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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Iraqi chronicles U.S. failures

Charles J. Hanley Associated Press

NEW YORK – In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country – a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007, Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”

“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country’s four-year ordeal. It’s an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly.

First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes.

What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

•The Americans disbanded Iraq’s army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

•Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein’s Baath party – from government, school faculties and elsewhere – left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

•An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq’s many state-owned enterprises.

•The CPA’s focus on private enterprise allowed the “commercial gangs” of Saddam’s day to monopolize business.

Bremer, who wrote his own account of his time in Baghdad, contended his authority was undermined by “micromanagement” from Washington, where he thought officials in the administration tried “to set me up as a fall guy” for problems in Iraq.

Though U.S. generals in Iraq repeatedly asked the administration to reinstate dismissed officers from Saddam’s army, Bremer recounted in his book “My Year in Iraq,” they were consistently refused at the highest levels. In the end, however, senior Defense Department officials sought to distance themselves from the decision to disband the old Iraqi army, and it became “etched into America’s consciousness” that it was Bremer who “had made a grave error in demobilizing the Iraqi forces,” he wrote.