Cheeky American in Iraq

When Paul Bremer, the former US head in Iraq announced recently that he was about to publish his memoir of the disastrou...s year he was in charge of that country, I almost couldn't believe his cheek. In this part of the world we hadn't heard from him since he ignominiously sped out of Baghdad on the day of the handover to the interim Iraqi government a year and a half ago.
He left the country surrounded by armed guards, giving the impression of someone who couldn't get out of the place fast enough. I was in Baghdad at the time, listening to the machine gun fire in the city every night, and then everyone there believed he had cut and run at the first opportunity. People who had been made utterly cynical about the glaring mismanagement of their country in the year of his tenure could only laugh at the manner of his departure. Tail between his legs wasn't even the half of it.
It seemed to those of us there at the time, that every wrong decision that could be made in his time in office had been made. Law and order was non existent, even the traffic regulations were scoffed and society was breaking down. Kidnapping of the children of ordinary families had become everyone's greatest fear, and streets which had been packed with shoppers just a few months earlier were more or less deserted.
Bremer seemed to be sitting over the whole sorry farce behind the walls of the Green Zone, so far removed from what was happening in the streets outside he could almost never have left Washington. The press conferences given by his staff almost every afternoon seemed to be speaking about a different place than that experienced by the rest of us living outside the walls. To me and to just about every other journalist in the city at the time, Bremer seemed to be the biggest buffoon imaginable.
(I have to admit that even in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina I had a sneaking suspicion that because things were so badly organised there, Bremer was involved somewhere along the line.)
Imagine my surprise then that in his memoir, My Year in Iraq; Paul Bremer says that none of it was his fault, that he knew all along that the US policy in Iraq was going very badly wrong. He now says that one of the very first things he wanted to do when he arrived in the country was to triple the number of US troops available to him just to get control of the place. Everyone who has ever been to Iraq since the war can see for themselves that 160,000 troops were never enough to run a country of more than 25 million people.
Immediately after the war, people who had been oppressed for generations and who had no stake in the country, set out to take revenge on the state. Looting became so widespread that even the electricity wires running along the roadsides were stolen. The US reaction was to disband the police and the Iraqi army, putting hundreds of thousands of disaffected people on the streets. With so few troops the US army didn't even try to put a stop to the destruction and Iraq is still paying the price for that.
But it now appears that while Bremer was putting a brave face on things in Baghdad, his requests for more and more troops were being ignored by Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld and by President George Bush. Time and again Rumsfeld ignored the requests for troops, never even bothering to reply on a couple of occasions. From reading the extracts made available so far, it seems that as far as Rumsfeld was concerned the Iraqis could fend for themselves amid the anarchy unleashed by the war.
We all knew that there was no post war plan, but the sheer extent of the lack of planning revealed by Bremer is truly shocking. Even more revealing is how little either Rumsfeld or Bush appears to care about what has been happening in the country.
When Saddam was finally captured just over two years ago Iraq was a place full of hope and expectation. People wanted things to change and when things only changed for the worse, the goodwill which was there towards the Americans and the rest of the world evaporated. That goodwill was not only wasted, it was squandered and things have now reached such a state that it will never return and it will take a decade to repair the country.  Funny thing is that the goodwill disappeared not because of the presence of American troops, but because there was not enough of them.
Fergal Keane is a reporter for RTÉ's Five Seven Live