The Arrogance and Hubris of Jerry Bremer

by
Larry C. Johnson

As Jerry Bremer hits the media circuit to tout his new book, which chronicles his tenure as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, he insists that he and the Administration never anticipated that an insurgency would emerge in Iraq. I am sure Jerry believes what he is saying, but he is wrong. I tried to warn him and I tried to hook him up with genuine experts on Iraq before he went to Baghdad in the spring of 2003. Jerry refused to listen and declined the help. Although Jerry is a brilliant, capable man, he was unwilling to listen to others or accept facts that contradicted the Administration’s conventional wisdom. Jerry’s arrogance in Iraq was symptomatic of the entire Bush Administration’s approach to policy and accounts in large measure for the mess we now face.

My comments about Jerry Bremer are made as someone who considered himself a friend of Jerry’s. I have known L. Paul Bremer aka “Jerry” in various capacities for more than 25 years. We first met when I was an instructor in the Washington Semester program in 1980 and he was an up and comer at the State Department. Later he served as the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism at State Department (1987 thru 1989). I started working in that office shortly after he left. While I do not claim to be a close personal friend, I have had a professional relationship with him dating back to 1994 and was called by him on several occasions for a briefing on the latest developments in the counter terrorism community. I was in regular contact with him until he took the job in Iraq.

Warned About the Insurgency

In January of 2003 I was appalled by the misinformation being peddled by the Administration of George W. Bush regarding Iraq’s support for terrorism. Contrary to the claims by President George W., Iraq did not have operational ties with the Islamic extremists who attacked us and confined its support to groups that were attacking Israel and Iran. In fact, Iraq had never been implicated in any mass casualty terrorist attack.

I wrote a paper and circulated the draft among several friends and former colleagues, including Jerry Bremer. The paper prominently featured these judgments:

An invasion of Iraq will topple Hussein and eliminate Baghdad’s ability to develop or use weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future, but it will do little to destroy the infrastructure of radical Islamic terrorism responsible for the 9-11 attacks. In fact there is a serious risk that a U.S. led war against Iraq may crystallize the diffused anger in the Arab and Muslim world—a heretofore unattained goal of bin Laden and his followers—and persuade more Muslim youths to take up the terrorist banner against America and her citizens.

If we go to war we must prudently prepare for expanded terrorist activity, at least in the short term, from Islamic extremists and their sympathizers. While we can hope that a US invasion will unleash a pent up Jeffersonian democracy inside Iraq, odds are that the United States and its UN allies will be forced to occupy Iraq for the foreseeable future. No occupying force, no matter how benign or charitable, will avoid facing opposition at some point from the local population. Add to this mix a belligerent outsider, like Iran, and the potential for terrorist attacks against the “occupying” force increases dramatically.

Jerry responded by telling me I was missing the point. That it did not matter what Saddam’s record on terrorism was. We were going to war and he would be deposed. I tried to get the paper published but no one in the main stream media was interested.

Refusing to Understand Iraq

When information leaked out the last week of April 2003 that Jerry Bremer would replace Jay Garner as head of the CPA in Iraq I was thrilled. Knowing Jerry’s skill and competence I felt fairly certain he could try to bring order to the chaos that had become Iraq. I emailed him with the query, “why do you want to take a job that requires a 70% cut in pay, a 24-7 work schedule, and the guarantee that you will be blamed even if things go wrong”. He wrote back that he felt it was his patriotic duty. That’s the good side of Jerry—he is a patriot.

In a bid to help Jerry get his feet on the ground I offered to set up a meeting for him with Pat Lang. Pat, who is fluent in Arabic, who had served as Defense Attache in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, who had headed the DIA’s Middle East Division during the first Gulf War, and who had significant experience working inside Iraq, is a national treasure. Naïve me! I figured Jerry would jump at the opportunity to talk to Pat and get a handle on the challenges before him. He declined the offer.

In the subsequent weeks I learned that he was assembling a team comprised of many of the folks that had first worked for him in the State Department Counter Terrorism Office back in 1988. Folks such as Clay McManaway were heading to Iraq even though they had no Arabic language skills and no significant area experience.

If Jerry had listened to Pat he could have learned very important things about Iraq. Just one week before Bremer’s named surfaced as the new CPA Administrator, Pat Lang circulated an email (April 23, 2003) commenting on an article in the Washington Post by Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest, U.S. Planners Surprised By Strength of Iraqi Shiites. Pat, referring to Kessler and Priest, wrote:

These two folks have really "cracked the code" on this. I was told several weeks ago by European academic and Intelligence sources that a large scale infiltration of Iranian Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) into Iraq was underway with the ultimate aim of pre-positioning Shia forces for the day when armed resistance against the US may be necessary. I subsequently mentioned this on Wolf Blitzer's "Late Edition" and the "Lehrer Newshour" as well as in a number of radio and newspaper interviews. I mention this because it should be pathetically obvious that if one FORMER intelligence person could know this, then the US government with its vast sources of knowledge should easily have known it. It seems that the government did not, or at least the policy people in the government did not.

Why is that?

The answer lies in a statement that was made to me this morning by a deeply bitter and now alienated Arab World Intelligence expert still serving in the US Government. "Hey," he said, "You can't inform people who already know it all." This man has given up on trying to tell the geo-strategic geniuses now running American foreign policy the hard truths of what the Islamic World is really like. Why? Because they won't listen. They seem to believe that the idiosyncratic cultures of the rest of the world are largely irrelevant and are merely nostalgic fictions dear to the hearts of area "Experts" who are invested in them and who are obstacles to the imposition of a "modern" culture and psyche modeled on that of the United States.

Gingrich's attack yesterday on the "Arabists" of the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs was "of a piece" with the "tough guy" approach of many in OSD, the NSC and the Vice President's office. The call for the "re-organization" of State was really a call for the elimination of "Arabists," in other words, those with real knowledge and experience of the Arab and Islamic Worlds. This has been a long term goal of this "tough guy" group centered in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith.

Unfortunately, these "gentlemen" (who frequently abuse and bully intelligence people into silence) will not pay the price of their egomania.
No, soldiers will pay.

Pat was not prescient; he was merely a well informed expert. Regrettably his voice was ignored by Jerry Bremer and others at the Department of Defense. Jerry Bremer, George Bush, and Don Rumsfeld may try to reinvent history and claim, “nobody knew or could have imagined the chaos in Iraq”, but that is simply not true. After listening to Jerry this morning on Meet the Press defend his foolish decisions by accusing critics of playing 20/20 hindsight, I went back into my emails from that period and pulled out the following (another gem from Pat Lang):

This interesting e-mail is, I think, pretty close to "on the mark." In my opinion what is wrong with the situation in Baghdad stems directly from the badly flawed judgments which Rumsfeld and his civilian staff made about Iraq and the likely situation post-war. It is now up to poor Bremer to see if he can rectify the situation with the help of the US military. WPL continued