Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [113]
On April 9, U.S. forces captured Baghdad, and the world watched live as jubilant Iraqis toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. I felt a mixture of both sadness at the needless death and suffering the war had caused and hope as I looked at the many Iraqis celebrating the promise of a better future. When the statue fell, it was like a switch had been thrown across the Arab world. The images flashed on TV from the Arabian Gulf to Morocco and around the world. Even before it hit the ground, my phone began ringing. On the other end were many of the ninety-nine prominent Jordanians who had questioned our position. They were calling to congratulate me on “my wisdom and judgment” in keeping Jordan out of the conflict. “We knew Saddam would not last,” they said. “We were with you all along.” I was amazed how easily some of the elite would change their colors to win favor.
I was sure that the United States and its allies would win the war, but I had no idea how badly they would handle its aftermath.
Chapter 20
“We Will Be Greeted as Liberators”
Conventional wisdom in Washington held that removing Saddam Hussein and imposing a new Iraqi government would be as simple as replacing a lightbulb. In an interview shortly before the war, Vice President Dick Cheney said:
I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.... The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
Once the war ended, this rosy view began to look more and more misguided. “It’s going to be a bloodbath,” I had told my friends in America. In my conversations with friends in the region, we almost universally shared a sense of foreboding about the aftermath of the war in Iraq. I remember several conversations with Egyptian president Mubarak in which we both expressed concerns that the invasion would lead to unforeseen negative consequences that we would be dealing with for decades.
In June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, Jordan hosted a meeting of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea, and during the conference I met L. Paul Bremer, the newly appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the interim Iraqi government established by the United States. The previous month, on arriving in Baghdad, Bremer had issued two now infamous orders: to pursue an aggressive de-Baathification policy, and to dissolve the Iraqi army.
I pleaded with Bremer not to dissolve the army, and warned him that it would blow up in all of our faces. I told him that I understood the rationale behind the process of de-Baathification, but that it needed to apply only to those at the top with blood on their hands. To be a taxi driver or a teacher in Saddam’s Iraq, you had to be a member of the Baath Party. I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance and would create a power vacuum that someone would have to fill.
The army was one of the only functioning institutions inside Iraq. Together with other security networks, it guaranteed Saddam’s survival. But it was also in large part responsible for social stability. Disbanding it was crazy—like deciding to fire all the cops, firefighters, and ambulance drivers in New York City all at once because you do not like the mayor. You would have hundreds of thousands of people with military training and access to small arms and explosives, sitting at home with no jobs in a desperately poor and brutalized country that had just come through a war. Baathists, feeling vulnerable,