Paul Bremer Is Still A Shitheel

Last Wednesday saw the release of the Chilcot Report, basically the U.K.'s "How did we go so wrong" report regarding the thought process leading up to and the aftermath of the decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The report's focus is, of course, focused on the U.K.'s involvement and processes, but a condemnation of the cheerleader nation condemns the US as the spearhead, so that's why Paul Bremer wrote a piece for the Guardian trying, vainly, to portray the Iraq War as a noble thing plagued by flawed execution instead of the inherent disaster that it is.

Bremer concedes that not enough planning was done for the aftermath of Saddam's removal, saying that his forwarded emails with reports on higher troop levels were ignored. As has been widely documented, having no plan was a purposeful strategy by the Bush administration so they could sell the public on a short, inconsequential war- developing plans that involve massive troop levels for years after the fact put a slight wrinkle on that sales package. It's one thing to make plans and hide them from the public eye, it's an entirely different thing to make no plans whatsoever and just make it up as you go along.

But, pointing out the flaws for effective planning after the invasion is about as difficult an observation as "water is wet" or "fire burns when you touch it", so Bremer gets no credit for pointing that out. His real points of contention are on the report's critiques of the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government and the justifications for going to war in the first place. 

Bremer starts with the de-Baathification, saying that it was always going to be a necessary move for Iraq to move forward past Saddam's rule. And in that, he has a point. If you want to move a country into a new future, you have to purge what has come before it. But the central criticism of the whole de-Baathification strategy is and always has been that it burned down all of Iraq's institutions without setting up anything to replace them. Part of purging the old is you have to do it responsibly, you have to take into consideration that the old political powers are the only powers who know how to effectively manage the country you're now in charge of. Bemer draws a parallel to the Nazi's and their subsequent purge from authority as the Allies and the Soviets took power in their respective Germany's. As Bremer says, to be in anything resembling power in Saddam's government, you had to be in the Baath party. T0he key point Bremer insists on missing though, is that being in the party so you can get a job doesn't mean you're actually loyal to that party's ideas or goals, it just means you're saying what you have to say to guarantee your next paycheck.

The other central point of the critique, that Bremer just skims by, is that by completely dissolving the army, the de-Baathification plan basically just created a wealth of people with military and fighting experience with a serious grudge against the new powers-that-be, and when the Sunni revolts came calling, a large part of those fighters where men who suddenly had an avenue to voice their displeasure.  And when the Iraqi government stopped paying those same factions not to revolt, well, here came ISIS knocking on the door with cash in hand.  

So it's not hard to see how colossal a fuck-up Bremer's signature policy when he was running Iraq was, and in defense of this, in a government that still, to this day, can't provide consistent power, water, or sanitation services, and with a sizable chunk of the country under enemy control staffed by the same army he kicked to the curb, Bremer's sole defense on why this wasn't a complete disaster is that he re-hired some teachers.  Bra-fucking-vo, dude, bra-fucking-vo.

Bremer than moves on to justifying the decision to invade Iraq in the first place with an argument I still can't believe a person is making in 2016 with a straight face. Here's his pitch, in full:

"Context is essential to the decision to go to war. The September 11 attacks showed a massive new threat, particularly if terrorists could get their hands on WMD. Iraq had been designated a state sponsor of terror by successive American presidents of both parties.

After 9/11, no American president could dismiss the possibility that a state sponsor would provide devastating weapons to terrorist groups, or use them itself. Iraq had WMD programs for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in 1988."

That bit about context is what kills me the most. Saddam, for all his horrors, ran a secular dictatorship. He fucking hated Al Qaeda and every other religious extremist terror group out there, mostly because they would have no problem coming for him, the secular apostate who suppressed their version of Islam as stringently as he possibly could. The bit about Iraq being a state sponsor of terrorism is fucking gold as well, since the only reason George H.W. Bush had to reclassify Iraq as a state sponsor was  because of all the work he did as Reagan's VP taking Iraq off the list so the U.S. could sell Saddam weapons to use in their war against Iran.  Weapons like, yes, the chemical agents Saddam used against the Kurd, an attack we had full knowledge was going to occur but did absolutely nothing to stop.  So it's bit hypocritical to use that same event as a cudgel to beat Saddam with and justify his removal.

Bremer also puts in a heroic effort to ignore the fact that Hans Blix was in Iraq investigating the possibility that Saddam either still had WMD's that we sold to him or that he was still operating programs to create them.  Blix's findings that Iraq had no WMD's and no capabilities to create them were blithely dismissed by the administration, with Condoleezza Rice famously saying they didn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.  And, of course, after the invasion was complete we also spent time looking for any signs of a weapons program and came up with exactly nothing, proving all the critics of the war right that Saddam had nothing and could create nothing.  So again, it's weird to invoke the context of the time when that context provides all the evidence that the justifications for the war were complete bullshit.

Bremer wants to portray himself as a man who was there at the time and learned from his mistakes.  He wants to show the world that he, and his bosses', embarked on a righteous cause and only erred in the means they used to pursue that cause. 

He is none of those things.  

By refusing to own up to the consequences of his own actions and by still holding on to justifications for the war that have been solidly discredited for over a decade now, Bremer shows himself to be same piece of shit who had no idea what he was doing when he burned a country that used to be an axis of civilization to the fucking ground.