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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.