The two main charges against Bremer have been that he should not have decapitated the ruling Baath political party of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein and that he should not have dissolved the Iraqi army. But Bremer shows that "de-Baathification" was absolutely necessary if Iraq was to have "any chance at a brighter future," and that the army had essentially evaporated away by the time he arrived on the scene.
Not only did the mostly Shiite majority of the army's rank and file decamp in the wake of our successful invasion of their country, they stripped the army's bases and supplies of matériel bare as they did so. There was no army left to reconstitute.
As for "de-Baathification," Bremer says it had to happen for the same reason that Eisenhower's conquering army had to destroy the Nazi party in post-WWII Germany:
Like the Nazi Party, the Baath Party ran all aspects of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell. Baathists recruited children to spy on their parents, just as the Nazis had. Hussein even required members of his dreaded intelligence services to read "Mein Kampf."
"Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") was the memoir Adolf Hitler wrote in prison before he and his National Socialists — the Nazis — took the reins of power in Germany in the 1930s. In it, he laid out the program (subjugating his own people, exacting retribution against the hated Jews, conquering the rest of Europe) which he would follow if given the chance, along with its ideological basis.
The Nazis were perfect totalitarians. So too, says Bremer, were the Baathists. Accordingly, "the ... policy of removing top Baath officials from government was right and necessary." Otherwise, openly expressed Iraqi fears "that the United States planned to leave unrepentant Baathists in senior government and security positions" would have festered among Iraq's citizens and nipped in the bud any hope of democracy emerging in their country.
In concluding his self-defense, Bremer writes:
No doubt some members of the Baath Party and the old army have joined the insurgency. But they are not fighting because they weren't given a chance to earn a living [under CPA policies]. They're fighting because they want to topple a democratically elected government and reestablish a Baathist dictatorship. The true responsibility for today's bloodshed rests with these people and their al-Qaeda collaborators.
Bremer thus paints a picture of the Iraq war as waged mainly between a coalition of Sunni Muslims — former Baathists and their present al-Qaeda collaborators — and everyone else. The fact that the Baathists and al-Qaeda have different ultimate goals — the former are basically secular; the latter want to spread the rule of Islamic religious law — makes little difference now. Nor does the fact that there were no important links between the two organizations at the time we invaded Iraq, despite what the Bush administration was saying back then.
That view of the matter makes sense to oldstyleliberal. Before we invaded Iraq, Baath rule under Saddam had one redeeming quality: it made for a degree of stability in the region. But when Saddam did a Hitler and annexed Kuwait at the point of a gun, thus upsetting the apple cart, the U.S. and its allies went to war to roll that incursion back and re-institute the status quo ante — which is arguably what Britain, France, and others should have done when Hitler rolled into the Sudetenland.
The downside of allowing Saddam to stay at the helm in Iraq was, per Bremer, the fact that Saddam ruled through "the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services." Substitute "Baath" for "Nazi," "the Iraqi army" for "the Reich's security services," and you get the picture.
It is a picture that oldstyleliberal feels today's American left has been more than a little blind to. As a budding liberal in the 1950s and '60s, oldstyleliberal was imbued with the sense that Nazi-style tyranny was the worst thing that ever happened, bar none. But his liberal contemporaries today have little to say about this indictment from Bremer:
It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old [Iraqi] army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves.
Civilian genocide and mass graves would seem to oldstyleliberal to constitute, if anything could, a call to arms to those of a liberal mentality.
The rhetoric and tactics the Bush administration has used to justify and prolong the Iraq war continue to baffle oldstyleliberal, he readily admits. He feels he has no special grip on the actual facts, either. Will the war be won? Can it be won? What would constitute a win? How will we know when the troops can come home? What is the correct exit strategy? The effective role of regional diplomacy in all this? All these are questions oldstyleliberal can't answer. It seems no one really can.
Yet it seems to oldstyleliberal that Bremer is right. Barring a full-scale roundup of former Baathists in the wake of our 2003 military victory — which would have been impossible, under the circumstances; look how long it took us to find Saddam Hussein — our only strategy was (and is) to work against their ongoing troublemaking. We had to expect it. And we all needed to recognize
- that the Baathist remnant would surely join forces with al-Qaeda at some point
- that their combined attacks on Iraq's majority Shiites would eventually provoke bloody retaliations
- and that this situation could not be quickly or easily dealt with by the fledgling democratic regime in Baghdad, without outside help
We should also have figured that military and police power, wielded by us and our invader allies or by Iraqis in their brand new uniforms, could not alone quell the instability. Diplomacy, too, was going to be needed — among all the players in the region, including Iran and Syria. What was Bush thinking in resisting this? Exactly what was Baghdad supposed to do with Iran, Syria, and the other states in the region when left to its own devices, post the eventual U.S. withdrawal? Or did anyone look that far ahead?
But never mind. This is where we are today. Call it what you like — civil war, chaos — we have to find a way to turn the page. We need to pull out all the stops and work for, if nothing else, stability without tyranny in Iraq. That's the overall goal.
If this means our troops must, for now, stay in harm's way there without a firm timetable for coming home, so be it. If it means we have to negotiate multilaterally or one-on-one with despised regimes in the region, fine. If it means we have to be open to reconfiguring Iraq as three semi-autonomous democratic regions, one Kurd, one Sunni, one Shiite, well and good.
oldstyleliberal feels he will be voting in 2008 for the presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican, who best embodies such an approach.
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