Truth - Al Franken [104]
Unlike Garner, Bremer didn’t have to be ordered to ignore the guidance of the postwar planners. Right after unpacking his toothbrush, Bremer began a sweeping de-Baathification of the Iraqi government, throwing the baby out with the Baath water.2 On May 16, his first decision was to fire 120,000 Iraqi officials—teachers, engineers, civil administrators, and public health officers, most of whom were nominal Baath Party members in the same way my wife and I are supporting members of the Museum of Natural History, even though we haven’t been there since our children were very small. Apparently Bremer’s impressive résumé didn’t prepare him for the task of distinguishing essential civil servants from the cadre of hard-core Saddam loyalists who had to be held to account for the atrocities they had committed, such as torturing prisoners.
Giving 120,000 pink slips to people with vitally needed skills would accelerate the collapse of whatever institutional infrastructure remained. Bremer’s next move, firing 400,000 more government employees, would complete it. In this case, it wasn’t just that they would have been helpful in the reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts. It was also that they had guns. On May 23, the multilingual Bremer fired the entire Iraqi military and canceled their pensions, neglecting to first disarm them. With military employment now out of the question, these angry, Kalashnikov-owning young men were obliged to find other ways to keep themselves busy. You know what they say about the Devil and idle hands.
It was a dramatic departure from the commonsense approach of the departed Jay Garner:
GARNER: Our plan then is we were going to use most of the army, the Iraqi army, for reconstruction. We were going to hire them and make them, for lack of a better word, reconstruction battalions and use them to help rebuild the country.
FRONTLINE: Did that seem like a good plan to you at the time?
GARNER: Seemed like a great plan, yeah, because they had the skill set to do everything I thought we needed to do. I mean, they know how to fix roads. They know how to fix bridges. They know how to move rubble around. They are all trained, to a certain degree. They knew how to take orders. They have a command-and-control system over them. They have their own transportation, you can move them around, that type of thing. So that was a—that was a good concept.
Without the army to fix bridges, etc., these tasks naturally fell to Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old outfit, which had secretly received a $7 billion no-bid contract coordinated by the vice president’s office. Halliburton’s financial future was secure and, along with it, the financial future of the Cheney family, which was receiving $12,000 a month from the company and owned 400,000 options on its stock—one for each former Iraqi soldier now roaming the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah, and Najaf.
But without the Iraqi army and civil service to help, the job at hand was too big for even Halliburton. Companies like Bechtel, DynCorp, and the newly formed Custer Battles LLC stepped into the breach.
To oversee the work of these contractors, Bremer didn’t want to rely on the dinosaurs who had successfully managed the transition in the Balkans in the nineties. He wanted fresh blood; energetic new faces, who wouldn’t be boxed in by the conventional wisdom. It wasn’t that Clinton’s approach hadn’t worked. It was that Clinton was involved. And Paul Bremer knew exactly where to find people who hadn’t worked for Clinton.
Among the new hires were Casey Wasson, twenty-three, a recent college grad who needed a job; Anita Greco, twenty-five, a former teacher, who also needed a job; John Hanley, twenty-four, a website editor (i.e., also needed a job). And then there was Scott Erwin, twenty-one, a former intern for Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay, who didn’t need