Baath Party. Some were slavish and brutal followers of Saddam; some were true believers. Many others were compelled to join the Baath Party to get along in their jobs and rise up in the omnipresent bureaucracies and other government institutions that dominated the economy, and to ensure that their children had educational opportunities in a country that had been ruled by the Baathists for decades. The very choice of the name of the edict showed its model—the denazification program in Germany after World War II. But that program had actually been applied quite differently in very different circumstances. Postwar Iraq was not postwar Germany, nor for that matter postwar Japan; and the Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer III was not the military administration of General Lucius Clay, America’s proconsul in postwar Germany, or the occupation in Japan under General Douglas MacArthur.
Initially, de-Baathification was meant only to lop off the top of the hierarchy, which needed to be done immediately. But as rewritten and imposed, it reached far down into the country’s institutions and economy, where support for the regime was less ideological and more pragmatic. The country was, as one Iraqi general put it, “a nation of civil servants.” Many schoolteachers were turned out of their jobs and left with no income. The way the purge was applied removed much of the operational capability from government ministries, dismantled the central government, and promoted disorganization. It also eliminated a wide swath of expertise from the oil industry. Broadly, it set the stage for a radicalization of Iraqis—especially Sunnis, stripped of their livelihood, pensions, access to medical care, and so forth—and helped to create conditions for the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq. In the oil industry, the result of its almost blanket imposition was to further undermine operations.
Aleksander Kwaśniewski, president of Poland, one of the countries in the “coalition of the willing,” argued with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that the post–World War II German model was misunderstood and was being misapplied. Rather, said Kwaśniewski, the United States should pay attention to the more recent model from Eastern Europe, where reformist wings of the former communist parties had been successfully integrated into the new political systems—an approach that had brought both cohesion and stability. Kwaśniewski’s Polish troops were welcomed into the coalition, but not his argument.15
The U.S. occupation arrived with a mélange of many ideas and analogies and lessons—ranging from a vision of a “New Middle East” to remembered film images of the joyous French tossing flowers at the U.S. soldiers liberating them from Nazi rule. Whatever their actual relevance to conditions in Iraq in 2003, these ideas nevertheless shaped the approach on the ground after the hostilities. Important realities of culture, history, and religion featured less.
The problem of inadequate troop levels was compounded by Order #2 by the Coalition Provisional Authority—“Dissolution of Entities”—which dismissed the Iraqi Army. Sending or allowing more than 400,000 soldiers, including the largely Sunni officer corps, to go home, with no jobs, no paychecks, no income to support their families, no dignity—but with weapons and growing animus to the American and British forces—was an invitation to disaster. The decision seems to have been made almost off-hand, somewhere between Washington and Baghdad, with little consideration or review. It reversed a decision made ten weeks earlier to use the Iraqi Army to help maintain order. In bluntly criticizing the policy to Bremer, one of the senior U.S. officers used an expletive. Rather than responding to the substance of the objection, Bremer said that he would not tolerate such language in his office and ordered the officer to leave the room.
The immediate effect of the army’s dissolution was “incendiary,” and the consequences would prove enormous. A plan was formulated to create a new military, but the ambition was pathetically small—initially just 7,000 troops, later lifted to 40,000. A separate oil police had guarded the entire petroleum sector. That too was dissolved, adding to the risks for the workers in the oil industry and leaving the oil system even more vulnerable to pillage and sabotage. 16
RAMPANT LOOTING
Looting seemed to have been endemic in Iraq whenever authority broke down, going back to the 1958 revolution. Widespread looting had broken out in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Yet that risk too seems to have gone largely unnoted in the planning for the postwar situation. In 2003 looting and vandalism started immediately, and on a massive scale. There was no Iraqi Army to help prevent the looting, but now a large