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were tailoring their operations to the unique circumstances in their parts of the country. General David Petraeus, for example, held local elections in the northern city of Mosul soon after liberation. That was an action-oriented, aggressive approach that worked in that part of Iraq but may or may not have worked in other areas. I believed that one template was unlikely to fit the whole country. Iraq was too ethnically and geographically diverse for a nationwide model. But the CPA was a Baghdad-centric organization that too often handed down decrees for the whole country without regard for the differences from province to province.

When a U.S. Marine commander recommended holding local elections in June 2003 in Najaf, a city they judged was ready for an elected town council, Bremer objected.17 He did not seem to favor organic political development at the local level. It wasn’t until April 2004 that Bremer approved an order on the operations of provincial and local councils. He also seemed to see little value in engaging Iraq’s tribes, which I considered key forces for stability in Iraqi history.

I learned much later from Admiral Giambastiani that Bremer was uncomfortable with the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP). CERP was an enormously valuable way to allow American military commanders across Iraq to help fund small-scale development projects in their area of responsibility (AOR).18 The local military commanders knew which projects were needed to earn local support to make headway against the insurgency. Our military commanders were convinced the funds were often more valuable than bullets, but Bremer refused to allocate CERP money to the military from the Saddam government’s seized assets.

In July 2003, Bremer announced a new program for the CPA called “Achieving the Vision to Restore Full Sovereignty to the Iraqi People.” The document listed as the primary goal the “early restoration of full sovereignty to the Iraqi people” and added that the CPA “will not leave until we have succeeded in carrying out the President’s [Bush’s] and Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair’s] vision.”19 Bremer’s interpretation of that vision included improving water resource management, improving health care services, reforming the tax system, building a welfare safety net, improving education and housing, and creating a vibrant civil society.20 I was struck by the reality that our own country was still working on some of those areas two centuries after our independence.

Bremer’s ambitions went far beyond the limited role for the United States that the Department of Defense and the interagency process had planned for and well beyond the role that had been resourced. CENTCOM had planned to liberate Iraq and set up the rough framework for the country to govern itself. The military had not planned to occupy every corner of Iraq with an American soldier or to try to impose a Western-style democracy on the country. The result was that the CPA and Iraq ended up with the downsides of an occupation strategy and few of the benefits—and without the resources that might have allowed some mitigation. The means were not well linked to the ends. It would be several months before those of us in Washington fully recognized that such a shift in policy had occurred.

It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that there would be missteps in the aftermath of liberation in so unfamiliar a country. But in those critical early days, the ambiguities in fundamental strategy were harmful. Bremer’s arrival marked an unfortunate psychological change in Iraq—from a sense of liberation, with gratitude owed to the American military and our allies, to a growing sense of frustration and resentment that Iraq had come under the rule of an American occupation authority.*

The failure to establish an Iraqi interim government quickly was not the cause of every problem we faced in post-Saddam Iraq. The legacy of tyranny, the harmful actions of ill-intentioned neighbors, the catastrophic state of its infrastructure, the mistrust of foreigners, the ethnic and sectarian tensions,