Iraq is Back.....

Those who have followed (or at least tried) Iraq's progress since the withdraw of all U.S. military personnel in 2011 know that Iraq has been on a long descent into chaos. The sources of the descent are multiple, but are largely anchored in unwillingness of Iraq's Shiite dominated government to compromise with the Sunni and Kurdish minorities in the country. Instead, the levers of power have been used to settle old scores, alienate enemies, and consolidate power. I wholeheartedly agree with those who argue that the lion's share of the responsibility for all of this rests with Iraq's government (see article).

The rapid advance of ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) into some of Iraq's most important cities is yet another example of the perils of "presidential doctrines" I wrote about in my previous post. Foreign policy is tough and seldom presents officials with simple choices. To the degree Obama Doctrine can coherently be described as the use of "necessary force," the advance of ISIS, and the related conflict next door in Syria, continue present the administration with an almost unfathomable set of difficult problems in deciding if, where, how, and when force should be deployed. If foreign policy were an old silent Hollywood western, we'd start lobbing missiles at the guys with the black hats. But it's not a Hollywood film.

Even if there are no good solutions for American policy makers, there are plenty of boo-birds tossing around diagnoses of what has gone so rapidly off the rails, many of them pointing to President Obama. House Speaker John Boehner yesterday said the president had been "taking a nap" as Iraq has been spinning out of control. Senator McCain, a regular critic of Obama's foreign policy, called for the resignation of the President's entire national security team (see link). For those interested, the Rand Corporation produced a lengthy diagnosis of America's failures in Iraq that makes for sober reading (PDF via this link).

However, when looking for source material for what is transpiring today, it's hard to ignore some of the "what ifs" that flow from Coalition Provisional Authority Orders No. 1 and No. 2 in the spring of of 2003; the de-Ba'athification degree issued by CPA Administrator, Paul Bremer.


In the immediate aftermath of the US invasion in April of 2003, Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party was outlawed. It was, in many ways, a reasonable action to take. Similar actions had been taken in postwar Germany and Japan to eliminate a major source of power and oppression throughout the country. But CPA Order No. 1 (May 16, 2003) went further and permanently banned anyone with Ba'ath Party membership from holding public office. The idea was to initiate some confidence in the entire Iraqi population that the United States was serious about the transformation of Iraq away from a dictatorship and ideally toward some kind of pluralistic society anchored by a non-partisan civil service. Great idea, but the Bush Administration underestimated the degree to which de-Ba'athification would undermine the ability of a New Iraq to actually do that. The simple fact was that too many of Iraq's jobs depended on Ba'ath Party membership in order to hold them. De-Ba'athification precluded some of the regime's most odious cronies from holding office, but the CPA Order No.1 effectively fired people occupying some of the most basic of jobs in the country; people for whom Party membership was nothing more than a perfunctory requirement.

The United States needed allies in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and Iraq's long-suffering Shiite majority needed to be brought into the fold along with Northern Iraq's restive Kurdish population, if a post-Saddam Iraq was going to have a chance. Yet, CPA Order No. 1 was too sweeping and arbitrary. Moreover, while Iraq's Sunni minority needed to account for its oppressive actions under Saddam Hussein's brutal rule, the path to reconciliation and reconstruction should have been handled differently. CPA Order No. 1 effectively transferred the levers of power and oppression from Sunnis to Shi'as. The result fueled much of the bloody score-settling that took place between 2004-2007 before the U.S. troop surge began the quell some of the violence in 2007 and 2008.

For insights into how the de-Ba'athification order came to be, I went back to Paul Bremer's memoir about his year in Iraq (see link). In it, Bremer recalls receiving pre-departure briefings from Don Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith in late April 2003 which included discussions about a draft de-Ba'athification decree. The message was clear from the Pentagon, sweeping de-Ba'athification was imperative. In short, do it! Bremer claims he was cognizant of the implications of a sweeping degree for running the government and that his inclination was to target Ba'ath Party members in the highest levels of government.

Once in theatre, Bremer assured himself that CPA Order No. 1 would allow him enough flexibility to grant exceptions to the sweeping order. Yet, he also acknowledges the incapacity of the CPA to actually make those determinations. Bremer's memoir paints a picture of a well-intentioned, ambitious, but highly inexperienced CPA staff struggling to grasp the scale and complexity of the situation they confronted. Many of the Americans in the CPA were relatively inexperienced, often seeing service in Iraq as a means of rapid career advancement. Of course, many were also bright-eyed idealists who sought to make a difference. Yet, in too many cases, they struggled to graft their limited experience onto Iraqi problems, often with the advice of local, or in some cases ex-patriot, Iraqis with complex, often self-serving (Ahmed Chalabi), agendas of their own. For a vivid, and depressing, account of these challenges, I recommend Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

The problems created by CPA Order No. 1 were then compounded by CPA Order No. 2, (May 23, 2003) disbanding Iraq's entire military and intelligence services (that's a lot of jobs). Once again, the real goal seemed to be a purge of Saddam's most loyal and oppressive instruments of power. As stated in his memoir, Bremer's hope was to quickly reintegrate the least odious members of the old military and intelligence structure into the New Iraqi Army. Yet, the CPA's capacity to actually deal with this problem seems to have been glossed over.

It was at that point the breakdown between Washington (the Pentagon and the White House) and Bagdhad (Bremer's CPA) seems to have begun. Bremer claims in his memoir that the Pentagon was deeply involved in drafting CPA Order No. 2. Yet, controversy erupted when the White House suggested Bremer had acted largely on his own and that disbanding the army wasn't what the Bush Administration had in mind (see link). The remainder of Bremer's memoir about Iraq depicts a proconsul increasingly isolated; falling out of favor with Rumsfeld, getting less direct access to the President, and dealing with a security situation that was rapidly deteriorating through 2004. Indeed, it's not hard to interpret much of what followed as something of a set-up for Bremer to be the fall-guy for much of what subsequently went wrong.
 
Responsibility for the current mess hardly rests with one person. However, it's hard not to think about what might have been had CPA Orders 1 and 2 been conceived differently? It doesn't seem, for example, as though another process, such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid, was ever seriously considered as a means of bringing all sides together and perhaps build the conditions for a federal state (see Rand report noted earlier).

There were plenty of American failures in Iraq, many of which are being rehashed and/or compounded as Iraq seems to unravel before us. Yet, because the impact of CPA Orders No. 1 and No. 2 was to effectively transfer power from one group to another and disband one of the few institutions, the army, that might have been a source of stability (and jobs), those two decrees are not a bad place to start diagnosing the current problems. Had the CPA handled matters differently, Iraq might not be the basket-case it is today. It might not be a shining example of a liberal democratic state, but it might not be the weak, sectarian battle field it has become.