“It is my responsibility … to help the Iraqi people to turn Iraq into a stable, safe, peaceful and prosperous country. I take it seriously.”
Thus spake Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer on April 15 of 2003. He has since griped that he wasn’t given the tools necessary to fulfill his responsibility, specifically that the US didn’t go in with enough troops. He didn’t mention the handicap of administering an armed occupation with a staff consisting in large part of baby-faced Republican sycophants.
Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran generated a lot of excitement with his September 17 story detailing the cronyism afflicting the CPA, but the outlines of the situation were detailed first by his colleague Ariana Eunjung Cha in a May 23 2004 story and expanded upon almost exactly two years ago by former CPA official Peter Galbraith in a New York Review of Books essay which I wrote about here.
The original 2004 Washington Post story attracted almost no attention; Galbraith’s NYRB essay fared even less well. Things in Iraq hadn’t gone completely south at that time, or at least not so overtly as now, and no one wanted to hear what Cha or Galbraith had to say; the NYRB was one of the few consistently reliable institutional sources of competent Iraq analysis and commentary available then. Cha’s story mentioned a detail that stayed with Galbraith as he wrote: a trio of CPA employees couldn’t figure out exactly why they were hired, but finally “realized that the one thing they had in common was that they had applied for jobs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which had kept their resumes on file.”
That’s pretty much all you need to know about the CPA: it was staffed by GOP loyalists who couldn’t get internships at the Heritage Foundation.
Bremer’s first address to the people of Iraq included a set of bullet points about progress already made and promises that the new regime would be the polar opposite of Saddam’s.
Police are coming back to work, and we’re starting to train them.. In the old days, they received their orders from on high. In the new Iraq, they will be answerable to the Iraqi people. And those who were on high, the Ba’athists who used their power to repress the Iraqi people, will be removed from office. The Coalition Provisional Authority banned the Ba’ath Party on April 16th.Shortly, I will issue a further order on measures to extirpate Ba’athists and Ba’athism from Iraq forever.
We have and will aggressively seek to identify these people, and remove them from office. We have hunted down and will continue to deal with those members of the old regime who are sabotaging the country and the coalition’s efforts. We will ensure that representations of Saddam Hussein and other Ba’athist symbols are removed systematically from public display. And we will work with the Iraqis to set up a process of bringing Ba’athist officials to justice for their past crimes. But we must do more than deal with the past. We will provide the conditions for Iraqis to govern themselves in the future. To that end, the Coalition Provisional Authority will work with responsible Iraqis to begin the process of establishing a government representative of all the Iraqi people.
Those remain, of course, the stated goals of the US 42 months down the road. But enough of dwelling in the past: let’s move on to what we might call The Rumsfeld Rebellion.
Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front.There are people who have announced that Iraq is the center of the war on terror and the main battle in that war, and they’re determined to incite sectarian violence and they’re trying to do it.
People have speculated that the administration are perfectly happy to perpetuate a failed Iraqi state following the initial failure to create a 51st US state there, but this is the first time a top administration official has confirmed that speculation and rebelled against the policy.
You go, Don.
Hah! Nice catch.