Bremer replaced Gen. Jay Garner, who seemed intent on building an Afghan-style puppet government and maintaining the public veneer of Iraqi self-governance, while ensuring a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq.15 Garner himself was heavily criticized during his three-week tenure in Iraq, but he certainly was less ambitious than his successor when it came to realizing Iraq as the free-market laboratory envisioned by many within the administration and the neocon intelligentsia. Garner was, by most accounts, a military man, not a committed ideologue. The Washington Post described Bremer as “a hard-nosed hawk who is close to the neoconservative wing of the Pentagon.”16 This was further emphasized by the fact that Dick Cheney sent his own special assistant, Brian McCormack, to Baghdad to serve as Bremer’s assistant.17 Bremer also reportedly relied heavily on the disgraced Iraqi exile, Ahmad Chalabi, for advice on internal politics in Iraq. Almost immediately upon Bremer’s arrival in Baghdad, some Iraqis viewed him as another Saddam, as he began issuing decrees like an emperor and quashing Iraqi hopes of self-governance. “Occupation is an ugly word,” Bremer said upon his arrival in the country. “But it is a fact.”18
During his year in Iraq, Bremer was a highly confrontational viceroy who traveled the country in a Brooks Brothers suit coat and Timberland boots. He described himself as “the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.”19 Bremer’s first official initiative, reportedly the brainchild of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputy, Douglas Feith, was dissolving the Iraqi military and initiating a process of “de-Baathification,”20 which in Iraq meant a banishment of some of the country’s finest minds from the reconstruction and political process because party membership was a requirement for many jobs in Saddam-era Iraq. Bremer’s “Order 1” resulted in the firing of thousands of schoolteachers, doctors, nurses, and other state workers, while sparking a major increase in rage and disillusionment.21 Iraqis saw Bremer picking up Saddam’s governing style and political witch hunt tactics. In practical terms, Bremer’s moves sent a firm message to many Iraqis that they would have little say in their future, a future that increasingly looked bleak and familiar. Bremer’s “Order 2”—disbanding the Iraqi military—meant that four hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were forced out of work and left without a pension. “An Iraqi soldier was getting $50 a month,” said one Arab analyst. “Keeping these men and their families in food for a year would have cost the equivalent of three days of U.S. occupation. If you starve a man, he’s ready to shoot the occupier.”22 In his book on the Iraq War, Night Draws Near, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid wrote, “The net effect of Bremer’s decision was to send more than 350,000 officers and conscripts, men with at least some military training, into the streets, instantly creating a reservoir of potential recruits for a guerrilla war. (At their disposal was about a million tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, freely accessible in more than a hundred largely unguarded depots around the country.)”23 One U.S. official put the number of out-of-work Iraqi soldiers higher, telling The New York Times Magazine, “That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.”24 According to Bremer’s orders, some soldiers were given a month of severance pay, while Iraqi commanders were given nothing. Shortly after Bremer’s order was issued, former Iraqi soldiers began to organize massive demonstrations at occupation offices—many housed in former palaces of Saddam’s. “If we had fought, the war would still be going on,” said Iraqi Lt. Col. Ahmed Muhammad, who led a protest in Basra. “The British and the Americans would not be in our palaces. They would not be on our streets. We let them in.” Muhammad warned, “We have guns at home. If they don’t pay us, if they make our children suffer, they’ll hear from us.”25 In an ominous warning of things to come, another former Iraqi military commander, Maj. Assam Hussein Il Naem, pledged: “New attacks against the occupiers will be governed by us. We know we will have the approval of the Iraqi people.”26
In the meantime, Bremer exacerbated the situation as he stifled Iraqi calls for direct elections, instead creating a thirty-five-member Iraqi “advisory” council, over which he would have total control and veto power. Bremer banned many Sunni groups from the body, as well as supporters of Shiite religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr, despite the fact that both had significant constituencies in Iraq. The future prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said that excluding these forces “led to the situation of them becoming violent elements.”27 Within a month of Bremer’s arrival, talk of a national uprising had begun. “The entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans’ face if they don’t end their occupation,” declared tribal chief Riyadh al-Asadi after meeting with U.S. officials who laid out the Bremer plan for the country.28 “The Iraqi people did not fight the Americans during the war, only Saddam’s people did,” Asadi said. “But if the people decide to fight them now, [the Americans] are in big trouble.”29 Bremer staunchly ignored these Iraqi voices, and as the bloody impact of his decision to dissolve the military spread, he amped up his inflammatory rhetoric. “We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or, if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country,” he declared.30
By July 2003, Bremer began referring to Iraq in the first-person plural. “We are eventually going to be a rich country,” Bremer said. “We’ve got oil, we’ve got water, we’ve got fertile land, we’ve got wonderful people.”31 According to Time magazine, he toured the Iraq National Museum that month, in the aftermath of the massive looting of Iraq’s national treasures—including by U.S. forces and journalists. As museum officials showed Bremer a collection of ancient gold and jewelry, Bremer quipped, “Which one can I take home for my wife?” As he made the remark, according to Time, “a member of his security detail interrupted, informing him of reports of four grenade attacks near Bremer’s palace headquarters. Minutes later Bremer climbed into a waiting SUV and headed back to the office, managing a few hurried handshakes as he left. Later that day a U.S. soldier was shot and killed while guarding the museum.”32
He also made no bones about his religious influences. Taking a page from the Christian zealot Gen. Jerry Boykin, Bremer spoke of his divine guidance. “There is no doubt in my mind that I cannot succeed in this mission without the help of God,” Bremer said a month after arriving in Baghdad. “The job is simply too big and complex for any one person, or any group of people to carry out successfully…. We need God’s help and seek it constantly.”33 This perspective seemed to be a family affair. Bremer’s brother Duncan ran for Congress in 2006 in the home district of James Dobson’s Colorado-based Focus on the Family. “I want to be God’s man in Washington,”34 he said. He ran on a far-right platform and opposed exceptions to any abortion ban that would allow abortions for victims of rape or incest, saying, “We’re killing the wrong person in that case.”35 During his unsuccessful campaign, Duncan Bremer held up his brother’s role in Iraq as evidence of his own foreign policy experience, saying he had visited Iraq while Paul Bremer was heading the occupation. Duncan Bremer declared during his campaign, “While I prefer that the Islamic Jihadists convert to my world view and receive the benefits of it, my point is that they must give up their world view and their particular version of Islam in order for us to have a peaceful world. From a geopolitical point of view, it does not matter whether they convert to ‘peaceful Islam’ if that be a religion, or Buddhism or whatever, as long as they give up their religious ideology.”36 Paul Bremer’s wife, Francie, whom Dobson called a “prayer warrior,”37 told a Christian publication that “her husband viewed his work in Iraq as a chance to bring the light of freedom to the people of Iraq after decades of darkness there.”38