<< We now know that the Baath Party responded to Iraq's rapid defeat in the conventional war by going underground. And it used that honeymoon period to build its strength--as the "Party of Return"--for the guerrilla campaign that really kicked off in the late summer of 2003 >>
Wall Street Journal REVIEW & OUTLOOK The Viceroy's Apologia L. Paul Bremer's selective Iraq history. Wednesday, October 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. Former viceroy L. Paul Bremer did 14 months of hard service in Iraq, so it is a special shame to see that he is now squandering that legacy by blaming others for what's gone wrong there. All the more so when he doesn't even have the history right. That's our reaction to yesterday's political tempest over quotes from Mr. Bremer faulting the Pentagon and Bush Administration for having too few troops in Iraq. To hear Mr. Bremer's version of it, he arrived in Baghdad on May 6, 2003, to find "horrid" looting and instability, and an "atmosphere of lawlessness" that was allowed to grow because "we never had enough troops on the ground" to stop it. Mr. Bremer revised his remarks slightly late Monday, saying in a statement that "I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq." But in a speech at DePauw University in September, Mr. Bremer said he had frequently raised the troop issue and "should have been more insistent about it," according to the local paper, adding that "the single most important change . . . would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout." You get the idea: Mr. Bremer isn't to blame because he was tossed into a bad situation that only got worse while his pleas for more troops were ignored. And this indeed would be a damning indictment if it were true. Trouble is, we haven't found a single other senior official involved in the war or its aftermath--in or out of uniform--who attests to Mr. Bremer's version of events. "I never heard him ask for more troops and he had many opportunities before the President to do so," one senior Administration official tells us. Or to be more precise, Mr. Bremer did finally ask for two more divisions in a June 2004 memo--that is, two weeks prior to his departure and more than a year after he arrived. We heard about his request at the time, but didn't think much about it after we learned that theater commander General John Abizaid was consulted and argued that it was better policy to train Iraqi forces to fill any void. Judging by our ultimate goal of Iraqi independence, and the success that mixed Iraqi and U.S. battalions had retaking Samarra over the weekend, General Abizaid was right. For that matter, if lack of troops was a problem, why didn't Mr. Bremer make better and more consistent use of the ones he already had? He was among those officials involved in the mistaken decision to have Marines stop short in Fallujah last April, and he has since defended that publicly. As for Mr. Bremer's claim that "horrid" conditions prevailed when he arrived in Baghdad, our own Robert Pollock and other reporters who were there attest otherwise. By early May 2003 the major looting was over, and the country was experiencing a postwar honeymoon of sorts. We understand Mr. Bremer's desire to explain why security has since deteriorated, but we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to win this war if we accept the argument that somehow that "looting" was the match that lit the insurgency. The truth is that the insurgency was already under way. We now know that the Baath Party responded to Iraq's rapid defeat in the conventional war by going underground. And it used that honeymoon period to build its strength--as the "Party of Return"--for the guerrilla campaign that really kicked off in the late summer of 2003. Although plenty of Iraqis warned of this threat, Mr. Bremer clearly underestimated it and failed to take the military and political steps that might have countered it. On the military side, Mr. Bremer pursued a two-year plan to build an army oriented toward external defense, not internal threats. And once General Abizaid convinced him of the need for an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, Mr. Bremer envisioned it as a garrison force and resisted its use in counter-insurgency operations. He also rebuffed attempts by the Iraqi National Congress and the two major Kurdish parties to supply the Corps with loyal anti-Baathist fighters. When the April violence flared in Fallujah and Najaf, the 36th Battalion of the ICDC--the only one the parties had been allowed to create--was the only one to prove its worth in battle. (The 36th has been fighting with us in recent days in Samarra.) On the political side, Mr. Bremer underestimated the extent to which putting an early end to the occupation was important. He initially resisted the creation of the Governing Council altogether, and when he allowed it to happen gave it too little power. He also delayed implementing the democracy we had said we came to bring to Iraq, and he ultimately had to be told by Washington to agree to Shiite demands for elections at an earlier date. We're not saying an Iraqi face would have changed everything. But something like the current Allawi interim government could have been created much earlier, with the potential to reveal the insurgency as the Baathist revanchism it is. As we say, Mr. Bremer was given a tough job in Iraq, and he's taken a lot of unfair criticism for some of the things he did right, such as officially dissolving the Baath Party and other structures of the old regime. But he is hardly helping the cause of victory now by criticizing his former colleagues, especially in a way that obscures the hard lessons we've learned in Iraq in the past 18 months.
