By PHK
(second of two parts; link to part one)
Bremer had been sent in to Iraq to impose American fixes, or perhaps more accurately American band-aids over a gushing wound. The W administration was still opposed to calling the insurgency an insurgency, adamant on keeping US troop levels down in an election year and unwilling to admit that administration predictions about the cost and consequences of the invasion had been so wrong. I’m not sure a tourniquet would have worked. In any event, it was not there to try.
Bremer spoke no Arabic and he would have had no time to learn any beyond a very few perfunctory greetings- if that. His foreign languages are French, Dutch and Norwegian. The intricate mosaic that is the Arab Middle East was simply not in his blood, his mindset, his linguistic skills – or within his competency.
This handsome, upper crust, elite New England prep school product, Yale alum, Harvard Business School grad, consummate State Department staffer was the type of person most at home in a glitzy European capital or a Georgetown drawing room but not running an operation as Herculean and as thankless a task as Baghdad.
Despite the desert boots he donned for his months in Baghdad, Bremer - like far too many in the W administration’s “gang who can’t shoot straight” to whom he catered – seems never to have served in the U.S. military even when many in his generation learned the hard lessons of a determined insurgency through real life experience in the insect infested jungles of Southeast Asia.
Bremer never even served as a diplomat in U.S. Missions in Saigon, Cambodia’s Phnom Penh or Laos’ sleepy Vientiane - countries where full-blown communist insurgencies raged and changed our embassies’ ways of thinking and operating. He was never posted to Thailand where a communist insurgency had taken root in the country’s impoverished north. Yet, Bremer certainly would have had the opportunity had he so chosen. Many of his other State Department colleagues did at the time.
In sum, Bremer may have put a toe in the desert sand after hitting the ground in Iraq, but he had no first hand experience with insurgency upon which to draw through involvement in previous conflicts elsewhere.
Maybe if he had, Bremer’s view of Iraq, the increasingly unpopular U.S. occupation and the importance of understanding – and doing something - about Iraqi needs and wants might have been different.
The W administration’s blame game: all Saddam’s fault
I guess I was most surprised to hear Bremer so confidently blame Saddam Hussein and the Baathist Party for everything that ailed Iraq and Iraqis prior to March 2003.
Did it ever occur to Bremer that the decade-plus US-led UN sanctions regime and the precipitous world wide decline in oil and gas prices during the 1980s and 1990s which helped sink the Soviet Union might also help explain why Iraq’s economy, health care services and longevity had hit the skids well before invasion time? There were far more reasons than solely the actions of a corrupt, repressive dictator that caused that economy to go bottoms up.
Several years ago I heard Margaret Tutwiler during her brief tenure as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs paint the world in black or white. She told us her's was a “with us or against us” Manichean universe with no complexity, no shades of gray.
W, too, obviously suffers from the same judgmental flaw. This sure simplifies decision-making and decision-explaining; on the other hand, it often leads down a one-way street with traffic speeding in the opposite direction and a resultant disaster for all involved.
Bremer’s presentation in Albuquerque - like Tutwiler’s earlier one in Washington - reeked with this Manichean “with us or against us” vision. Not only was it all Saddam Hussein’s fault for the sorry state of pre-2003 Iraq, but Saddam Hussein was, in a nutshell, a simplistic tyrannical dictator who – according to Bremer - took his cues from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
OK, true in part. Saddam certainly had read Hitler. But wasn’t the Baathist Party at least partially modeled on Stalinism and the Soviet brand of communism? I thought I learned somewhere that Saddam was, in fact, well versed in Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedung, all radical thinkers, leaders or both who led the way in ruining countries by imposing misguided statist economic policies and instigating police rule based on friend informing on friend, with plenty of torture opportunities tossed in.
Further, I was under the impression that Saddam had drawn his blueprint for today’s Sunni insurgency in Iraq from China's Chairman Mao and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh who developed an Asian model for the weak to fight against the strong. Maybe I'm wrong but I thought I had read that Saddam followed, and now his Sunni followers follow carefully this Asian approach in the U.S. invasion’s aftermath.
Administration critic or cheerleader?
Bremer clearly had his differences with the administration’s conduct of the occupation of Iraq when he was pro-consul there, but to hear him talk now, he sounds like the administration’s lead cheerleader. How? Just a couple of examples.
• Bremer described the Iraqi insurgency as composed of two, anti-US, anti-democracy groups: 1) Saddam loyalists; and 2) Al Qaeda. The good news, said Bremer, is that recent reports suggest there are fights between the two. I don’t dispute his observation that these two Sunni groups are both tactical allies and enemies. But I am going to bet that given this country’s complex tribal, religious and ethnic social fabric, the reality is far murkier. What about long standing problems, for instance, with Moktada al Sadr and his Madhi Army?
When I asked Bremer’s assessment of al Sadr, Bremer characterized him as a dangerous young Shiite cleric with a loyalist following and a family pedigree leading back to the prophet Mohammed but lacking in clerical training. True. But don’t al Sadr’s political pretensions and militarized acolytes represent yet another piece of the entangled insurgent mosaic that, in al Sadr’s case, has tentacles stretching into Iran?
• And then what about the enemies our over-zealous culturally insensitive, linguistically-deprived military have made because U.S. troops are too often unable to distinguish between friend and foe?
Bremer understands well the counterproductive reaction that resulted from the handling of Iraqi detainees by the U.S. military, but what about those midnight raids on people’s homes which Packer, Anthony Shadid and other journalists have chronicled? They’re not the only ones to describe the problem: a friend who visited Iraq in 2003 was told then by Iraqis about the raids – and how counter-productive the batter-down-the-door, drag-families-out-in-their-nightclothes and strip-search the men were to “winning hearts and minds” for the U.S. presence. Bremer failed to address these raids or their consequences either in his prepared talk here or in the question period that followed.
Holding suspects indefinitely with little or no proof is, I agree with Bremer who chose instead to focus on this problem in his answer to my question, a terrible policy, but barging into their homes at the dead of night before shackling them and toting them away doesn’t win friends either.
“Kiss and tell” NOT
Ultimately, though, Bremer’s speech here was far from “kiss and tell.” Although Bremer described some differences and frustrations with the military during his time in Iraq (Packer characterizes Bremer’s relationship with General Sanchez as poisonous), for the most part Bremer’s is a justification for the decisions he made and a plea for support for the administration’s current policies. I sympathize with the former. I find the latter, however, saddeningly reprehensible.
Kow-towing to the current W Administration party line, Bremer described Iraq as the front-line state against terrorism. He told us that Americans need to be patient and “stay the course” and if this happens, Iraqi democracy will ultimately triumph and the terrorists will be doomed to history’s trash heap.
Things, Bremer also informed those of us assembled in the Sheraton Uptown Ballroom that evening, are looking up. Iraqis, he said, foremost want a stable democratic government. And he added for good measure, last fall’s elections in the country are producing a trickle around effect in the region. This, he told us, is reflected in last year’s Saudi municipal elections, elections in Qatar, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and Qaddafi’s born-again, see-the-light turnaround from foe to friend in Libya. Sorry, but this upbeat assessment sounds just like it came from – well – current State Department press guidance.
This is not, however, how many reporters who have been there and seen the situation tell it. But then a reporter’s vantage point is far from that of a cosseted Viceroy living in a castle on a fortress Emerald Isle.
Polls I’ve read over the past several months report that Iraqis want security, electricity and the foreign occupiers out. That means us. The polls also say that Iraqis are optimistic about a brighter future. But let’s face it, if the Financial Times has it right, the electricity situation is worse now than before the 2003 invasion. The economy remains a disaster and the projected oil revenues to pay for getting Iraq back on its feet have not been forthcoming. Insurgents have seen to that.
Meanwhile, democracy in Iraq has brought to the fore poisonous religious-ethnic rifts that have become more pronounced, not less, providing more tinder to fuel the insurgency’s bonfire.
Flacking for W?
As for the election “trickle- around” effect? Bremer seems to have forgotten that the Brits had quietly worked on Qaddafi for several years before his seemingly sudden turn to the “side of the angels.” So credit should go to where it’s due: to the British government and its professional foreign office. Thus, it’s far from likely that Qaddafi’s apparently sudden turn for the better relates to elections in Iraq. These events are simply separate.
What about election fever spreading throughout the Middle East as Bremer claims – cheerleading on behalf of current administration policy? Oh, really?
How convenient it must be to forget that the Egyptian government that rules the most important country in the Arab world - has just announced a postponement of elections for two years – probably because President Hosni Mubarak knows full well that the Egyptian Brotherhood would win even bigger next time around. Then there’s the recent Hamas victory in Palestine – an electoral victory the W administration threatens to overturn in concert with the Israelis.
That Bremer toed W’s party line is no surprise. He would have needed USG clearance of the book’s text before publishing – and the same people who brought us the fiasco in Iraq still wield a censor’s pen. But I was surprised and disappointed to hear yet another apologia for an administration policy gone awry.
In the end, I had hoped for more from Bremer’s presentation: more realism and demonstration of a much greater sophisticated understanding of the socio-cultural-religious threads that underpin Iraq today. I had wanted to come away with an assessment different from the reviews I’d read – or at least with a feeling that there’s far more to this man than portrayed in the media. Finally, I had hoped to have been impressed enough to buy an autographed copy of his book. All said and done, this didn’t happen.