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Ex-Iraqi Cabinet Official Blasts
Occupation Missteps
CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP
Monday April 9, 2007
In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government
insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking"
mismanagement of his country _ a performance so bad, he writes,
that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be
liberators."
"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by
the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the
new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation
of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order,"
having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various
times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before
the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first
senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's
four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American
and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops
up repeatedly.
First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington
pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of
Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively
that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi
society," he writes.
What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance"
of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with
Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:
_ The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could
have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds
of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool
for the resistance.
_ Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam
Hussein's Baath party _ from government, school faculties and elsewhere
_ left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.
_ An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance
Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.
_ The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial
gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.
_ Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment
to be spirited away across borders.
_ The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline
at giveaway prices and draining the budget.
In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior
U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in
2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained
generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement."
Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister
in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping,
his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.
On U.S. reconstruction failures _ in electricity, health care and
other areas documented by Washington's own auditors _ Allawi writes
that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories"
merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."
For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's
explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.
The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive
corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million
Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police
kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers
have done.
As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in
Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their
narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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