Of all the mistakes made in the Iraq invasion, the CPA’s de-Baathification program, instituted under Paul Bremer, is one that has found few defenders.
With that acknowledged mistake nearing a 4-year anniversary, there are signs that efforts are being made to actually correct the mistake and to acknowlege that the efforts to create “a neo-con utopia”, as ably described by Naomi Klein in her September 2004 piece,
“Baghdad Year Zero” (Harpers) were fundamental in creating the clusterfuck Iraq is today.
Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn’t fazed by chaos. He’d been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia’s civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, “was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them.”
He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned. The U.S. occupation administration in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), placed ideology over pragmatism, he believed. His boss, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, refused to pay for repairs needed to reopen many looted state-owned factories, even though they had employed tens of thousands of Iraqis. Carney spent his days screening workers for ties to the Baath Party.
“Planning was bad,” he wrote in his diary on May 8, “but implementation is worse.”
When he returned to Washington, he made little secret of his views. They were so scathing that his wife lost a government contract. He figured his days of working on Iraq were over.
Until a phone call on Tuesday.
David Satterfield, the State Department’s Iraq coordinator, was on the line with a question: Would Carney be willing to go back to Baghdad as the overall coordinator of the American reconstruction effort?
The reversal of de-Baathification, the increase of reconstruction projects outside the Green Zone, the re-opening of state factories, may come years too late, these rehabilitated critics concede.
Most painfully, the other obstacle comes in the form of..Ahmad Chalabi:
Chalabi is the chairman of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, which continues to have ultimate authority to decide which ex-Baathists can return to work and which cannot. He has prepared draft legislation that calls for easing some elements of Bremer’s policy, but he said parliament has been unable to act on it because a majority of the members of the legislature’s de-Baathification committee belong to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s political party, which walked out in November to protest a meeting between Maliki and Bush.
Speaking by telephone from Baghdad, Chalabi said he expects progress “pretty soon.”But he said the law will not contain a key demand of the U.S. government: a sunset clause that would abolish the commission, effectively depriving Chalabi of political influence. He called it unconstitutional.
Chalabi said he heard Bush’s call for swift action on the de-Baathification law, but he emphasized that he and his fellow Iraqis, not U.S. officials, are in charge of the legislative timetable.
“We don’t feel any pressure,” he said.
