My Year in Iraq

The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope

L. Paul Bremer, Malcolm McConnell

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780743289078
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"BAGHDAD WAS BURNING." With these words, Ambassador L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer begins his gripping memoir of fourteen danger-filled months as America's proconsul in Iraq. My Year in Iraq is the only senior insider's perspective on the crucial period following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. In vivid, dramatic detail, Bremer reveals the previously hidden struggles among Iraqi politicians and America's leaders, taking us from the ancient lanes in the holy city of Najaf to the White House Situation Room and the Pentagon E-Ring. His memoir carries the reader behind closed doors in Baghdad during hammer-and-tongs negotiations with emerging Iraqi leaders as they struggle to forge the democratic institutions vital to Iraq's future of hope. He describes his private meetings with President Bush and his admiration for the president's firm wartime leadership. And we witness heated sessions among members of America's National Security Council -- George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice -- as Bremer labors to realize the vision he and President Bush share of a free and democratic New Iraq. He admires the selfless and courageous work of thousands of American servicemen and -women and civilians in Iraq. The flames Bremer describes on arriving in Baghdad were from fires started by looters. One of his first acts was to request an additional 4, 000 Military Police to help restore order in the streets. For most of the next year, as the insurgency spread, Bremer resisted efforts by generals and senior Defense Department civilians to reduce American troop strength prematurely, replacing our forces with ill-trained, poorly led Iraqi police and soldiers. And he lays to rest the myth that the Coalition disbanded Saddam's army, a force comprised of Shiite draftees who had deserted and refused to serve under their former Sunni officers. Bremer also describes his frustration with intelligence operations that concentrated on the search for weapons of mass destruction while the insurgency gathered strength. Bremer faced daunting problems working with Iraq's traumatized and divided population to find a path to a responsible and representative government. The Shia Arabs, the country's long-repressed majority, deeply distrusted the Sunni Arab minority who had held power for centuries and had controlled the detested Baath Party. Iraq's non-Arab Kurds teetered on the brink of secession when Bremer arrived. He had to find Sunnis willing to participate in the new political order. Some in the U.S. government pushed for what Bremer would come to call a cut-and-run policy that would have quickly delivered governance of Iraq to a handful of unrepresentative anti-Saddam exiles. Bremer vigorously resisted this ill-conceived course. He takes the reader inside marathon negotiations as he and his team shepherded Iraq's new leaders to write an interim constitution with guarantees for individual and minority rights unprecedented in the region.
My Year in Iraq is required reading for all those interested in the real story of how America responded to its gravest recent overseas crisis.

Chapter 1

Chaos

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2003

Baghdad was burning.

As the Air Force C-130 banked above the curve of the Tigris River, I twisted in the sling seat and stared out the circular window of the cargo bay. The capital of Iraq stretched north beneath the right wing, dusty beige, sprawled in the shimmering heat. Dark smoke columns rose in the afternoon sun. I counted three, five…seven.

Beside me, my colleague, retired ambassador Hume Horan, was saying something. But his voice was swallowed by the engine roar. I took out the foam earplugs the crew had distributed when we’d boarded the plane that morning in Kuwait.

“…government buildings,” Hume shouted over the howl of the turboprops. “…Baath Party offices.” He pointed toward the smoke rising above the arc of the river. “Most of the ministries were concentrated in that district. Saddam liked to keep a close eye on his people.”

Ahead in the open compartment, Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his entourage also peered down at Baghdad. Over the weekend, my small staff and I had flown nonstop with Dick Myers aboard a huge C-17 jet transport from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to Doha, Qatar, on the Persian Gulf. From there, we’d taken this C-130, first to overnight in Kuwait, and then this morning to Basra in southern Iraq. We’d been traveling almost forty-eight hours.

The smoke below in Baghdad held all our attention.

Clay McManaway, another retired ambassador, my old friend—and now my deputy—was seated nearby. “Industrial-strength looting,” he yelled. “After they strip a place, they torch it. Lots of old scores to settle.”

Hume nodded in agreement as I replaced my earplugs. He was one of the State Department’s leading Arabists, had spent much of his career in the Middle East, and knew Baghdad well. I did not.

Among my own assignments during almost three decades as an American diplomat, I’d been Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s chief of staff and ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism under President Ronald Reagan, jobs that had taken me to almost every capital in the region. Every one but Baghdad. While Francie, my wife of thirty-seven years, and I had served at the American Embassy in Afghanistan long ago, this was my first trip to Iraq, the country where I was about to face the biggest challenge of my life.

Less than a month before, I’d been just another former ambassador living happily outside Washington, working in the private sector. I ran the crisis management division of a large American company, Marsh & McLennan. Francie and I didn’t miss the political pressure and crushing workload of high-level diplomacy. We’d recently bought an old farmhouse in New England where we hoped to vacation with our children and grandkids.

But on this hot afternoon above Baghdad, I was eight thousand miles away from suburban Washington and the mountains of Vermont. I was also back in the government, the recently appointed administrator of the newly formed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Some press reports characterized me as “the American viceroy” in occupied Iraq.

As the senior American in Baghdad, I would be President George W. Bush’s personal envoy. My chain of command ran through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and straight to the president. I would be the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.

Being a civilian, I would have no command authority over the 170,000 Coalition troops spread thin across Iraq, a country the size of California with a population of more than 25 million. But the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)—the Coalition’s military arm, headquartered in Tampa, Florida—had orders from the president and Rumsfeld to coordinate their operations with the CPA and me.

The Coalition forces that had toppled Saddam after three weeks of intense combat were mainly American soldiers and Marines, but included more than 20,000 British and a much smaller number of Australians, as well as troops from NATO countries, including our new Central European allies.

The terrain they occupied was as varied as Iraq’s human landscape. Coalition troops held positions in the marshy Shatt al-Arab delta of the Tigris and Euphrates, in the river towns and holy cities of the south where the Shiites, 60 percent of Iraq’s population, were concentrated. Five hundred miles to the north, there were Coalition outposts on the pine-covered ridges in the homeland of the Kurds, non-Arabs who comprised about 20 percent of the population. And our units were also dotted across the flat, baking desert of central and western Iraq, the heartland of the minority Sunni Arabs who made up the 19 percent of Iraqis and had dominated Iraqi society for centuries.

The plane’s whining engines dropped in pitch, and the bank angle increased to the left. A young crewman in a desert-tan flight suit strode through the swaying cargo compartment, flexing the fingers of his right hand.

“Five minutes,” he called, “five.” He then made a sharp cinching gesture at his waist to remind us to tighten our red nylon seat belts.

This model of the workhorse C-130 transport was called a Combat Talon and normally carried Special Operations Forces on low-altitude parachute drops or steep assault landings deep in enemy territory. We’d flown up from the southern Iraqi city of Basra at an altitude of only 200 feet, flashing above the mud-walled villages and date groves among the ancient skein of irrigation canals that had made Mesopotamia the Fertile Crescent for millennia.

The purpose of flying fast, “down on the deck,” had not been to provide sightseeing for VIPs but to minimize the risk from ground fire. During the invasion a month earlier, automatic weapons and small arms had mauled U.S. Army attack helicopters passing over these sleepy farming compounds. Although President Bush had declared the end of “major combat operations” eleven days before, Deputy CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid had conceded that the country was not yet fully pacified when he’d briefed us at CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in Qatar.

In less than five minutes we’d land at Baghdad International Airport. Pulling my seat belt tight, I stifled a yawn and thought back over the events that had brought me here.

It was mid-April and Francie and I were leaving the Hartford, Connecticut, airport in a rental Ford Taurus, en route to Vermont to choose furniture for our farmhouse. Francie had bought one of those sticky buns at the airport and the smell of cinnamon filled the car as we pulled onto Interstate 91.

She seemed happy and turned to me. “Honey, I always feel I’m in good hands with you.”

I glanced at her smiling blue eyes and hated to spoil that contentment. Not only does Francie have fibromyalgia, which often keeps her bedridden, but she had recently popped two discs in her back, which sent hot twinges down her sciatic nerve along the right leg. Still, she was temporarily free of pain and excited about furnishing our vacation home.

But I had to tell her what was weighing on my mind, and I had to tell her now. Washington couldn’t wait any longer.

“We need to talk,” I said gently. “About a job I may be offered.”

“What job?” she asked quickly, the bun halfway to her mouth. Francie and I are so close that we sense each other’s moods instantly, and the atmosphere in the car cooled at once. “What job?” she insisted. “Last time I checked you had a job.”

She was right, of course. Running Marsh & McLennan’s crisis management division for eighteen months had been engrossing work. But Francie knew I was eager to draw on my experience to help our country some way, any way, in the global war on terrorism. I had been fighting this battle for almost twenty years, most recently as chairman of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism. In our report to President Bill Clinton in June 2000, the blue-ribbon commission had predicted mass-casualty terror attacks on the American homeland “on the scale of Pearl Harbor.” As with most such panels, our recommendations had been largely ignored until the attacks of September 11, 2001, proved our point.

And after that disaster, even at the age of sixty-two I just couldn’t stay safe on the sidelines. Members of the Bush administration had discussed several jobs with me in the past months. But whenever the topic arose, Francie had opposed the idea, vehemently.

“I need you too much,” she’d say. “I depend on you too much.” And I knew she had a point.

Now as we drove north from Hartford, I raised the subject again. “This time it’s a job where I can really make a difference. In a way, it uses all the skills I’ve acquired over a long career…diplomacy, insight into other cultures, management, and stamina…”

“What job?” Now she was curious. I knew Francie; if I could hook her intellect I’d be halfway there.

“Helping to put Iraq back together.” Only a few days before, we’d sat in our suburban Washington home watching the CNN coverage as deliriously happy Iraqi men and boys had beat their shoes on the decapitated head of Saddam Hussein’s statue that the victorious American Marines had just toppled.

“You?” She became quiet and just looked at me while I studied the road ahead with my heart pounding. I wanted this challenge. At least I wanted the chance to try. But I wouldn’t do it without her blessing.

Slowly, as we drove north through the greening hills, we worked our way around the subject. I told her that I had been contacted by Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and by Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. The Pentagon’s original civil administration in “post-hostility” Iraq—the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, ORHA—lacked expertise in high-level diplomatic negotiations and politics. And, contrary to most media accounts, the White House had never intended ORHA’s leader, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, to be the president’s permanent envoy in Baghdad. I had the requisite skills and experience for that position.

“They’re interested in my being considered for the job of running the occupation of Iraq.”

Finally, after a long, thoughtful silence, Francie smiled again. “Okay, if anybody can do it, you can.”

Now, I’m no softy, but her words brought tears to my eyes: I knew what it would demand of her as well as of me. But she patted my leg and said, “You better call whoever you have to call before I change my mind.”

We both understood that the task of rebuilding Iraq would be difficult. But driving through the sunny foothills of the Green Mountains that April afternoon, neither Francie nor I could anticipate the true nature of the assignment or the strain it would put on both of us.

Ten days later, I was in the Oval Office.

Since my talk with Francie, things had moved quickly. Undertanding that I was willing to be considered for the job, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had asked me to meet with him. I had known him for decades, since the time we both had worked for President Ford. We had stayed in touch over the years, and I admired his patriotism, quick intelligence, and drive. We discussed the situation in Iraq, and I confirmed my interest. He said he would check with the other members of the national security team and get back to me. At 6:30 that night, his office told me we had a meeting with the president the next day at 10:00 A.M.

“Why would you want this impossible job?” President Bush asked me bluntly.

George W. Bush was as vigorous and decisive in person as he had appeared on television, trying to rally the country after 9/11. I had never met him before, although during my years as a diplomat I had come to know and respect his father and mother.

“Because I believe America has done something great in liberating the Iraqis, sir. And because I think I can help.”

This first brief meeting was over, except for a message Francie asked me to give him. “Mr. President, my wife wants you to know that her favorite passage from your State of the Union speech is, ‘Freedom is not America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to mankind.’ ”

The president smiled as he shook my hand, obviously moved by Francie’s words.

Over the next two weeks, I had a frenzied series of meetings at the Pentagon, struggling to get “read in” on the situation in Iraq before my departure. Between sessions, I scrambled to assemble a staff. The Pentagon had already made available Air Force Colonel Scotty Norwood as my military aide. Scotty knew the ropes at the Department of Defense and immediately began serving me with extraordinary skill. The Navy offered up an energetic young lieutenant, Justin Lemmon.

On a visit to Vice President Cheney I learned that his special assistant, Brian McCormack, was interested in going to Iraq. I found him standing by the copy machine in Cheney’s outer office at the White House and asked him if this was true.

“It is,” Brian said with a confident smile.

“Are you married?” I asked. I wasn’t eager to take people with young families to Baghdad.

“Not yet,” he replied. “I can be ready to leave in a week.”

This is the kind of enthusiasm I need, I thought, and hired him on the spot.

Realizing I would also need some wise, experienced counsel, I thought of my old friend and colleague, Ambassador Clayton McManaway. He had been my deputy twice in the State Department, had served in Vietnam, in the Department of Defense, and knew the intelligence community. After a tour as our ambassador t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• One
• 1. Chaos
• 2. Taking Charge
• 3. Repairing a Shattered Nation
• 4. Political Minuet
• 5. A Distant Hope
• Two
• 6. “Don’t Bother Us with History”
• 7. Can America Stand the Heat?
• 8. Road Map to Democracy
• 9. “We Got Him!”
• Three
• 10. A Bitter Fight Begins
• 11. Writing the Constitution
• 12. Hitting the Wall
• 13. Cliffhanger
• 14. Sovereign Iraq
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors