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By Root 3713 0

and the political vacuum all contributed to the instability. Nonethe-less, I am persuaded that many of these difficulties became worse as a result of the delay in ceding authority to the Iraqis. The CPA’s top-down approach inadvertently stoked nationalist resentments and fanned the embers of what would become the Iraqi insurgency. Many Iraqis associated the CPA with imperiousness and heavy-handedness. In his book War and Decision, Doug Feith argues that the main problem with the CPA was not the commonly cited decisions on de-Baathification or the disbanding of the Iraqi army that gave rise to an insurgency. He suggests that the CPA’s policies and methods fueled the insurgency in other, more subtle ways.21 The broader impression of an overbearing U.S. authority issuing edicts to the Iraqi people buttressed the anticoalition arguments of militants like Muqtada al-Sadr and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This played well into propaganda that the United States was trying to dominate and exploit Iraq rather than liberate it and return it promptly to Iraqi control.

Bremer issued two important orders soon after he arrived in Baghdad. In subsequent years both orders became characterized as the two original sins of the occupation and the cause of the difficulties in the years that followed. At the time, however, they were greeted with approval by a great many Iraqis and were put into place with the best of intentions.

CPA Order Number 1 concerned the policy of de-Baathification—the removal from the government of officials in the top layers of Baath Party.22 Many were minority Sunni Arabs who had run Iraq for three decades. The Baath Party was less of a political party than a symbol of the state, much like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union or the Nazis in Germany. As such, it had become a widely hated vestige of Saddam’s regime. Bremer, rightly in my view, thought it was important to make clear to Iraqis that the Baathists who had served a regime that had terrorized the citizenry, deployed the secret police, murdered regime opponents, and authorized torture chambers and rape rooms were not going to return to power.

But we knew that many thousands of Iraqis had been forced into the Baath Party and were members in name only. Under Saddam, almost anyone who wanted to advance professionally had to join, including schoolteachers, doctors, and engineers. There was no desire or intention to punish everyone in the system. As I had noted immediately after my trip to Baghdad at the end of April 2003, in certain sectors Baathists were keeping the fragile Iraqi infrastructure from collapsing.23 The goal of de-Baathification was to target those at the top of the party, the ones who were so closely linked with the former regime that they could not be trusted to serve in the post-Saddam government. The de-Baathification policy in fact was akin to the Allies’ de-Nazification policy in Germany after World War II, which barred some 2.5 percent of the German population from postwar government service. In Iraq, by contrast, DoD officials intended the policy to cover only one tenth of 1 percent of the population.24

Though the policy later found few defenders at the top level of the administration, de-Baathification initially had broad support among the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. The approach was promoted in the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project that, as noted, later became touted in the media as the neglected plan for postwar Iraq.25 Two weeks before the war began, an NSC staff member briefed the President on the policy. He explained that there were 1. 5 million members of the Baath Party in Iraq but proposed removing only the 1 to 2 percent who were what he called “active and full members.” All told, there were some twenty-five thousand people who could lose their government jobs. There were no objections from any of the principals present at the NSC meeting. However, the President did express some skepticism. “It’s hard to imagine punishing twenty-five thousand people,” Bush said. He then asked the critical question: “Who will