US made the right decisions in Iraq

Once conventional wisdom congeals, even facts can't shake it loose.

These days, everyone "knows'' that the Coalition Provisional Authority made two disastrous decisions at the beginning of the US occupation of Iraq: to vengefully drive members of the Baath Party from public life and to recklessly disband the Iraqi army.

The most recent example is former CIA chief George Tenet, whose new memoir pillories me for those decisions (even though I don't recall his ever objecting to either call during our numerous conversations in my 14 months leading the CPA). Similar charges are unquestioningly repeated in books and articles.

Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.

Like most Americans, I am disappointed by the difficulties the nation has encountered after our quick 2003 victory over Saddam Hussain. But the US-led coalition was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussain modelled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services. We had no choice but to rid Iraq of the country's equivalent organisations to give it any chance at a brighter future.

Here's how the decisions were made. General Tommy Franks, the head of the military's US Central Command, outlawed the Baath Party on April 16, 2003. The day before I left for Iraq in May, Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith presented me with a draft law that would purge top Baathists from the Iraqi government and told me that he planned to issue it immediately. Recognising how important this step was, I asked Feith to hold off, among other reasons, so I could discuss it with Iraqi leaders and CPA advisers. A week later, after careful consultation, I issued this "de-Baathification'' decree, as drafted by the Pentagon.

The decree was not only judicious but also popular. Four days after I issued it, Hamid Bayati, a leading Shiite politician, told us that the Shiites were "jubilant'' because they had feared that the United States planned to leave unrepentant Baathists in senior government and security positions - what he called "Saddamism without Saddam''. Opinion polls during the occupation period repeatedly showed that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, including many Sunnis, supported de-Baathification.

We then turned over the implementation of this carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians. I was wrong here. The Iraqi leaders, many of them resentful of the old Sunni regime, broadened the decree's impact far beyond our original design. That led to such unintended results as the firing of several thousand teachers for being Baath Party members. We eventually fixed those excesses, but I should have made implementation the job of a judicial body, not a political one.

Modest revisions

Still, the underlying policy of removing top Baath officials from government was right and necessary. This decision is still supported by most Iraqis; witness the difficulties that Iraq's elected government has had in making even modest revisions to the decree.

The war's critics have also comprehensively misunderstood the "disbanding'' of Hussain's army. It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old army's reign of terror. It's no wonder that Shiites and Kurds, who together make up more than 80 per cent of Iraq's population, hated Hussain's military.

Moreover, any thought of using the old army was undercut by conditions on the ground. Before the 2003 war, the army had consisted of about 315,000 miserable draftees, almost all Shiite, serving under a largely Sunni officer corps of about 80,000. The Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalised and abused by their Sunni officers. When the draftees saw which way the war was going, they deserted and, like their officers, went back home. But before the soldiers left, they looted the army's bases right down to the foundations. So by the time I arrived in Iraq, there was no Iraqi army to disband. Some in the US military and the CIA's Baghdad station suggested that we try to recall Hussain's army. We refused, for overwhelming practical, political and military reasons.

So, after full coordination within the US government, including the military, I issued an order to build a new, all-volunteer army. By the time I left Iraq, more than 80 per cent of the enlisted men and virtually all of the noncommissioned officers and officers in the new army were from the old army, as are most of the top officers today. We also started paying pensions to officers from the old army who could not join the new one - stipends that the Iraqi government is still paying.

I'll admit that I've grown weary of being a punching bag over these decisions - particularly from critics who've never spent time in Iraq, don't understand its complexities and can't explain what we should have done differently. These two sensible and moral calls did not create today's insurgency. Intelligence material we discovered after the war began showed that Hussain's security forces had long planned to wage such a revolt.

No doubt some members of the Baath Party and the old army have joined the insurgency. But they are not fighting because they weren't given a chance to earn a living. They're fighting because they want to topple a democratically elected government and re-establish a Baathist dictatorship. The true responsibility for today's bloodshed rests with these people and their Al Qaida collaborators.

L. Paul Bremer was presidential envoy to Iraq and administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority from May 2003 to June 2004.