The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

urgency of our mission,” he wrote, “yet we relied on the military for support. For example, the military commander set rules for transporta- tion: we initially needed a lead military car, followed by the car with civilians and a military vehicle bringing up the rear. But there weren’t enough vehicles. One day we had 31 scheduled missions and only nine convoys, so 22 missions were scrubbed.” More substantively, he added that “no lessons seem to have taken hold from the recent nation-building efforts in Bosnia or Kosovo, so we in ORHA felt as though we were reinventing the wheel.” And doing so under virtually impossible constraints. … The lack of respect for the civilian officials in ORHA was a source of astonishment to Lt. Col. Rutter. “I was amazed by what I saw,” he says. “There would be a meet- ing called by Amb. Bodine” — the official on Garner’s staff responsible for Baghdad — “and none of the senior officers would show up. I remember thinking, this isn’t right, and also thinking that if it had been a commander who had called the meeting, they would have shown up all right.” Carney attributes some of the blame for ORHA’s impotence to the fact that it set up shop in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace, where “nobody knew where anyone was, and, worse, almost no one really knew what was going on outside the palace.” … Larry Hollingworth, a former British colonel and relief special- ist who has worked in Sarajevo and Chechnya and who briefly served with ORHA right after Baghdad fell, says that “at the U.S. military’s insistence, we traveled out from our fortified headquarters in Saddam’s old Republican Palace in armored vehicles, wearing helmets and flak jackets, trying to convince Iraqis that peace was at hand, and that they were safe. It was ridiculous.”… As the spring wore on, administration officials contin- ued to insist publicly that nothing was going seriously wrong in Iraq. But the pressure to do something became too strong to resist. Claiming that it had been a change that had been foreseen all along (though it had not been publicly announced and was news to Garner’s staff), President Bush replaced Garner in May with L. Paul [“Jerry”] Bremer. Glossing over the fact that Bremer had no experience in postwar reconstruc- tion or nation-building, the Pentagon presented Bremer as a good adminis- trator — something, or so Defense Department officials implied on background, Garner was not. Bremer’s first major act was not auspicious. Garner had resisted the kind of complete de-Ba’thification of Iraqi society that Ahmad Chalabi and some of his allies in Washington had favored. In particular, he had resisted calls to complete- ly disband the Iraqi Army. Instead, he had tried only to fire Ba’thists and senior military officers against whom real charges of complicity in the regime’s crimes could be demonstrated and to use most members of the Iraqi Army as labor battalions for reconstruction projects. Bremer, however, took the opposite approach. On May 15, he announced the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, some 400,000 strong, and the lustration of 50,000 members of the Ba’th Party. As one U.S. official remarked to me privately, “That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.” The decision—which many sources say was made not by Bremer but in the White House — was disastrous. In a country like Iraq, where the average family size is six, firing 450,000 people amounts to leaving 2,700,000 peo- ple without incomes; in other words, more than 10 per- cent of Iraq’s 23 million people. The order produced such bad feeling on the streets of Baghdad that salaries are being reinstated for all soldiers. It is a slow and com- plicated process, however, and there have been demon- strations by fired military officers in Iraq over the course of the summer and into the fall. Ignoring the Shiites It should have been clear from the start that the suc- cess or failure of the American project in postwar Iraq depended not just on the temporary acquiescence of Iraq’s Shiite majority but also on its support — or at least its tacit acceptance of a prolonged American presence. Before the war, the Pentagon’s planners apparently believed that this would not be a great problem. The Shiite tradition in Iraq, they argued, was nowhere near as radical as it was in neighboring Iran. The planners also seem to have assumed that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shiites would welcome American F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 But the Shiites soon demonstrated that they were interested in political as well as religious autonomy.