It didn’t take long for the story of the U.S. massacres in Fallujah to spread across Iraq and the Arab world. Within a few weeks, folk songs appeared on the radio, praising the people of Fallujah for bravely confronting the occupation forces.64 DVDs went on the market with footage of the aftermath of the massacres interwoven with images of resistance attacks against U.S. patrols and scenes of epic Arab movies. In one DVD, footage from the movie Black Hawk Down depicting the slaughter of U.S. forces in Somalia is accompanied by the voice of Fallujan singer Sabeh al-Hashem, who sings: “Fallujah, attack their troops and no one will be able to save their injured soldiers. Who brought you to Fallujah, Bush? We will serve you the drink of death.”65 In another song, Hashem declares, “The people of Fallujah are like wolves when they attack the enemy.”66
All of this would prove eerily prophetic in less than a year’s time, when four Blackwater soldiers found themselves driving through the center of Fallujah. In the meantime, back in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., a neoconservative “terror expert,” L. Paul Bremer, was preparing to head for Baghdad, where he would direct the occupation for the Bush administration. Erik Prince would soon ready his private soldiers to serve as the elite personal bodyguards for Bush’s man in Iraq.
CHAPTER FIVE
GUARDING BUSH’S MAN IN BAGHDAD
L. PAUL Bremer III arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, and moved into Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris River.1 Perhaps Bremer’s greatest legacy in Iraq, where he served as the proconsul of the U.S. occupation for a little more than a year, was overseeing the transformation of the country into the epicenter of anti-U.S. resistance in the world and presiding over a system in Iraq that resulted in widespread corruption and graft within the lucrative world of private contracting. At the end of Bremer’s tenure, some $9 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, according to a comprehensive audit done by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq. Bremer responded that the audit held his Coalition Provisional Authority to “an unrealistic standard.”2
Like Erik Prince, Bremer is a conservative Catholic convert who cut his teeth in government working for Republican administrations and was respected by right-wing evangelicals and neoconservatives alike. In the mid- 1970s, he was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s assistant. During the Reagan administration, he served as Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Alexander Haig, Reagan’s imposing and powerful Secretary of State. At the height of Reagan’s bloody wars in Central America, Bremer was promoted to Ambassador at Large on terrorism. In the late 1980s, Bremer left government, joining the private sector as the managing director of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates. A favorite “terrorism expert” among neoconservatives, Bremer was influential in developing the concepts for what would become the “war on terror” and the Department of Homeland Security.3 A year before 9/11, he protested CIA guidelines that “discouraged hiring terrorist spies,” arguing that they should be lifted to permit the CIA to “actively recruit clandestine informants.”4 When the 9/11 attacks happened, Bremer was already a fixture in the “counterterrorism” community, having been appointed in 1999 by House Speaker Dennis Hastert as chair of the National Council on Terrorism. At the time of the attacks, Bremer was a senior adviser on politics and emerging risks for the massive insurance firm Marsh & McLennan. The company had a headquarters in the World Trade Center staffed by 1,700 employees, 295 of whom died in the attacks.5
Forty-eight hours after 9/11, Bremer wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Our retribution must move beyond the limp-wristed attacks of the past decade, actions that seemed designed to ‘signal’ our seriousness to the terrorists without inflicting real damage. Naturally, their feebleness demonstrated the opposite. This time the terrorists and their supporters must be crushed. This will mean war with one or more countries. And it will be a long war, not one of the ‘Made for TV’ variety. As in all wars, there will be civilian casualties. We will win some battles and lose some. More Americans will die. In the end America can and will prevail, as we always do.” Bremer concluded, “[W]e must avoid a mindless search for an international ‘consensus’ for our actions. Today, many nations are expressing support and understanding for America’s wounds. Tomorrow, we will know who our true friends are.”6 In an appearance on Fox News at the time, Bremer said, “I would hope that we would conclude that any state which was involved in any way, giving any kind of support or safe haven to that group, will pay the ultimate price.”7
A month after 9/11, Bremer headed up a new division at Marsh & McLennan, specializing in “terrorism risk insurance” for transnational corporations. The division was called Crisis Consulting Practice and offered companies “total counterterrorism services.” To sell this expensive insurance to U.S. corporations, wrote Naomi Klein in The Nation, “Bremer had to make the kinds of frank links between terrorism and the failing global economy that activists are called lunatics for articulating. In a November 2001 policy paper titled ‘New Risks in International Business,’ he explains that free-trade policies ‘require laying off workers. And opening markets to foreign trade puts enormous pressure on traditional retailers and trade monopolies.’ This leads to ‘growing income gaps and social tensions,’ which in turn can lead to a range of attacks on US firms, from terrorism to government attempts to reverse privatizations or roll back trade incentives.”8 Klein likened Bremer to a computer hacker who “cripples corporate websites then sells himself as a network security specialist,” predicting that “in a few months Bremer may well be selling terrorism insurance to the very companies he welcomed into Iraq.”9 Shortly after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, his former boss at Marsh & McLennan, Jeffrey Greenberg, announced that 2002 “was a great year for Marsh; operating income was up 31 percent…. Marsh’s expertise in analyzing risk and helping clients develop risk management programs has been in great demand…. Our prospects have never been better.”10
In mid-April 2003, Dick Cheney’s then Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had contacted Bremer about taking “the job of running the occupation of Iraq.”11 By mid-May, Bremer was in Baghdad. His appointment as both Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq was met with immediate controversy, even among those who had worked with him. One former senior State Department official who served with Bremer labeled him a “voracious opportunist with voracious ambitions,” saying, “What he knows about Iraq could not quite fill a thimble.”12 Klein argues that, in Bremer, the Bush administration was not looking for an Iraq specialist, but rather tapped him because he “is an expert at profiting from the war on terror and at helping US multinationals make money in far-off places where they are unpopular and unwelcome. In other words, he’s the perfect man for the job.”13 That certainly seemed to be the view of Henry Kissinger, who said of Bremer at the time, “I don’t know anyone who could do it better.”14