Truth - Al Franken [109]
The United States had declared war on Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi declared war right back—this time, without the support of the Pentagon.
14 Werewolves of Washington
Having been accomplished once, the mission was accomplished a second time, on June 28, 2004. At an understated ceremony held two days early deep inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, L. Paul Bremer handed over a leather-bound document transferring sovereignty from the mysteriously constituted Coalition Provisional Authority to Iyad Allawi, America’s handpicked interim prime minister.
Within two hours, Paul Bremer had flown out of Iraq and was onto his next assignment, a nationwide after-dinner speaking tour that went off without a hitch. Until, that is, conference organizers at the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers released some excerpts from his remarks at their annual summit. Bremer, now liberated from Iraq, felt free to speak his mind about the looting. “We paid a big price for not stopping it, because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” he told the agents and brokers. “We never had enough troops on the ground.” The implications for the insurance industry were clear. Do not write any insurance policies for anything in Iraq. But the media saw wider implications. Perhaps things weren’t going so well in Iraq after all. When a reporter dug up a previous Bremer speech at DePauw University, the plot thickened still further. Bremer had told his audience at DePauw:
The single most important change—the one thing that would have improved the situation—would have been having more troops in Iraq in the beginning and throughout. Although I raised this issue a number of times with our government, I should have been more insistent.
The implications for the students at DePauw were clear. Do not enlist in the U.S. Army after graduating from DePauw. Not only was the situation on the ground out of control, but the Bush administration was refusing to adapt, fearing that increasing troops levels would be tantamount to admitting a mistake.
Despite the occasional stumble, Bremer’s speaking tour was a well-deserved victory lap. Bremer had left his mark. Iraq was well on its way to becoming whatever it was going to become.
There is a monument to L. Paul Bremer in Iraq. And it’s as perfect a symbol as the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore, and an even better one than the Washington Monument, which I never “got.” It’s called a Bremer wall. And there’s not just one Bremer wall, but many, many Bremer walls.
A Bremer wall is a twelve-foot-high, five-ton reinforced concrete barrier that proved to be an innovative solution to the biggest problem in postwar Iraq: explosions.
The Bremer walls represented Bremer’s legacy in many ways. Instead of providing security for all Iraqis, Bremer walls provided security for people lucky enough to live inside the Bremer walls—people like Paul Bremer. They reinforced the Iraqis’ perception that our mission was not to protect them, but to protect ourselves from them. This is what reconstruction in Iraq has become. Building barriers instead of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure.
Let me give you a concrete example. The concrete. Before the war, Iraq had nineteen operating cement factories and was a major cement exporter. Because of looting and electrical outages, the plants are now operating at only one sixteenth of their prewar capacity. None of these factories has been awarded a single contract to supply the reconstruction. Instead, the cement for the Bremer walls must be imported from Turkey, driven in via an increasingly hazardous route by increasingly reluctant Turkish truck drivers. As a result, the cost of each Bremer wall is approximately $1000. Iraqis, who are currently enjoying an unemployment rate of anywhere from 27 percent (the official U.S. government figure) to a more likely estimate of more than 50 percent, say they