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TIME: In the political area, did having a June 30 deadline affect the way you had to deal with Moqtada al-Sadr?
BREMER:No.
TIME: Looking back, would you have done some different, to avoid a showdown with the Mahdi Army, or was that always going to happen?
BREMER:Well, I think at some point, either we or the interim government was going to have to face the issue that you had a political figure who was wanted for murder. People forget that this was an Iraqi court investigation led by Iraqis; it was an Iraqi investigating judge who requested the arrest warrant; it was an Iraqi judge who gave the arrest warrant. It wasn't us. Sooner or later, if you believe in the rule of law, you have to have some consequence to that. (Sadr) would have to sooner or later face justice. When was that going to happen? That question was going to have to be faced at some point. Of course, it still has not been faced. He's still subject to the arrest warrant.
TIME: Do you think the June 30 deadline — the fact that you only had seven months to prepare — allowed you time to to create the Iraqi security apparatus you would have liked?
BREMER:I don't think anyone, starting with the Iraqis, is satisfied that we yet have adequate Iraqi security. The UN resolution and the letter from the Prime Minister clearly recognized that there was going to be a period of time before Iraqi forces are going to be able to take full responsibility for security. But that's a matter of months and months and months. It would not have made a difference if we have seven or nine months. This is a matter of a year, a year-and-a-half ? I don't know how long it's going to take, but it's going to take some time.
TIME: Let's look at your "de-Baathification" policy. There seems to have been a rollback on that in recent months. Was that a function of having a short deadline, and needing to speed up the transition?
BREMER:No that was always going to be the case. If you go back and see what I said on May 17, when I signed the order, a year ago, I said very clearly that it was our intention to pass this responsibility to Iraqis as soon as we could. No outside group of people was going to be able to make the fine—and they are very fine—judgments about people, on a case-by-case basis. I said at the time that I expected we would make mistakes, by keeping people in power who should be thrown out, and by throwing people out who should be kept in. I said it many times since.
We all along have maintained that we have not changed two principles. Number one, that there's no place in the new Iraq for the Baath Party ideology. And number two, that there's no place in the government for Baath Party members who are criminals. We defined that as the top layers of the Party, estimated to be 25-30,000 people. Baath Party membership at liberation was 2 million. So the de-Baathification order never affected more than about 1 percent of the people in the Baath Party. Just 1 percent.
Now what happened was, when the Governing Council de-Baathification committee took over, in the end of the year, it became politicized, and there were interpretations going well beyond what we had said the de-Baathification policy would be — people being thrown summarily out of work, particularly teachers, several thousand teachers and university professors. And it was to fix that particular point that we adjusted how those were handled in early April. That was only after I had spent two months trying to get the de-Baathification committee to conform to our original policy.
TIME: So was there a communication failure there? Because right from the time you announced the de-Baathification policy, many Iraqis thought their careers would be in peril because they had been forced to join the party.
BREMER:We were consistent. I must have spoken publicly about it every couple of weeks, beginning from May all the way through. I encouraged the Governing Council to speak to that effect; they did not do as good a job as they might have done. And in fact, of course, most of the Baath Party members were not affected. If there were 11,000 or 12,000 teachers who were affected badly because of the implementation by the Council, even that is a small percentage of the 2 million people who were members of the Party. And I must tell you one other thing. For all of the back and forth on this issue, the de-Baathification decree I signed is still the single most popular thing I did in this administration.
TIME: How do you measure that?
BREMER:Just by what I hear. I've talked to thousands of Iraqis over the year, and they are certainly not hesitant to tell me about things they disagree with me. It's not as if they all agree. That's the impression I get by members of political parties, who themselves represent more people. The alternative to not de-Baathifying at the time, I think would have led to an enormous amount of violence. A lot of people would have gotten killed. I think we save a lot of lives. I would offer in evidence simply what happened in comparable circumstances in Europe at the end of (World War II) when tens of thousands of people were killed in revenge killings. We had very little of that here.