Quotes of the Day

TIME: As we approach June 30th, are there still some things that you have liked to have seen accomplished?

BREMER:If you go back and look at what has been accomplished, I would say that we have accomplished almost everything we set out to accomplish at liberation. They (President Bush and Prime Minister Blair) had a vision for Iraq which was an Iraq that was stable, pluralistic, democratic, at peace with itself — and we have accomplished most of that on the way. There are still problems with security, of course, and I expect there will continue to be problems with security.

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.

TIME: Let's look forward for a bit. Where will you wake up on July 1?

BREMER:Probably on an airplane.

TIME: And for your personal career, what sort of job has this been for you?

BREMER:Well, it's certainly been by a long shot the most challenging job I've ever had. It's been exciting, it's been exhausting. It's been a roller-coaster ride — exhilaration and disappointment come from one hour to the next. It's been very intense. In the end, the judgment on the coalition presence here will be on the broad themes — how we did on getting politics more-or-less straight, the economy on the right path, professionalism? . I'm a historian, so I'm inclined to look at the broad themes. There will be a lot of second-guessing, about this decision or that decision; I probably make several hundred decisions a day, and I surely can't be getting them all right.

TIME: Would you say that dropping the plan (to create the Interim Government at a series of regional caucuses) was a tactical correction?

BREMER:Oh, absolutely. If you look back to the Nov. 15 agreement, basically everything we said in that agreement is now the case, except the caucuses. Everything else is there — the writing of the Transitional Administrative Law, the June 30 date for handing over sovereignty, elections by Jan. 1, the writing of the constitution, formation of the interim government. The only thing that got changed was the caucuses; to me, that's tactical. It's not even, to my view, a footnote in history. It was a tactical thing: it was there, it went away.

TIME: But it would have helped to have caucuses, it would have been more...

BREMER:Would it have been a more representative way to do it? Yes. But politics is the art of the possible. If I didn't already know that, I certainly learned it here.

TIME: Would it be fair to say that Ayatollah Sistani was the man who stood in the way of the caucuses plan?

BREMER:I think that was part of it, but there were also concerns among some members of the Governing Council. I think their concern was that they weren't going to be able to control it enough. Some of the organized parties didn't want to have a system that was more representative. We saw this with the GC right to the end. They wanted to, in fact, choose the interim government. It was the same thread which started with the Nov. 15 agreement. One of the members of the GC, the day after the agreement, was already criticizing the caucus system. The thread there is that it was not going to give the GC, particularly the parties in the GC, the control they wanted.

TIME: Is it something that you regret, that the Governing Council got so much of a say in the interim government?

BREMER:I don't think they got much of a say, that story is just flat wrong. It's certainly not their view.

TIME: But you can see how people may interpret it that way.

BREMER:Yeah, that was the reporting of it. There are only two members of the Governing Council in the interim government, out of 33. That doesn't look very intense to me.

TIME: They have the two top positions.

BREMER: That may be, but there are two out of 33. Twenty-two of the interim government had nothing to do with the former government. Two-thirds. The GC had very little to say about this government, very little. They chose neither the President nor the Prime Minister, despite what the press writes. I think that the interim government is a significant break from the GC, and that's good.

• Bobby Ghosh/Baghdad
• The U.S. administrator reflects on his year in Baghdad