A rchive Date
[ 01-02-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4121960/
Racing the Clock in Iraq
Our intel about what the postwar scene would look like was wrong, too. Now Paul Bremer, America's modern - day MacArthur, has only five more months to make it all work
By Michael Hirsh
Feb. 9 issue - What's next?" It's Jerry Bremer's mantra, his passion. Dreamy visions for Iraq's future, once so much part of the war rhetoric in Washington, only irk him at this late stage. "Schedule, schedule, schedule - that's what I want," Bremer raps out. "I want benchmarks for the number of days. I need a chart of what tasks are falling behind." There are so many tasks. He's training Iraq's new police, civil - defense force and Army. He's creating village councils, an anticorruption agency and inspector - general offices. Hospitals, schools and sewage lines. In all, an astonishing 17,500 projects so far.
A bomb nearby rattles the doors to his dusty office; Bremer doesn't flinch. What's next? Farms - a wheat shortfall looms. Power - Iraq's diesel inventory, which he checks every morning, is low. Bremer's just returned from the United Nations, where he humbly ate the Bush administration's crow and asked Secretary - General Kofi Annan's help to quell Shiite demands for direct elections. Next he must meet the Kurds; they want autonomy in the north, and he's pushing for a deal. What's next? "You've got a few minutes for lunch, sir," says an adjutant, delivering a Styrofoam plate from the Army mess to his desk. Bremer gulps down the glutinous chicken and rice, staring into the blue light of his computer screen. He doesn't seem to pay attention to the food; all he's aware of consuming these days is time. He has so little of it. He's obsessed with compressing the time left to him, grinding it down until every minute is directed toward his goal: to build something lasting in Iraq.
And so it goes, 16 to 18 hours a day. Bremer's ultrasecure command post in Saddam's old imperial - palace complex at the heart of Baghdad is a beehive of true believers: military officers, civilian aides, defense contractors and CIA officials who stream in and out of his small office. The 3,000 staffers in his Coalition Provisional Authority get to swim in Saddam's pool, but otherwise live a spartan existence; many sleep in a large dorm, with double - decker beds, men and women mixed together, housed in Saddam's cavernous "Decision Room." That's the place where the dictator once informed officers if they would live or die. The question is, will America's efforts to remake Iraq live on - or die off once Bremer leaves? To find out, NEWSWEEK recently gained access to Bremer's inner sanctum, spending a week sitting in on his meetings, flying with him to Mosul as he oversaw a graduation class of Iraq's new Civil Defense Corps.
Presently a new team enters the office of Iraq's civil administrator, his democracy task force, the project closest to his heart. Bremer notes he's giving the teaching teams some $450 million, nearly five times what they were budgeted; he talks about bringing in local U.S. battalion and brigade commanders. "You've got basically nothing in this area!" he says, scanning a printout. He asks if there is "an escape clause" in the contract being given to the U.S. company that's doing the democracy promotion because "it very well may be that the U.N. takes over." The Iraqi electricity minister pops in, and Bremer, with his usual genteel good humor, admonishes him for making wild predictions about megawatt increases in the country's still - flickering power supply (even now, Baghdad blacks out several times a day). Though he's careful not to flaunt it, Bremer controls everything down to Iraqi ministers' travel plans. "We're both going to get run out of town if you keep doing that," Bremer says. "What do we care?" the minister jokes, "we're both going to lose our jobs anyway."
That is true. On June 30 Bremer will hand over sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, and he doesn't even know yet how it's going to be chosen. But for the moment the 62 - year - old, a onetime marathoner and triathlete who looks a good 10 years younger, is effectively America's viceroy here, with vast powers of the kind last wielded by Douglas MacArthur in Japan. And the success or failure of George W. Bush's faltering adventure in Iraq - and America's future stature in the Arab world - hangs very much on what he does in the interim. Bremer can move $100 million around on a whim (anything more, and he has to check with Congress). "It's like being a president, a governor, a CEO and a general all wrapped in one," says his top aide Dan Senor. And as the months have passed, the insurgency has raged and the Bush administration's hopeful vision for Iraq has dimmed, Bremer has shown less and less patience for the "spider's cage" of bickering bureaucrats in Washington who want to noodle every contract. He simply doesn't have the time for it. "I can't have someone back in Washington telling me not to build a hospital in Basra but to do an irrigation project in Mosul," Bremer tells an aide. "You want to do that, you've got to get out here. We've got a flak jacket with your name on it."
Resolutely on his side, he knows, is President Bush's national - security adviser and alter ego, Condoleezza Rice, with whom he confers nearly every day on the red secure phone in his office. (He talks with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld less, about three times a week.) "He's doing a heroic job," Rice told NEWSWEEK, adding that her own role is to break through bottlenecks for him. It was Bremer who, with the White House's backing, demanded the $18.6 billion for Iraq's reconstruction (the rest of the $87 billion was for the military). Why? Because after a few months on the ground Bremer realized it was time to dispense with the pretense in Washington that this wasn't nation - building from the ground up. The official rhetoric is that the Iraqi people are choosing their own course to democracy. In fact, America is trying to create a brand - new Iraq.
As a result, Bremer may have the toughest job in the world right now. Consider: the fabled MacArthur, the "American Caesar," took seven years to remake Japan. John McCloy, the High Commissioner who reconstituted post - Hitler Germany, took three years, coming on top of four years of military rule. Bremer has just five months to go. And whereas Japan was already unified, Bremer is trying to build a new Iraq by abruptly reversing the divide - and - rule course that Saddam brutally pursued for 35 years. He must meld together fractious Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in a backward economy with a jobless rate still at 30 to 40 percent (about half what it was after the war, by Bremer's latest estimate), and in a region of the world where bordering nations, like Iran and Syria, are constantly interfering. Henry Kissinger, who's made diplomatic history himself, says the task his onetime protege is engaged in (Bremer was his chief of staff and managed his firm, Kissinger Associates) "is unprecedented." Bremer's job is "much harder" than MacArthur's, says Kissinger. "I can't think of many situations in which there were so many moving parts. And so many conflicting pressures that had to be resolved in so little time ... Secondly, in Japan there was no challenge to legitimacy of the occupation. It was basically accepted."
The lack of a sense of legitimacy - both in Iraq and the international community - is Bremer's most fundamental problem at the moment. First, it means his life is in constant danger as an occupier. Bremer's safety is more closely guarded than that of his boss back in Washington, George W. Bush. The president, at least, can go to the bathroom on his own in the West Wing. Bremer is ringed by concentric circles of blast walls, razor wire and chicanes (zigzagging concrete blocks to slow vehicles) in a four - square - mile area called the Green Zone that is crawling with troops and armored vehicles. Still, so grave is the risk of infiltration by insurgents and terrorists (disguised as one of the many Iraqi workers at the CPA) that even inside that protective bubble, Bremer must be accompanied by four fierce - looking bodyguards armed with Bushmaster rifles when he needs to use the restroom 20 feet from his office. It's not the kind of thing that MacArthur had to worry about.
None of this was expected when Bush launched his war, saying Americans would be welcomed as liberators. Perhaps the best measure of the failure so far of the administration's grand neocon vision is that while Americans are now spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on Iraq, they'll find no gratitude here. Few Iraqis can admit, even to their family or friends, that they are working for a U.S. company, much less the CPA. The reason: they would be shunned or killed. Despite Saddam's capture on Dec. 13, the insurgency persists. It is now inseparable from the occupation itself, fueled by deep resentment of Americans and their foreign and Iraqi collaborators. Just last Friday there were 35 attacks, nearly as many as occurred daily in the worst month before the capture. For Iraqis hungry for the vision Bush promised, after nearly 11 months of chaos, it's all too slow, too violent, too brutal at the hands of U.S. soldiers who can detain them arbitrarily, and often do. To correct that, Bremer is engaged in what he says is the fastest police - training program in history (85,000 new trainees in a year). But meanwhile the daily killings, humiliations and power outages have created a sense among Iraqis that the Americans have bungled things.
Yet Bremer and his sleep - starved team believe the vision of a new, stable ally in the Mideast is not only achievable, but still likely. Bremer's hope is that the June 30 handover and the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside the cities will blunt the insurgency; someday perhaps, he says, Iraqis will come to remember their liberation more fondly. Now he has a more immediate concern: the one thing that hasn't happened in postwar Iraq, except in isolated cases - ethnic and sectarian fighting.
Bremer is urgently dealing with a growing Shiite rebellion over the issue of whether the new transitional assembly set to accept sovereignty will be elected or chosen by caucuses of elites, his plan. Suddenly he desperately needs the approval of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, the Shiite cleric who commands much more prestige than the administrator. Sistani, knowing the Shiites represent a majority, wants national elections. The Sunni minority doesn't, and it is fomenting the Iraqi insurgency. The Kurds, meanwhile, want to wait on elections until they can "normalize" - return Kurds to areas that Saddam cleaned out. Bremer's task is to give Sistani something that sounds like elections while allaying Sunni and Kurd fears of disenfranchisement. Bremer hopes that a U.N. team now here will affirm the U.S. view that elections are impossible before handover, because of the lack of voter registration, census data and so on, allowing Sistani a face - saving way out. And he says that contrary to reports Sistani refuses to deal with him, the two have "been communicating since May." But NEWSWEEK has learned that Sistani is planning a new obstacle: a committee of his own that will dissect the United Nations' findings, possibly causing more delays.
Most of today's headaches predate Bremer's arrival in mid - May. Poor planning and Rumsfeld's insistence on cutting, by about half, the 400,000 - man invasion force the brass wanted for Iraq resulted in rampant looting and unsecured caches of weapons, now used by insurgents. But Bremer has made some misjudgments. He has relied too much on slow - moving American contractors. Bremer has also been obsessed with the model of postwar Germany; he carries around a timeline labeled MILESTONES: IRAQ AND GERMANY, and insisted on pursuing that approach - a new constitution guaranteeing rights first, elections second, and only then sovereignty. But he failed to gauge rising Shiite demands for national elections and the rage the occupation would engender. When the Shiites stymied his attempts to draft a constitution, he had to publicly retreat on Nov. 15, announcing that sovereignty would be granted first. "Both Germany and Japan were defeated nations," Bremer says now. "In a psychological way, the people understood they'd gone into total war and been defeated ... The difference here is, what was defeated was a regime, and the Iraqi people have quite understandably a distaste for the occupation."
And yet there remains a paradox in Iraqi attitudes that Bremer still hopes to exploit in orchestrating a happy transition to Iraqi control under a U.S. defense umbrella (essentially the outcome in postwar Japan and Germany). For many Iraqis, the deepest fear now is civil war. Most can't live with the occupation, but few can imagine living without it, or at least a strong U.S. military presence. The key will be to make it less in - your - face, even as permanent - looking bases in Iraq are being erected. "Prior to the regime's fall, my feeling was that civil war would be a very remote possibility," Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani told NEWSWEEK in an interview last week. "Now I think it will take very little to start one. If Coalition forces leave, we could be only 24 hours away."
For Bremer and for America, the stakes could not be higher. If he fails and Iraq begins coming apart after he leaves, America will face a terror - generating black hole in the Mideast for decades to come. Other nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to be destabilized. (And Bush could possibly lose in November, in a race in which Iraq could be the main issue.) If he succeeds, then the much - fabled virtuous cycle of Arab reform so touted by the hawks could get underway, and Bremer could well end up as Bush's second - term secretary of State. Rice, asked about that prospect, laughed and responded, "Jerry can do just about anything." The president is deeply fond of Bremer, administration sources say, and Colin Powell plans to leave. TO JERRY, THE RIGHT MAN FOR A BIG JOB, reads Bush's scrawled inscription on the photo of the two of them, which sits atop a shelf in Bremer's plainly furnished office. Is Bremer the right man? "If anyone can pull it off," says Kissinger, "he can."
Most of today's headaches predate Bremer's arrival in mid - May. Poor planning and Rumsfeld's insistence on cutting, by about half, the 400,000 - man invasion force the brass wanted for Iraq resulted in rampant looting and unsecured caches of weapons, now used by insurgents. But Bremer has made some misjudgments. He has relied too much on slow - moving American contractors. Bremer has also been obsessed with the model of postwar Germany; he carries around a timeline labeled MILESTONES: IRAQ AND GERMANY, and insisted on pursuing that approach - a new constitution guaranteeing rights first, elections second, and only then sovereignty. But he failed to gauge rising Shiite demands for national elections and the rage the occupation would engender. When the Shiites stymied his attempts to draft a constitution, he had to publicly retreat on Nov. 15, announcing that sovereignty would be granted first. "Both Germany and Japan were defeated nations," Bremer says now. "In a psychological way, the people understood they'd gone into total war and been defeated ... The difference here is, what was defeated was a regime, and the Iraqi people have quite understandably a distaste for the occupation."
And yet there remains a paradox in Iraqi attitudes that Bremer still hopes to exploit in orchestrating a happy transition to Iraqi control under a U.S. defense umbrella (essentially the outcome in postwar Japan and Germany). For many Iraqis, the deepest fear now is civil war. Most can't live with the occupation, but few can imagine living without it, or at least a strong U.S. military presence. The key will be to make it less in - your - face, even as permanent - looking bases in Iraq are being erected. "Prior to the regime's fall, my feeling was that civil war would be a very remote possibility," Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani told NEWSWEEK in an interview last week. "Now I think it will take very little to start one. If Coalition forces leave, we could be only 24 hours away."
For Bremer and for America, the stakes could not be higher. If he fails and Iraq begins coming apart after he leaves, America will face a terror - generating black hole in the Mideast for decades to come. Other nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to be destabilized. (And Bush could possibly lose in November, in a race in which Iraq could be the main issue.) If he succeeds, then the much - fabled virtuous cycle of Arab reform so touted by the hawks could get underway, and Bremer could well end up as Bush's second - term secretary of State. Rice, asked about that prospect, laughed and responded, "Jerry can do just about anything." The president is deeply fond of Bremer, administration sources say, and Colin Powell plans to leave. TO JERRY, THE RIGHT MAN FOR A BIG JOB, reads Bush's scrawled inscription on the photo of the two of them, which sits atop a shelf in Bremer's plainly furnished office. Is Bremer the right man? "If anyone can pull it off," says Kissinger, "he can."
It does seem odd that anyone would want to kill this genial, good - humored man. A devout Roman Catholic (his nickname, Jerry, comes from his patron saint, Jerome), Bremer has framed on his desk, right next to his computer, a Latin inscription that is his life's guiding principle. NON SUM DIGNUS: "I am not worthy." It's what a Catholic says at mass before receiving the host. "What is significant about it is that every Catholic says it, even the pope," he says. Raised in New Canaan, Conn., the son of a wealthy international businessman, Bremer studied history at Yale and later, like the president, went to Harvard Business School. Unsure about entering business or government, he heeded his father's invocation of noblesse oblige. He argued "you ought to give something back in public service," Bremer says, adding almost apologetically, "It sounds trite these days ..." Bremer joined the State Department, fell into Kissinger's orbit, and then it was 23 years and a couple of ambassadorships before "I came to my senses," he says, and went into business. Since then he's kept mostly a low profile, but in 2000 Bremer coauthored a now widely cited report that predicted terrorist attacks on America, earning him his stripes as a post - 9/11 hawk.
Bremer doesn't seem to care about the political storms back in Washington. Asked if he's a neocon like his old friend Paul Wolfowitz, he notes he's a lifelong Republican and says with a smile, "I'm a con - con." Bremer, his aides say, simply doesn't read most of the raging Beltway commentary on Iraq. Questioned about what the commentariat widely considers his biggest mistake, the demobilization of the Army, Bremer insists that the media have erred in reporting that he did not hand out stipends. "The two most popular things I've done since I've been here are the de - Baathification decree - which stands head and shoulders above everything else - and the disbanding of the Army." Perhaps some of the vast number of gun - toting ex - soldiers set adrift did join the insurgency. But he insists the move also reassured disaffected Shiites and Kurds that they will never again suffer from Saddam's Baathists. The Iraqis' belief that "the new Iraqi Army is designed not to interfere in internal affairs" might even help to avert civil war, he says.
To his credit, Bremer has evolved. He has a "legalistic mind - set," says one Iraqi Governing Council member, who, while frustrated at Bremer's stubbornness, admires him. As recently as a month ago Bremer was still insisting on caucuses, rigidly hewing to the Nov. 15 agreement. But "in the Arab world the agreement is not the agreement. We keep changing as we go along," says the Council member. "Welcome to Iraq." Now he's willing to finesse the issue, broadening the caucus idea in favor of something that might be more like a local referendum or a partial election. The book that sits closest to his desk is the Qur'an. He studies Arabic in every spare moment, flipping through flashcards on transport planes, quoting the Prophet Muhammad reverently in speeches with the proper invocation, "Peace be upon him." Ultimately he recognizes that he is already entering a kind of lame - duck period, as Sistani has made clear. "Bremer wants to glue the Iraqis together, but his glue is not very strong right now," notes IGC member Mahmoud Othman.
Bremer thinks he can still make things stick together by the time he departs. His overriding goal is to leave behind so many new institutions by June 30 that the forces of integration overtake the chaos. He's trying to create facts on the ground that will engender a powerful demand for sovereignty, outflanking Sistani's power bid. Hence his intense push to hold town - hall meetings and local caucuses, even though officially his caucus idea is suspended pending the United Nations' finding on whether elections are feasible.
Now Bremer must fight a rear - guard action as well: jittery suggestions back in Washington that America skip selection of a new transitional assembly altogether and simply hand off to the IGC. But that would almost certainly not be accepted as a legitimate government - the Bremer - appointed IGC is widely seen as a collection of U.S. stooges. Still, Bush is so intent on that date (coming as it does before the GOP convention) that Bremer cannot dismiss the idea of a handover to the Governing Council.
Meanwhile Bremer is nurturing Iraqi civil society with an accumulation of small steps: he's forming professional and trade associations in major cities, on the theory that this way doctors will identify themselves as doctors and not as Kurds or Shiites. Soon to be announced is that Iraq will field seven teams in the 2004 Olympics. The restoration of symbols of a return to the community of nations - a national soccer team, the Iraqi symphony, new Iraqi Fulbright scholars - is a big Bremer theme, his way of trying to fend off the sense of societal doom many Iraqis feel as they flirt with civil war. Last week another Bremer pet project, a new Commission of Public Integrity to battle endemic corruption, was handed off to Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi to announce.
Bremer is never short of new ideas. Surely one of the strangest conversations to take place in an Army Black Hawk helicopter occurred last week between Bremer and the outgoing commander of the 101st Airborne in the north, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, who is rotating out this week. Bremer launched into his latest passion: Iraqi Court TV. He's already nationalizing Petraeus's "Mosul's Most Wanted" TV show to get locals to call in with tips on insurgents. Even U.S. TV host John Walsh is helping. "If we have that, we might as well follow it with 'Court TV'," said Bremer, only half - joking. "Maybe we can have a perp walk." No idea seems too small or too silly to the man who holds Iraq's future in his hands but must soon yield it up to an unready nation. Not when he has so little time left.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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