Quotes of the Day
Paul Bremer would be the first to tell you that he has not had much time since he arrived in Baghdad just over a year ago to think about how he will go out. The proud finisher of 20 marathons, Bremer was a distance runner thrown into a sprint, a mad 13-month dash to try to create a new government and something approaching stability out of the fractious void that Iraq became in the wake of the coalition overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003. If the U.S. occupation of Iraq has proved that Secretary of State Colin Powell was right to remind President Bush before the war that if the U.S. broke Iraq, the U.S. would own it, then Bremer was the guy who got handed the broom. He was tasked with sweeping up the mess, responsible for everything from making sure the electricity was on, to putting together a new central bank, to coming up with a workable political system in a country where politics had, for the past 24 years, come at the end of the barrel of a gun. "I probably made several hundred decisions a day," he told TIME, "and I surely can't be getting them all right.''
Now he is in his last days, and outwardly at least he leaves as he arrived: cool, calm and collected. Meticulous in dress, he is articulate, strong willed, tireless in his work. Even his harshest critics give Paul Bremer all that. But next week, when he vacates his office at Baghdad's Republican Palace, from which he has essentially run Iraq, Bremer will depart with a diminished reputation. Blame for the failures of the occupation can be spread across the whole spectrum of the U.S. military and political leadership — from the Pentagon planners who ignored warnings of the chaos that would follow "liberation" to the military commanders who tolerated the climate of brutality at the Abu Ghraib prison. But Bremer also comes in for his fair share. In interviews with TIME, a range of U.S., British and Iraqi officials said Bremer's tenure yielded some important achievements but was also plagued by misjudgment, insensitivity and stubbornness in the face of spiraling unrest and steadily deteriorating Iraqi support for the occupation. Indeed, it's safe to say that Bremer would never have imagined that he would be departing amid such violence and chaos.
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With the handover of power set for June 30, the troubles plaguing the U.S. venture in Iraq remain on harrowing display. In Baghdad, where Bremer's green zone headquarters sit cordoned off and isolated from the rest of the city ("like Xanadu," says a British official), a suicide bombing on Thursday killed 35 Iraqis and wounded at least 138. In all, car bombs killed nearly 90 throughout Iraq last week. For some, images of the continuing carnage, the failure to find illicit weapons and now the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Iraq did not aid al-Qaeda's attack on America serve to undermine the Bush Administration's efforts to herald the establishment of a new Iraqi government as a sign that the occupation has been worth the sacrifice.
And yet, even as he prepares to exit, Bremer continues to stick to the script. "If you go back and look at what has been accomplished, I would say that we have [done] almost everything we set out to accomplish at liberation," he told TIME. "[President Bush and Prime Minister Blair] had a vision of an Iraq that was stable, pluralistic, democratic, at peace with itself — and we have accomplished most of that. There are still problems with security, of course, and I expect there will continue to be problems with security."
Bremer prides himself on the cool, clinical approach he brings to managing the crises that have erupted on his watch. But his tendency to downplay the violence — and Iraqi frustration at the lack of progress toward stopping it — has made him increasingly irrelevant to the people he presides over. Iraqis generally seem to view Bremer as an aloof, remote figure. "He doesn't know us, and he doesn't want to know us,'' says Baghdad schoolteacher Kamel al-Hasni. Bremer says there is little he could have done to alter that perception and he doesn't particularly care about it either. "I just do the best I can, and the chips will fall as they may," he says. "I didn't come here to be loved. I came here to do a job."
The facts on the ground in Iraq have changed so much that it's easy to forget that it wasn't always so dire. When Bremer arrived, in May 2003, the deadly insurgency inside Iraq had yet to begin in earnest. But chaos was mounting, as internecine violence surged, citizens began settling scores and looters took everything that wasn't bolted down. Bremer had all of 10 days' notice that the Administration wanted him to take over as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), and it showed. A former adviser recalls being stunned when at an early-morning meeting the new CPA chief asked the aide to show him on a map the location of Kurdistan — which the U.S. had protected as part of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq for more than a decade.
Even so, Bremer quickly assumed an almost presidential air, appearing in public in jacket and tie despite the sweltering heat. Bremer did make impromptu visits to shops and restaurants — efforts to show that some sense of normalcy was returning. But by late last summer, the violence against both coalition targets and Iraqis had begun, and Bremer has rarely been out of his security bubble since. A former top adviser who briefed Bremer every day says Bremer was in constant contact with his bosses at the Pentagon, talking daily with Washington officials like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. "I was never in a meeting when I saw Bremer make a decision with senior aides. He'd come out of his phone calls, and he'd say, 'Here's what we're going to do.'" Bremer's ability to navigate the Administration's internal divisions made him an instant star. According to the former adviser, the White House was grooming Bremer to become Secretary of State in a second Bush term.
But just after Bremer took over, he issued a series of orders that had the effect of fueling the insurgency that has blackened his entire tenure. Over the course of just three days in mid-May, he ordered a deep purge of Baath Party members from their jobs in government ministries, schools and universities. He then followed with an order to disband completely the Iraqi military. The results were disastrous. "All of a sudden we had about 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists that had gone underground," says a top U.S. official in Baghdad at the time. "We had about 200,000 still armed soldiers that had gone underground. And we had no Iraqi face to tell the Iraqi people what was happening. Within a couple of weeks, the insurgency began to rise, and it kept rising through the summer and into the fall."
Senior officials at the coalition authority in Baghdad say they tried to talk Bremer out of these decisions. Recalls one: "We said, 'Let's get Rumsfeld on the phone to soften it up a little bit.' But Bremer said, 'No, I'm issuing this today.' It went absolutely too deep, and he was told that, but he wouldn't change." (Rumsfeld said in an interview with TIME late last year that he took responsibility for disbanding the army, meaning that Bremer was just carrying out orders.) A former senior official in the CPA confronted Bremer about the order to disband the army. "What the hell are you doing this for?" the official asked. "We don't need them," he recalls Bremer saying of Iraqi soldiers. A former top adviser says, "We had things running good on Wednesday, and by Saturday we had 400,000 new enemies. I don't know if you can lay all this at Bremer's feet, but you can lay enough of it there to make it count."
It was only after weeks of angry protests by destitute Iraqi troops that the Americans agreed to pay former soldiers up to $150 a month. Last April, Bremer finally reversed the de-Baathification order, saying it had been "poorly implemented." Even to those who worked closely with Bremer and admire his diligence, his cocksure stubbornness was frustrating. "[He] takes in alternative views," says Bremer's British counterpart, Jeremy Greenstock, who worked in the green zone, "but he doesn't like changing his decisions."
As security deteriorated last year — U.S. military fatalities rose from one a day last summer to four a day by November — Bremer came under heavy pressure from Washington to put a plan in place that would return sovereignty to the Iraqis sooner rather than later. Bremer was summoned back to Washington last November. He returned to Iraq with a significantly different game plan, one that would eliminate his job as proconsul years ahead of schedule. (The last American in a comparable position, Douglas MacArthur, ran Japan for six years.) The White House, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Robert Blackwill, in particular, took over the Iraqi political portfolio from an inept Pentagon and told Bremer to find a way to form an Iraqi government that could assume power from the CPA by July 2004. Bremer devised a complex caucus system intended to ensure that the rights of the minority Sunnis and Kurds would be protected. But the plan was never accepted by the key political force in the country, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the religious leader of the majority Shi'ite Muslims. He wanted direct elections in 2004. Bremer at first "tried to roll over him," believing that giving in to the Shi'ites would drive the Kurds and Sunnis away from the political process, perhaps for good, says a coalition official.
But Sistani's intransigence and insistence on the U.N.'s involvement forced Bremer to rip up his plans. In mid-January, Bremer flew to New York and met in the basement of the United Nations building with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Greenstock and several members of the Governing Council. Annan became convinced the Americans would defer to the U.N. on the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. Annan assigned his envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to go to Iraq to help piece together the interim government and figure out whether direct elections were really feasible in 2004. Brahimi and U.N. election expert Carla Perelli ultimately advised Sistani they were not, and Sistani agreed to the current plan: a June 30 handover, with direct elections to be held next January. Bremer finally backed off the caucus idea. Bremer's ultimate willingness to compromise earned him the highest praise of his tenure. Greenstock says that Bremer "was the guiding hand for ending Sistani's block without a bust-up. He managed it very well."
Critics say Bremer did not come to know many Iraqis outside the Governing Council — and that he managed to alienate even council members with his brisk manner, as a CPA source puts it. His defenders say that keeping council members in line — and maintaining momentum for the handover of power — consumed most of Bremer's energy. As a result, Bremer spent much of his time playing an inside game, forgoing meetings with the Iraqi public and allowing the day-to-day governance in much of the country to be carried out by either U.S. troops or local militia that rushed into the void. "In politics, the path from A to B is never straight. It almost always goes through C, D or F," Bremer says.
That said, he can point to some undeniable successes. On March 1, Bremer and the council worked until the wee hours of the morning on the so-called Transitional Administrative Law, a document that, while only temporary, may provide the basis for a new Iraqi constitution.
Bremer says he will ultimately be judged not for the violence and mismanagement that marred his administration but for the political arrangements set in place during his 13 months in Baghdad. But he can't escape questions about his political judgment — in particular the decision in late March to close the newspaper affiliated with the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. At the time, Bremer said the paper was inciting anti-Americanism and endangering U.S. troops. Adnan Pachachi, then a Governing Council member, says that no one was consulted when Bremer decided to shut the paper down. In response, al-Sadr's loyalists staged a rolling revolt in Baghdad and across much of southern Iraq, locking down cities and in the process turning many previously neutral Iraqi Shi'ites firmly against the U.S. occupation. Governing Council members believe the decision was a huge mistake. Says Ibrahim Jaafari, one of the two Vice Presidents in the new Iraqi government: "We couldn't contain the Sadr movement." U.S. troops were forced to fight troops loyal to al-Sadr in Najaf and other politically vital Shi'ite cities in the south. While al-Sadr has in recent weeks called on his fighters to lay down their arms, few members of the new government believe that conflict was inevitable, and most trace it back to the decision to shut the newspaper. "Najaf was a political failure," says Jaafari.
The stresses of the job have worn on Bremer: he tells TIME that he plans to leave public life, write a book and enroll at the Academy of Cuisine in Washington. But while Bremer had hoped to leave Iraq in triumph, the persisting unrest means few Iraqis will be sad to see him go. Members of the now disbanded Governing Council are withering in their criticism of how Bremer treated them — issuing orders and backing them to the wall, rather than consulting. Even the U.N.'s Brahimi has called him "the dictator of Iraq." It wasn't a compliment, but it was close to the mark. This was the hand Bremer was dealt. He was the guy with the broom, standing amid all the broken crockery. He needed to make decisions, and he made them — sometimes for better and, as even he concedes, often for worse.
The supreme power he wielded only months ago has all but vanished. In his final days in Iraq, Bremer spends much of his time helping the new interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, get up to speed on all that will be required of him. On a recent Sunday, after a lengthy lunch with Jaafari — during which Bremer got to use some of the Arabic he has learned in daily half-hour lessons — he confers with the new Prime Minister in the green zone. The meeting with Allawi is about staffing a Prime Minister's office and a new anticorruption law that is about to be implemented. Bremer listens, offers advice. There are no orders given. The dictator's time, it's clear enough, is about up. Later Bremer discloses that Allawi jokingly complained to him about going to bed after midnight and being back at work by 6. A weary smile crosses the face of the soon-to-be ex-proconsul. "Yeah," Bremer says he told Allawi, "now you're getting it."
- Bill Powell; Bobby Ghosh/Baghdad