Follow The Money, If You Can

As reported here, Paul Bremer, the former civilian administrator in Iraq, testified before a House oversight committee chaired by Henry Waxman in an effort to find out whether or not any money intended for Iraq’s reconstruction ended up with insurgents instead.

As you might expect, Bremer vigorously defended himself. But to get a reminder of what transpired under Bremer’s watch, let’s travel back to those heady days right after the statue of Saddam Hussein had fallen for a few minutes, OK (specifically, here).

Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" very well. He wears a business suit and combat boots. As the proconsul of Iraq, you might have thought he'd have more taste. But he is a famous "anti-terrorism" expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast army of international companies-most of them American, of course-and creating the first democracy in the Arab world. Since he seems to be a total failure at the "anti-terrorist" game-50 American soldiers killed in Iraq since President George Bush declared the war over is not exactly a blazing success-it is only fair to record that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well.

And how on earth could we have ever imagined longing for the day when only 50 of our troops had been killed after Dubya’s “Mission Accomplished” moment?

Indeed, anarchic violence is now being embedded in Iraqi society in a way it never was under the genocidal Saddam. Scarcely a day goes by when I do not encounter the evidence of this in my daily reporting work in Baghdad. Visiting the Yarrnouk hospital in Baghdad on Monday to seek the identity of civilians killed by American troops in Mansur the previous day, I came across four bodies Iying out in the yard beside the building in the 50C heat.

All had been shot. No one knew their identities. They were all young, save one who might have been a middle-aged man, with a hole in his sock. Three days earlier, on a visit to a local supermarket, I noticed that the woman cashier was wearing black. Yes, she said, because her brother had been murdered a week earlier. No one knew why.

And disbanding the Iraqi army soon after he became “viceroy” (and try telling me that a title like that didn’t have imperialist connotations - don't completely understand the difference between that and "proconsul," assuming there is one) was part of the reason for all of the violence described above. However, in an interview conducted two years ago, Bremer called it ".. the most important decision I made, and it had the effect of avoiding a civil war in Iraq.”

I hate to break the news to you, Paul, but your decision only postponed civil war. It didn’t avoid it.

And I found Bremer’s quote here darkly humorous (and again, this passage was written in 2005)…

Recent low levels of American public support for the Iraq effort can be explained partly because of the far-off setting, and because the two-year conflict remains unresolved, he said.

"Americans are can-do, impatient kind of people. They like to get on with things," Bremer said. "And this is tough stuff. Nation building is not something that happens overnight."

Well, pardon us, Paul, but as an American taxpayer, I get highly concerned when I hear about 363 tons of cash in stacks of $100 bills that are flown over on C-130 military cargo planes into a war zone that suddenly cannot be accounted for. That’s not called being “impatient.” It’s called “exercising common sense,” something that you apparently didn’t do when you called the shots over there (especially because, as you have so infamously noted here, you “didn’t see the insurgency coming”.

And of course, Bremer was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom by Dubya, who of course recognizes failure as success regularly (see Rumsfeld, Don).

Good for Rep. Waxman for making Bremer squirm a bit. It’s the least Bremer should have to endure, as opposed to these heroes who have paid the ultimate price.