Known and Unknown (62 page)

The failure to establish an Iraqi interim government quickly was not the cause of every problem we faced in post-Saddam Iraq. The legacy of tyranny, the harmful actions of ill-intentioned neighbors, the catastrophic state of its infrastructure, the mistrust of foreigners, the ethnic and sectarian tensions, and the political vacuum all contributed to the instability. Nonethe-less, I am persuaded that many of these difficulties became worse as a result of the delay in ceding authority to the Iraqis. The CPA's top-down approach inadvertently stoked nationalist resentments and fanned the embers of what would become the Iraqi insurgency. Many Iraqis associated the CPA with imperiousness and heavy-handedness. In his book
War and Decision
, Doug Feith argues that the main problem with the CPA was not the commonly cited decisions on de-Baathification or the disbanding of the Iraqi army that gave rise to an insurgency. He suggests that the CPA's policies and methods fueled the insurgency in other, more subtle ways.
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The broader impression of an overbearing U.S. authority issuing edicts to the Iraqi people buttressed the anticoalition arguments of militants like Muqtada al-Sadr and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This played well into propaganda that the United States was trying to dominate and exploit Iraq rather than liberate it and return it promptly to Iraqi control.

 

B
remer issued two important orders soon after he arrived in Baghdad. In subsequent years both orders became characterized as the two original sins of the occupation and the cause of the difficulties in the years that followed. At the time, however, they were greeted with approval by a great many Iraqis and were put into place with the best of intentions.

CPA Order Number 1 concerned the policy of de-Baathification—the removal from the government of officials in the top layers of Baath Party.
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Many were minority Sunni Arabs who had run Iraq for three decades. The Baath Party was less of a political party than a symbol of the state, much like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union or the Nazis in Germany. As such, it had become a widely hated vestige of Saddam's regime. Bremer, rightly in my view, thought it was important to make clear to Iraqis that the Baathists who had served a regime that had terrorized the citizenry, deployed the secret police, murdered regime opponents, and authorized torture chambers and rape rooms were not going to return to power.

But we knew that many thousands of Iraqis had been forced into the Baath Party and were members in name only. Under Saddam, almost anyone who wanted to advance professionally had to join, including schoolteachers, doctors, and engineers. There was no desire or intention to punish everyone in the system. As I had noted immediately after my trip to Baghdad at the end of April 2003, in certain sectors Baathists were keeping the fragile Iraqi infrastructure from collapsing.
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The goal of de-Baathification was to target those at the top of the party, the ones who were so closely linked with the former regime that they could not be trusted to serve in the post-Saddam government. The de-Baathification policy in fact was akin to the Allies' de-Nazification policy in Germany after World War II, which barred some 2.5 percent of the German population from postwar government service. In Iraq, by contrast, DoD officials intended the policy to cover only one tenth of 1 percent of the population.
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Though the policy later found few defenders at the top level of the administration, de-Baathification initially had broad support among the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. The approach was promoted in the State Department's Future of Iraq Project that, as noted, later became touted in the media as the neglected plan for postwar Iraq.
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Two weeks before the war began, an NSC staff member briefed the President on the policy. He explained that there were 1. 5 million members of the Baath Party in Iraq but proposed removing only the 1 to 2 percent who were what he called “active and full members.” All told, there were some twenty-five thousand people who could lose their government jobs. There were no objections from any of the principals present at the NSC meeting. However, the President did express some skepticism. “It's hard to imagine punishing twenty-five thousand people,” Bush said. He then asked the critical question: “Who will do the vetting?”
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The President understood that there was a good deal of pent-up rage against the ruling Sunnis by Iraq's Shia and Kurdish populations. In the wrong hands, it would be easy for de-Baathification to be an ax rather than a scalpel.

After Bremer announced the policy in May, he appointed Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Shia majority, to administer it. With Chalabi in charge, just as the President had feared, de-Baathification gained a reputation for score settling. Stories circulated about schoolteachers who were fired, former Baathist officials who were beaten in the streets, and even murders—acts that the CPA had not authorized, condoned, or had even minimal control over.

De-Baathification inflamed the minority Sunnis, who saw it as an act of vengeance against them as a group. Sunnis justifiably argued that while many of them had been forced to participate in the Baathist government, they were not all complicit in Saddam's crimes. The policy, and how it was administered, led some Sunnis to become embittered against the American presence in Iraq.

CPA Order Number 2—the decision to disband the Iraqi army—has since become one of the most criticized decisions of the war. Of the dozens of important decisions made during that week in May 2003, it was not one that stuck out with unique prominence at the time. But in hindsight, its importance is unmistakable.

Disbanding the army was not my instinct. Everything I wanted to do in Iraq was tied to the thought that we should have the Iraqis doing as much for themselves as possible. If we disbanded the army, it would mean that as many as four hundred thousand young Iraqi men would be put out of jobs and onto the streets. Some were armed, had military training, and could become susceptible to calls for resistance against the United States, coalition forces, and the new Iraqi government.

Before the war I had agreed it would be wise to keep the Iraqi army as a reconstruction corps—something loosely resembling FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps. In January 2003, Feith and his staff, working with the Joint Staff, drafted a briefing called “Rebuilding the Iraqi Military” that recommended retaining the regular army.
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One month later, at a February 26 meeting, Pentagon representatives briefed the NSC principals on the DoD plans for what they called “the reintegration of the regular army.” Under the plan, those structures of the military that were tainted with the crimes of the Baath regime—the Republican Guard and secret police among them—would be dissolved, but the regular army would be retained to assist in keeping security. The proposal would use the army “as a national reconstruction force during the transition phase.”
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The assumption was that they had structure and manpower as well as skills and equipment that could be valuable assets. By March, the brief was updated with the recommendation that following combat operations in Iraq, the army “should ‘maintain its current status in assembly areas and permanent garrisons.'”
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In short, the Iraqi army would be retrained and used as an instrument of defense of the new Iraqi state.

But I was aware that there were some downsides to keeping it in the form we found it. Controlled by Sunni officers loyal to Saddam, the army had been an instrument of terror against many Shia and Kurds. It was bloated with senior officers—eleven thousand generals, almost all of them Sunnis.
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(By comparison, the U.S. Army, about the same size as Saddam's, had about three hundred generals.) Corruption was deeply ingrained. The Kurds and Shia, together composing 80 percent of Iraq's population, would also vehemently oppose any attempt to retain Saddam's army. We had to ask whether it made sense to risk alienating the vast majority of Iraqis by trying to keep and reconstitute the army. I concluded that the benefits outweighed the risks, and that we would keep it intact to help with security and reconstruction.

The calculus changed, however, as coalition troops drove north to Baghdad. Faced with the prospects of death or capture if they engaged our coalition forces, many members of the Iraqi army removed their uniforms and deserted. Undoubtedly, large numbers of the army's conscript soldiers—most of them Shia—had never wanted to serve the Saddam regime in the first place and didn't plan to stay any longer than necessary. CENTCOM was operating on the U.S. intelligence community's judgment that the Iraqi army would remain intact after the invasion, and that the largely Shia conscripts at lower levels of the military would be available to actively work with coalition forces to secure and reconstruct the country.
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That judgment turned out to be incorrect.

The Iraqi army, in Bremer's words, “disbanded itself.”
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The evolving situation called to mind the John Maynard Keynes quote, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Few, if any, of the arguments in favor of using the army continued to be applicable, while most of the reasons against using it remained. Bremer recommended a change of course.
³³
He made the decision in close coordination with his senior adviser on defense issues, Walter Slocombe, who had served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Clinton administration and who at my request had agreed to assist the CPA.

Bremer and Slocombe championed a proposal to create an entirely new Iraqi army. The training and equipping of the army would fall under the control of the CPA and not, as commonly assumed, under the United States military. Bremer briefed me and several other Defense officials about the outlines of the plan on May 19, 2003 and then other members of the National Security Council three days later. His decision, particularly its specifics, did not receive the full interagency discussion it merited.
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We were told that each of the soldiers was to receive a stipend while the army was reorganized, so that they would not be aimless, unemployed, and on the streets.
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Unfortunately, there was a month delay before Bremer's office announced the payments and another month before the CPA could issue them.
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Many members of the Iraqi army became embittered. The initial pace of training the new army was also excruciatingly slow.
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Later I revived the question of whether it might be desirable or possible to reassemble units of the old Iraqi army and bring them into service in some form.
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I asked General Abizaid for an assessment. But Bremer strenuously objected to this idea, apparently on the grounds that Iraqis would not want any remnants of the old army reconstituted.
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Whether or not disbanding the Iraqi army was ultimately a good idea, the failure to reform and reconstitute it quickly was costly.

Bremer's plan for a new Iraqi army focused on defending Iraq from an external threat rather than on using it for internal security.
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This decision stemmed from his certain view that the Iraqi people would never trust or tolerate any version of Saddam's army patrolling their streets. Yet the far greater threat to Iraqis was not from outside invaders but from the insurgency being waged from within. The army was being trained to fight the wrong war.

For nearly a year Abizaid made efforts to get the training of the Iraqi army transferred from the CPA to the military, which had vastly more experience. Bremer finally relented in the spring of 2004. In the meantime, Abizaid and Sanchez had built up the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a force of military units that remained in their communities, but the size of Iraq's national security forces was still too small to deal with the insurgency.

It is fair to ask why differences between the CPA and CENTCOM, and more broadly between State and Defense, were not better resolved. I have asked it myself as I look back. The fact was that Bremer's views on Iraqi governance and occupation reflected those of the State Department. Those key differences were never clearly or firmly resolved in the NSC. Only the President could do so.

As time went on, Bremer's pride of ownership in his policy concerning the Iraqi army wavered. In 2005, Bremer said the decision had been his, calling it “the most important decision I made, and it had the effect of avoiding a civil war in Iraq.”
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However, by September 2007, as criticism of his decision intensified, Bremer wrote an op-ed in the
New York Times
entitled, “How I Didn't Dismantle Iraq's Army.”
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Apparently Bremer felt he was blamed unfairly for the decision, and in truth, it wasn't all Bremer's fault. Many shared responsibility for the policy. I was told of Bremer's decision and possibly could have stopped it.
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Members of the NSC had been informed of his decision before Bremer announced it, and not one participant registered an objection.
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My impression was that President Bush wanted Bremer to have considerable freedom of action. However, it is now clear that the NSC should have deliberated the decision more fully. We should have had more clarity about the critical details of implementation, ensuring that the stipend payments and the size, purpose, and timeline for it were well understood and agreed to beforehand.

There is no mistaking that the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army had consequences, but as time has gone on we may be finding it has had some advantages as well.
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Perhaps because much effort was poured into building a new force from scratch, it is emerging as one of Iraq's more effective institutions. By way of contrast, its police force suffers from lack of training and discipline, sectarianism, and corruption. As in Afghanistan, the State Department was, by U.S. law, placed in charge of police training in Iraq. However, State sent very few qualified people to either country.
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In the case of Iraq, for reasons still unclear, the training program was delayed for six months. As a result, the country was without any sort of internal security force for a critical period following the war.