feels compelled to write a book even before the issue of his greatness has been settled. One almost wishes that a sort of Son-of-Sam law could be enacted to stem this tide of ink.

And yet the public does perhaps benefit. Instant autobiographies like Bremer’s, co-written with former Foreign Service officer Malcolm McConnell, do shed light on details normally kept secret, especially in an administration as tight-lipped as that of George W. Bush, if only perhaps because the author is so intent on settling scores before colleagues and underlings come out with books of their own. The main targets of Bremer’s book are Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith -- incidentally the men who hired him -- as well as generals Ricardo Sanchez and John Abizaid, all of whom, Bremer declares, resisted putting adequate numbers of Americans on the ground to impose security while simultaneously indulging unrealistic fantasies about training vast numbers of Iraqis to fill the gaps. Bremer also reveals that as late as November 2004 -- six months into an occupation that had grown increasingly bloody and chaotic due to the growing insurgency -- the U.S. military had “no overall strategy for defeating the enemy” in the estimation of his staff. While such criticisms have long been at the fore of the public debate, Bremer is the highest-placed former Bush administration official, and a singularly qualified one at that, to blast American military policy in post-invasion Iraq.

At the same time, Bremer’s belief in the righteousness of the mission never wavers. Nor does his devotion to his boss, President Bush. Bremer writes that as his first meeting with the president was concluding, he took an extra moment to praise him, saying, “Mr. President, my wife wants you to know that her favorite passage from your State of the Union speech is, ‘Freedom is not America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to mankind.’ ” Before leaving his family behind to take the dangerous post in Baghdad, Bremer and his wife consoled themselves that it was “God ... who had asked us to make this sacrifice.” Clearly, he and the president were on the same page when it came to who they were serving in Iraq.

Bremer was 62 when he assumed control of the occupation on May 12, 2003. A Yale graduate, class of 1963, he was a retired career diplomat who had spent the 1960s at embassies in Afghanistan and Malawi, then served as chief of staff for Henry Kissinger, ambassador to the Netherlands and later ambassador at large for counterterrorism during the Reagan years before entering the private sector. Ultimately, he ran the crisis management division of Marsh & McLennan, an $11-billion-a-year consulting firm.

When he arrived in Baghdad aboard a C-130 military transport more than a month after the April 9 “liberation,” the city was burning. It was believed at the time that such lawlessness was the result of criminal gangs running rampant in a city the size of Los Angeles controlled by no more than 40,000 U.S. troops. Later, as Bremer reveals, the Americans would discover that Saddam’s intelligence services had planned months before the invasion to unleash looting, assassinations and bombings as part of a strategy to wage insurgency warfare.

Against this growing but for the most part completely ignored menace, Bremer’s task was twofold: to restore public services, which had begun to collapse even before the invasion, and to constitute an Iraqi governing body. Given the sparse resources at his disposal, not to mention confusing messages from the bureaucracy in Washington, Bremer was rather like the professor on “Gilligan’s Island” trying to build a radio from a rock and a coconut, only his job was to rebuild a country emerging from one war and sliding into another. The big picture was missed, Bremer claims, largely because the CIA station in Iraq was obsessed with its fruitless hunt for WMDs, not rooting out the insurgency.

Bremer’s critics say he committed two drastic blunders soon after taking his post when in mid-May he signed orders firing the Iraqi Army and banning former Baath Party members from holding government jobs. These moves, the reasoning goes, created an instant class of disgruntled military and professionals, most of them Sunni, and drove them into the ranks of the insurgency. Bremer repeatedly justifies the former decision by arguing that the Iraqi military had already “self-demobilized,” a point his critics have countered by suggesting that the army might have been reconstituted -- paid and organized and vetted -- if only to give the soldiers something to do in lieu of taking up arms against the occupation. As for his efforts to “de-baathify” Iraq, Bremer does concede that they were hijacked by Ahmad Chalabi, shady operator and early administration point man, who used the edict to strip tens of thousands of civil servants and teachers from their jobs. This was disastrous, as one high-level military official has explained, because each of those fired officials supported a family of 10 or so, making the magnitude of the problem enormous.

Despite mixed assessments of Bremer’s actions, many agree that his effort to create the Transitional Administrative Law, the first Iraqi constitution, was a triumph against all odds. When he arrived in Iraq, many in the administration, including Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, were pushing to recognize Chalabi and his group of exiles as the government of Iraq. The idea was to hand over power as quickly as possible and begin a triumphal exit. As appealing as this notion was to neocons within the administration, Bremer resisted, pointing out that these so-called leaders “couldn’t organize a parade, let alone run the country.”

The story of Bremer’s efforts to create a legitimate ruling body and produce a provisional constitution acceptable to all parties is a compelling, tragic and at times darkly comic read. Even as Iraqi leaders and friends like U.N. head Sergio Vieira de Mello died in insurgent attacks and Bremer himself survived one assassination attempt (as well as a supposed plot by his Green Zone barber to “kill me when I got a haircut”), he outmaneuvered administration officials, French diplomats at the U.N., Shia holy man Ali Husseini Sistani and tribal leaders like the one who promised, “If ... we should ever decide to betray you, I pledge my word that we will give you a month’s notice.” By the time Bremer left the country, the constitution he fought for had been written and power handed over to a nascent body of somewhat representative Iraqis.

“My Year in Iraq” is rife with behind-the-scenes machinations at the highest levels of the administration, especially after the wheels fell off their dream of early victory. Bremer remains staunchly loyal to President Bush (indeed, it seems at times that only he, the president and perhaps Condoleezza Rice are consistently clear-headed and forthright), and yet his accounts of meetings with the president often have a perhaps unintended comic edge. In his first briefing with Bush in the Middle East, which took place in a limousine as they rode to a summit in Aqaba, Bremer answered the president’s request for an update with what sounds like a high school social studies class book report. “I’m optimistic for two reasons, Mr. President,” he enthuses. “First, Iraq has excellent resources, plenty of water, and it’s fertile, besides the huge oil reserves. And, the Iraqis are energetic and resourceful folks.” Bush later responded with a backslap and what would become a catchphrase: “Pace yourself, Jerry.” If Bremer is to be believed, the nation’s most serious military adventure in generations seems to be managed at the top level with all the gravity of a fraternity house charity event.

It is premature for the triumphal tone Bremer often adopts, but his commitment to the cause of Iraqi democracy seems genuine, even moving. What undermines “My Year in Iraq” and other books like it is the perception of eagerness to cash in and pay off grudges. Why not publish these conclusions in a format that doesn’t smack so much of self-promotion -- say, a journal like Foreign Affairs -- rather than a volume filled with more than two dozen photos of the author trotting around Iraq like a factotum action hero, dressed in a blazer and combat boots?

Nevertheless, Bremer’s effort reveals the soul of administration wrestling with neo-empire building. Perhaps his most poignant comment comes in a note to his wife regarding his view that both administration hawks and generals on the ground were too eager to pull out and abandon the Iraqis: “If America cannot stand the heat after less than six months, we are going to have a very untidy century.”

Evan Wright is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for his reporting from the Middle East. He is the author of “Generation Kill,” a book about Marines in Iraq.