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Articulate, energetic, with the kind of Kennedyesque profile to which men of a certain age aspire, Bremer has the look of a man used to success. But he has inherited a mess. His predecessor, retired General Jay Garner, is leaving Baghdad only 40 days after arriving. Garner insists that he always knew he would be replaced rapidly--he had told his wife that he would be home for his family's annual Fourth of July picnic--but everyone understands that the switch was accelerated because the first month went badly. Officials acknowledge that America's postwar planners made a central mistake, though an understandable one: they assumed that Garner's most pressing task would be to ameliorate a humanitarian catastrophe, perhaps one in which millions of refugees fled chemical and biological weapons. But no such weapons were used; flows of displaced persons were relatively small. "Jay was the absolutely perfect man for a job that wasn't needed," says a civilian adviser to the Pentagon team. Says Garner himself: "If only Iraqis were dying of starvation and disease, and there were TV reports showing Americans giving food and shots to suffering children, the American public would have been pleased insofar as what they expected."
Maybe so. What the American public can hardly be pleased about is that a month after President George W. Bush said that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," American soldiers are still getting killed on a regular basis. As an officer from the Garner team said, "That many deaths if you multiply 15 a week by 52, that's unacceptable, politically, that's unacceptable." Given the dangers from remnants of the Iraqi army, irregular forces loyal to Saddam Hussein and gangsters on the streets of Baghdad and other towns, American forces are far from being secure. The Iraqi army was supposed to have been disbanded last week--at least an edict to that effect was issued by Bremer. But saying an army no longer exists is different from disarming it. Iraq has half a million unemployed soldiers, many of them expected to care for extended families, many of them having received no pay for two months and many of them with weapons. That's a combustible combination. On the road to Baghdad from the international airport last week, a twisted heap that had once been an Army humvee sat on the highway. Crouched behind a metal guardrail, an Iraqi had triggered a trip wire, detonating a charge. One American was killed. "The only person who knows how to do that is the Iraqi Baathist army," concludes a U.S. naval intelligence officer attached to ORHA. "And they are thinking right now, F___ the Americans; we'll gravitate toward the radicals."