The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

72 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 6 Set Up for Failure My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope L. Paul Bremer III, with Malcolm McConnell, Simon & Schuster, 2006, $27.00, hardcover, 417 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVE D UNFORD Ambassador L. Paul (“Jerry”) Bremer has taken a lot of heat for what has gone wrong in Iraq. While My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope will not absolve him, it does suggest that if our intervention proves to be the dis- aster many fear, much of the blame should go to the Bush administra- tion’s mistakes and misjudgments prior to his appointment. Conversely, should Iraq somehow emerge as a success, Jerry Bremer will deserve some of the credit. He got off to a rocky start when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003. During his first substantive meeting with the senior civilian advisers (I was one) who had come in with retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner the month before, he floated the idea of “shooting looters.” When this comment inevitably leaked, the U.S. administration and the mili- tary quickly distanced themselves from it — apparently convincing Bremer that we were all Garner loy- alists who couldn’t be trusted. Ironically, most of us hungered for strong civilian leadership and very much wanted Bremer to succeed. So his unwillingness to reach out for advice from those of us with some experience on the ground in Iraq was a missed opportunity Bremer staunchly defends his controversial debaathification decree, pointing out that it applied to just 1 percent of Baath Party members. Unfortunately, most of them were heads of large families and networks, greatly increasing its impact. The order did not create the insurgency, but did give it the legs it has today. Too late, Bremer realized that “we’re in a race.” From the day Coalition forces took Baghdad, time was not on our side. Iraqis were mak- ing decisions about whether or not it made sense to work with us. So our top priority should have been to get Iraqi institutions up and running and put people back to work, with help from the United Nations and other countries. But instead of focusing on security, which he left largely to the military, and reconstruction, which was hostage to the deteriorating secu- rity situation, Bremer spent much of his time haggling with his hand-picked Governing Council over the details of the political process. I once assumed Bremer had not given senior Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani enough atten- tion. But after reading this memoir, I suspect the reverse is true. I also won- der if our scrupulous attempt to bal- ance the number of Sunnis, Shi’a and Kurds contributed to the dominance of ethnic and sectarian politics we now find in Iraq. Making matters worse, Bremer’s relationship with Lt. Gen. Rick Sanchez, commander of Coalition forces, was clearly strained, while Donald Rumsfeld and the civilians in the Pentagon ignored his concerns about troop levels, persisted in naïve attempts to transfer power to Ahmad Chalabi and an unrepresentative group of exiles, and resisted Bremer’s push for the arrest of renegade Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Other critical issues get surprising- ly little of the author’s attention. He records that for weeks the CPA had no phones, but never explains why. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal elicits a few paragraphs but embar- rassingly little introspection. And the State Department’s Future of Iraq project is dismissed in a couple of sen- tences. This book is an important compo- nent of the history of this war, though critics will find it self-serving. But there should be no doubt that Jerry Bremer took on one of the toughest tasks ever given to a U.S. diplomat and handled it with skill, discipline and grace — notwithstanding the presi- dent’s negative reaction when Bremer recommended he look to the State Department for his replacement. B OOKS Jerry Bremer took on one of the toughest tasks ever given to a U.S. diplomat and handled it with skill, discipline and grace. u