Imperial Life in the Emerald City (7 page)

Before he even arrived in Iraq, Bremer sidelined Zal Khalilzad, the White House's envoy working on the political transition. The Afghan-born Khalilzad, who would eventually become an American ambassador to post-occupation Iraq, had spent months interacting with Iraq's exiled political leaders. He knew more about them than anyone else in the U.S. government, and he had their trust. When Bush tapped Bremer to be the viceroy, Powell and others in the State Department assumed Khalilzad would become Bremer's top deputy and would remain in charge of assembling an interim government. But Bremer didn't want someone in Baghdad who had preexisting relationships with Iraqi leaders. Bremer regarded Khalilzad as a potential threat—someone who knew more about the players and the country than he did, and could disagree with the viceroy's agenda.

Bremer insisted on approving every substantive CPA policy. Staffers sent him thousands of one-to-two-page documents titled
ACTION MEMO
or
INFORMATION MEMO,
because he required it. He read them over breakfast, in the late hours of the night, and on helicopters. One staffer remarked to me that history was repeating itself: Saddam signed off on even the most insignificant decisions because nobody else wanted to, lest they mistakenly contradict the dictator's whims. “Nothing's changed,” the staffer said. “We can't do anything without Bremer's okay.”

Bremer tolerated, and even welcomed, differing opinions in policy debates. But once he arrived at a decision, he expected everyone to get on board. Public questioning of his edicts was verboten. And nobody was above reproach. When Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British prime minister Tony Blair's personal representative in Baghdad, dared to suggest at a meeting with Powell and Bremer that one of Bremer's edicts might have been too severe, the viceroy snapped at him. The message was clear:
Don't contradict me.

In a 2002 article for
Directors & Boards
magazine, Bremer wrote that in a crisis, “quick decisive action is vital, even though decisions have to be taken in ‘fog of war' conditions.” He practiced what he preached. Paperwork never languished on his desk. The same staffers who complained about having to write endless memos were amazed at the speed with which Bremer sent those memos back, often with comments scrawled in the margins.

Bremer's article should have been required reading for everyone in Washington dealing with Iraq. “Crisis management plans cannot be put in place ‘on the fly' after the crisis occurs,” he wrote. “At the outset, information is often vague, even contradictory. Events move so quickly that decision makers experience a sense of loss of control. Often denial sets in, and managers unintentionally cut off information flow about the situation.”

In his first few weeks, Bremer slept on a twin-size cot on the palace's second floor, in a room with no air-conditioning. He soon moved into a trailer and, eventually, into his own villa, which Halliburton had furnished with plush sofas, a dining table for a dozen, and a study.

After his morning run, a quick shower, and breakfast, he was in his office by six-thirty, sitting behind a large wooden desk on top of which was a telephone, a Dell computer with a flat-panel screen, and a stack of memos. In front of the desk was an octagonal coffee table, around which aides gathered for meetings. Maps of Iraq's power grid and administrative districts were tacked to the walls. Bremer's bookshelves were nearly empty, save for a guide to the management of financial crises, Rudy Giuliani's book
Leadership,
and a box of Raisin Bran. On one shelf was a framed photo of Bremer finishing the 1991 Boston Marathon in three hours and thirty-four seconds. He was fifty then, and the time was good enough to place him in the top ten for his age group, although he often joked that “those thirty-four seconds”—which kept him from finishing in less than three hours—“I will take with me to my grave.” On his desk was a wood carving that looked like a large nameplate. It read
SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS.
When a visitor noted, during his first weeks on the job, the second line of the aphorism—“failure is an orphan”—Bremer tensed. “There won't be any failure,” he said.

He ran the CPA like a mini–White House. At seven-fifteen, he received a security and intelligence briefing. At seven-thirty, he huddled with Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq. At eight, he gathered his senior staff for the cabinet meeting. Then it was time to play the role of front man for the occupation. He met with Iraqi leaders. He visited hospitals, schools, and power plants. He posed for photos. There was usually a working lunch and formal dinner with prominent Iraqis. Sometimes he played host in the al-Rasheed Hotel, where black-jacketed waiters served four-course meals. Or he traveled to the home of an Iraqi politician. The evenings brought more meetings, more paperwork, and the videoconferences with Washington. He rarely crawled into bed before midnight.

It was clear that Bremer was a workaholic, but other appearances could be deceiving. He often wore blue chinos with his navy pinstripe suit jacket. It looked like a matching ensemble from afar, and it was much easier to launder. He wolfed down the dining hall fare, leading many to conclude he saw food only as fuel. In fact, he was a French-trained chef who had taught cooking classes in Vermont and once spent thirty-six hours making a sauce. His antipathy toward French government policy on Iraq didn't diminish his love of French cuisine, the French language, or the French countryside. He owned a house in France, and he was, perhaps, the only Bush appointee to have studied at the Institut d'études politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris.

He'd grown up in Hartford, Connecticut, gone to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in history in 1963. He went on to earn a master's in business administration from Harvard University before entering the Foreign Service. His initial posting was in Kabul in the 1960s, where he famously set up Afghanistan's first ski run, in the mountains near the capital, jury-rigging a loop of rope to a tractor motor to pull skiers up the hill. After his studies in Paris, he was stationed in Malawi before returning to Washington, where he was tapped to be Kissinger's special assistant.

Even in his early years, Bremer was work-obsessed. He traveled with Kissinger as he engaged in shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. That year, during which his daughter, Leila, was born, he was away from home for two hundred days. His wife, Frances Winfield Bremer, eventually wrote a book titled
Coping with His Success: A Survival Guide for Wives at the Top.
“One day he came home and said he had had lunch with Kissinger and David Rockefeller,” she told a
Washington Post
reporter in 1982. She'd had peanut butter sandwiches with Leila and their son, Paul. As Jerry described the lunch, Francie, who studied at Harvard, sat there thinking, “I'm as smart as he. Why am I sitting here with peanut butter?” She took a qualifying test for Mensa as well as the Foreign Service entrance exam, passing both, and it “defused the whole question of competition” with her husband. A year after the
Post
article appeared, the family moved to the Netherlands, where the Dutch named a tulip variety after Francie.

In 1994, the couple converted to Roman Catholicism. Jerry, who was born an Episcopalian, had been visibly moved watching television coverage of Pope John Paul II at World Youth Day celebrations in 1993. “Yet another influence was our exposure, while living in Europe, to the historical beauty of a Church of saints, shrines and simple people at prayer, a Church that was truly the bedrock of western civilization,” the Bremers wrote in their parish newsletter.

When the White House approached Jerry about going to Iraq, Francie said that the couple “held hands and prayed about it.”

In Baghdad, Bremer attended Mass every Sunday in the palace chapel, the vast room adorned with a mural of a Scud missile.

         

Before departing for Baghdad, Bremer told an associate that he planned to “make some bold decisions.” He was coming to bail water from the foundering ship and set it on a new course.

After accepting the job as CPA administrator, he spent a week in briefings and meetings at the Pentagon. He asked for proposals that could be put into action right away. He heard about plans to repair schools and power plants, but he knew Iraqis wouldn't see the results immediately. Shooting looters on sight would be bold, and he even proposed this at his first staff meeting in Baghdad, but he eventually concluded that such an action would be too politically risky. Forming an interim government at once, as Garner was trying to do, would be significant, but Bremer feared that Iraqi political leaders weren't ready. Then he heard about de-Baathification.

Bremer had concluded on his own that senior members of Saddam's Baath Party would have to be purged, and that lower-ranking members would have to renounce their affiliation. He compared it to the de-Nazification undertaken by the Allies after World War II. But he didn't know much about the Baath Party's structure and operations.

Doug Feith's office was armed with answers. In the months leading up to the war, there had been a vigorous debate between the Pentagon and the State Department over the scope of de-Baathification. State advocated a policy of “de-Saddamification,” which entailed purging two classes of Baathists: those who had committed crimes and those at the very top of the command structure. Defense had a more expansive view. Influenced by a paper on de-Nazification written by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, Feith's office advocated a broader purge, as well as a prohibition on rank-and-file members holding senior government posts. The CIA agreed with State, while the vice president's office weighed in with the Pentagon. The dispute eventually made its way to the White House, where the National Security Council tried to strike a compromise: Those in the highest ranks of the Baath Party—about 1 percent of the membership—would be fired from government jobs. Others would be subjected to a South Africa–style “truth and reconciliation process.” The plan was included in a PowerPoint presentation for President Bush and other members of his war cabinet—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice—on March 10. Frank Miller, who chaired the NSC steering group on Iraq, was the presenter. According to two people present in the room, Bush gave the nod.

The decision lacked specificity. The NSC staff didn't know how the top ranks were structured or how many people were at those levels, even though this information was available on the Internet and in academic papers. But “the thrust was clear: treat these people leniently and try to work with them,” one of the people at the meeting said.

At the Pentagon, the mechanics of de-Baathification were handled by Feith's Office of Special Plans, which took its cues from the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi and other INC officials argued passionately that a wholesale purge of the Baath Party was necessary to demonstrate America's commitment to a new political order in Iraq. If the old guard were allowed to stick around, they maintained, there would be no way a democracy would bloom. The INC advocated extending the ban on government employment to the top four levels of the party to include the rank of
udu firka,
or group member. Below that rank were only regular members and cadets. To people in Feith's office, including
firka
s in the ban comported with the president's decision to fire top-ranking members.

When Bremer held his first substantive discussions with Feith and his staff, de-Baathification was on the agenda. As soon as they outlined the policy as they saw it, Bremer seized on it. It was just the sort of bold decision he wanted to implement. He wrote a memo to Pentagon officials noting that he wanted his arrival in Iraq to be “marked by clear, public and decisive steps to reassure Iraqis that we are determined to eradicate Saddamism.”

Feith's office drafted a one-and-a-half-page executive order titled “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society.” Not only did it include a prohibition on employing
firka
s and above, but it also banned regular members from “holding positions in the top three layers of management in every national government ministry, affiliated corporations and other government institutions.” The document was shown to Pentagon lawyers and to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld but not to Rice or Powell, who believed the policy drafted in Feith's office did not represent the compromise forged at the March 10 war cabinet meeting. The final draft was printed in the Pentagon and carried to Baghdad by one of Bremer's aides.

Three days after he arrived in Iraq, Bremer dispatched an aide to Jay Garner's office with a copy of the de-Baathification policy. It was going to be the viceroy's first executive order. He planned to issue it the next day.

Garner read it.
Holy Christ,
he thought to himself.
We can't do this.

He contacted the CIA station chief and asked him to meet him in front of Bremer's office right away. As Garner walked down the hall to the viceroy's suite, he ran into one of the State Department ambassadors and explained what was happening.

“We've got to put a stop to this one,” Garner said. “It's too hard, too harsh.”

Garner and the station chief barged into Bremer's office.

“Jerry, this is too harsh,” Garner said. “Let's get Rumsfeld on the phone and see if we can't soften it.”

“Absolutely not,” Bremer said. “I'm going to issue this today.”

Garner asked the station chief what would happen if the order were issued.

“You're going to drive fifty thousand Baathists underground before nightfall,” he said. “Don't do this.”

Bremer politely ended the discussion. That night, he summoned all of the CPA's senior advisers to a meeting to outline the order. Several senior CPA staffers knew about the proposed de-Baathification policy and they held out hope of softening it. One of them, Meghan O'Sullivan, who would later become a top political adviser to Bremer, wrote a memo recommending a narrower purge.