Desert sturm

While Bremer's accomplishments deserve our gratitude, he bears a heavy responsibility for his failure to admit to the true state of affairs in Iraq. By Dexter Filkins

My Year in Iraq:The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. L Paul Bremer III with Matthew McConnell. Simon & Schuster. €28.30

The most startling moment in My Year in Iraq, L Paul Bremer III's memoir from his days as the head of the American occupation, comes near the end, when violent uprisings were sweeping most of the central and southern parts of the country in May 2004. With the whole American enterprise verging on collapse, Bremer decided to secretly ask the Pentagon for tens of thousands of additional American troops – a request that, as the rest of his book makes clear, was taboo in the White House and Pentagon.

Bremer turned to Lt Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, and asked him what he would do with two more divisions, as many as 40,000 more troops. General Sanchez did not hesitate to answer. "I'd control Baghdad," he said. Bremer then mentioned some other uses for the soldiers, like securing Iraq's borders and protecting its infrastructure, to which General Sanchez replied: "Got those spare troops handy, sir?"

This is a jaw-dropping scene, and probably in ways that Bremer did not intend. To nearly anyone who spent time in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it was scandalously obvious that the American military, for all its prowess, lacked sufficient numbers of soldiers to bring the country under control. Iraqis knew it. American officers, beneath their breath, often said it. A two-mile drive on the road to Baghdad International Airport, the scene of daily suicide attacks, confirmed it.

Yet for most of the 14 months that Bremer oversaw the occupation, he and his aides, and General Sanchez and his, often seemed the only people in Iraq who refused to acknowledge the anarchy in the streets. Though confronted by the growing guerrilla insurgency and the brazen behavior of armed militias, Bremer and other senior American officials routinely batted down any suggestion that they needed more soldiers.

Instead, Bremer and his aides would point to the Iraqi police and army, which, they claimed, totalled 200,000 men by April 2004. Anyone who had had even a passing encounter with Iraqi soldiers or police officers during that time worried that American officials were inflating their numbers and exaggerating their quality. Sure enough, later that month, when Sunni and Shiite guerrillas rose across the country, the Iraqi security services disintegrated and disappeared.

Thanks to Bremer's book, we now know he harboured doubts of his own. He knew, or at least strongly suspected, that the fledgling Iraqi security forces weren't up to the job. He just didn't say so in public.

Bremer's concern reflected a broader disquiet: "Coalition forces were spread too thin on the ground," he writes. "During my morning intelligence briefings, I would sometimes picture an understrength fire crew racing from one blaze to another."

What are we to make of such an admission? Bremer evidently believed he was acting courageously in the face of intense pressure from the White House, dead set against any increase in American forces. And indeed his account illustrates what can only be described as the irresponsibility of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior military commanders, like Gen John Abizaid, who, if Bremer is to be believed, brushed aside the concerns of their most senior man on the ground. As early as the fall of 2003, Rumsfeld and others were actually planning to reduce the number of American troops, even as the guerrilla insurgency intensified. Bremer fought valiantly to keep the troops he had, and he deserves no small credit for that.

But Bremer bears a heavy responsibility for keeping silent – and so does General Sanchez. If we can assume that Bremer's recollection is correct, then General Sanchez' remarks indicate that Baghdad was indeed out of control, that both he and Bremer knew it and that without more troops, it was likely to stay out of control. And so it did, for many months after Bremer and General Sanchez left Iraq. Neither man ever gave a public assessment of the security situation that remotely approached the one Bremer gives here.

By staying silent, Bremer ensured that there would be no public debate on the merits of deploying more American troops. By staying silent, he helped ensure that there would be little public discussion over the condition of the Iraqi security forces, whose quality he doubted. When his request for more troops was ignored, his silence helped ensure that the troops would never come.

Why did he fail to speak out? Bremer doesn't say. For a memoir, this is a remarkably unreflective book. The aides gathered around President Bush are known for their loyalty; Bremer's case seems to be one where fealty to his superiors – or a desire to keep his job – overtook the needs of Americans and Iraqis on the ground.

It's debatable, of course, whether 30,000 or 40,000 additional American soldiers would have made much of a difference. After the looting and anarchy that sprang forth when the American military conquered Iraq in March and April of 2003, the situation may have grown beyond the control of any foreign army.

And in fact, American troops eventually did quell the 2004 uprisings. But it took many months and hundreds of dead and wounded soldiers to do so. The violence in Iraq, measured by attacks on Americans and on the Iraqi government, never returned to those early levels.

The lawlessness following the American invasion was allowed to metastasise on Bremer's watch, helping to make Iraq the grim and uncertain place it is today: that is, somewhere just short of civil war.

There are fascinating and valuable stretches of this book, apart from Bremer's comments on troop levels. He recounts in detail the drafting of Iraq's interim constitution and the heretofore secret dialogue he carried on with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite leader, during the tumultuous period that led to free elections and the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty. These are Bremer's principal accomplishments, and he deserves our gratitude for bringing them off.

His account of the confrontation between four leaders of the new Iraq and Saddam Hussein in his prison cell, in the hours after his capture in December 2003, is thrilling to read. "Saddam Hussein," roared Mowaffak al- Rubaie, who had endured torture at the hands of Baath Party goons, "You are cursed by God! You are cursed by God!"

But sadly, it's a measure of Bremer's book that the best parts are those that involve events he writes least about. And this memoir is also emblematic of Bremer's tenure as the chief of the American occupation. For 14 months, he presided over an enterprise that, for all its energy, often seemed more about press conferences staged inside the Green Zone than the dangerous and uncertain reality outside.

"Iraq has before it a path toward a better future," Bremer writes at the end of his book. "It is a future of hope for all Iraqis." Well, yes, but like much of My Year in Iraq, that is only partly true. The Iraq Bremer built has a functioning government and a framework for a democracy that is now coming into bloom. But the anarchy loosed by the American invasion threatens everything the Americans and Bremer have achieved. Those are the two legacies of Bremer's reign, and we do not yet know which of them will prevail.p

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