|
What we got right in Iraq
14.5.2007
By L. Paul Bremer
|
|
|
|
May 14, 2007
Once conventional wisdom congeals, even facts can't
shake it loose. These days, everyone "knows" that
the Coalition Provisional Authority made two
disastrous decisions at the beginning of the U.S.
occupation of Iraq: to vengefully drive members of
the Baath Party from public life and to recklessly
disband the Iraqi army. The most recent example is
former CIA chief George J. Tenet, whose new memoir
pillories me for those decisions (even though I
don't recall his ever objecting to either call
during our numerous conversations in my 14 months
leading the CPA). Similar charges are
unquestioningly repeated in books and articles.
Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our
current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these
two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis,
created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and
sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The
conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's
also dead wrong.
Like most Americans, I am disappointed by the
difficulties the nation has encountered after our
quick 2003 victory over Saddam Hussein. But the
U.S.-led coalition was absolutely right to strip
away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny.
Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's,
which controlled the German people with two main
instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security
services. We had no choice but to rid Iraq of the
country's equivalent organizations to give it any
chance at a brighter future.
Here's how the decisions were made. Gen. Tommy R.
Franks, the head of the military's U.S. Central
Command, outlawed the Baath Party on April 16, 2003.
The day before I left for Iraq in May,
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith presented
me with a draft law that would purge top Baathists
from the Iraqi government and told me that he
planned to issue it immediately. Recognizing how
important this step was, I asked Feith to hold off,
among other reasons, so I could discuss it with
Iraqi leaders and CPA advisers. A week later, after
careful consultation, I issued this "de-Baathification"
decree, as drafted by the Pentagon.
Our goal was to rid the Iraqi government of the
small group of true believers at the top of the
party, not to harass rank- and-file Sunnis. We were
following in the footsteps of Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower in postwar Germany. Like the Nazi Party,
the Baath Party ran all aspects of Iraqi life. Every
Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell. Baathists
recruited children to spy on their parents, just as
the Nazis had. Hussein even required members of his
dreaded intelligence services to read "Mein Kampf."
Although Hussein and his cronies had been in power
three times as long as Hitler had, the CPA decree
was much less far-reaching than Eisenhower's de-Nazification
law, which affected all but the lowest-ranking
former Nazis. By contrast, our Iraqi law affected
only about 1 percent of Baath Party members. We knew
that many had joined out of opportunism or fear, and
they weren't our targets.
Eisenhower had barred Nazis not just from holding
government jobs but "from positions of importance in
quasi-public and private enterprises." The Iraqi law
merely prohibited these top party officials from
holding government positions, leaving them free to
find jobs elsewhere -- even outside Iraq (provided
they were not facing criminal charges). Finally, the
de-Baathification decree let us make exceptions, and
scores of Baathists remained in their posts.
Our critics (usually people who have never visited
Iraq) often allege that the de-Baathification
decision left Iraqi ministries without effective
leadership. Not so. Virtually all the old Baathist
ministers had fled before the decree was issued. But
we were generally impressed with the senior civil
servants left running the ministries, who in turn
were delighted to be free of the party hacks who had
long overseen them. The net result: We stripped away
the tyrant's ardent backers but gave responsible
Sunnis a chance to join in building a new Iraq.
The decree was not only judicious but also popular.
Four days after I issued it, Hamid Bayati, a leading
Shiite politician, told us that the Shiites were
"jubilant" because they had feared that the United
States planned to leave unrepentant Baathists in
senior government and security positions -- what he
called "Saddamism without Saddam." Opinion polls
during the occupation period repeatedly showed that
an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, including many
Sunnis, supported de-Baathification.
We then turned over the implementation of this
carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians. I
was wrong here. The Iraqi leaders, many of them
resentful of the old Sunni regime, broadened the
decree's impact far beyond our original design. That
led to such unintended results as the firing of
several thousand teachers for being Baath Party
members. We eventually fixed those excesses, but I
should have made implementation the job of a
judicial body, not a political one.
Still, the underlying policy of removing top Baath
officials from government was right and necessary.
This decision is still supported by most Iraqis;
witness the difficulties that Iraq's elected
government has had in making even modest revisions
to the decree.
The war's critics have also comprehensively
misunderstood the "disbanding" of Hussein's army,
arguing that we kicked away a vital pillar that kept
the country stable and created a pool of unemployed,
angry men ripe for rebellion. But this fails to
reckon with the true nature of Hussein's killing
machine and the situation on the ground.
It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have
to remind people of the old army's reign of terror.
In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against
Iraq's minority Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands
of innocent civilians and more than 5,000 people in
a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish
town of Halabja. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein,
whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of
men, women and children and threw their corpses into
mass graves. It's no wonder that Shiites and Kurds,
who together make up more than 80 percent of Iraq's
population, hated Hussein's military.
Moreover, any thought of using the old army was
undercut by conditions on the ground. Before the
2003 war, the army had consisted of about 315,000
miserable draftees, almost all Shiite, serving under
a largely Sunni officer corps of about 80,000. The
Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and
abused by their Sunni officers. When the draftees
saw which way the war was going, they deserted and,
like their officers, went back home. But before the
soldiers left, they looted the army's bases right
down to the foundations.
So by the time I arrived in Iraq, there was no Iraqi
army to disband. Some in the U.S. military and the
CIA's Baghdad station suggested that we try to
recall Hussein's army. We refused, for overwhelming
practical, political and military reasons.
For starters, the draftees were hardly going to
return voluntarily to the army they so loathed; we
would have had to send U.S. troops into Shiite
villages to force them back at gunpoint. And even if
we could have assembled a few all-Sunni units, the
looting would have meant they'd have no gear or
bases.
Moreover, the political consequences of recalling
the army would have been catastrophic. Kurdish
leaders made it clear to me that recalling
Hussein-era forces would make their region secede,
which would have triggered a civil war and tempted
Turkey and Iran to invade Iraq to prevent the
establishment of an independent Kurdistan. Many
Shiite leaders who were cooperating with the
U.S.-led forces would have taken up arms against us
if we'd called back the perpetrators of the southern
killing fields of 1991.
Finally, neither the U.S.-led coalition nor the
Iraqis could have relied on the allegiance of a
recalled army. This lesson was driven home a year
later, when the Marines unilaterally recalled a
single brigade of Hussein's former army, without
consulting with the Iraqi government or the CPA.
This "Fallujah Brigade" quickly proved disloyal and
had to be disbanded. Moreover, the Marines' action
so rattled the Shiites and Kurds that it very nearly
derailed the political process of returning
sovereignty over the country to the Iraqi people --
further proof of the extreme danger of relying on
Hussein's old army.
So, after full coordination within the U.S.
government, including the military, I issued an
order to build a new, all-volunteer army. Any member
of the former army up to the rank of colonel was
welcome to apply. By the time I left Iraq, more than
80 percent of the enlisted men and virtually all of
the noncommissioned officers and officers in the new
army were from the old army, as are most of the top
officers today. We also started paying pensions to
officers from the old army who could not join the
new one -- stipends that the Iraqi government is
still paying.
I'll admit that I've grown weary of being a punching
bag over these decisions -- particularly from
critics who've never spent time in Iraq, don't
understand its complexities and can't explain what
we should have done differently. These two sensible
and moral calls did not create today's insurgency.
Intelligence material we discovered after the war
began showed that Hussein's security forces had long
planned to wage such a revolt.
No doubt some members of the Baath Party and the old
army have joined the insurgency. But they are not
fighting because they weren't given a chance to earn
a living. They're fighting because they want to
topple a democratically elected government and
reestablish a Baathist dictatorship. The true
responsibility for today's bloodshed rests with
these people and their al-Qaeda collaborators.
washingtonpost com
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 