NOT WWII:

OUT ON THE STREET: The United States’ de-Baathification program fuelled the insurgency. Is it too late for Bush to change course? (JON LEE ANDERSON, 2004-11-08, The New Yorker)

On April 19, 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad, an advance “jump group” of Americans commanded by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner was flown into the city to manage the occupation of Iraq. One of the first to arrive was Stephen Browning, whose previous assignment had been as director of programs on the West Coast for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Two months earlier, Browning had been summoned to Washington to join a group of experts charged with planning for postwar Iraq. Within a day or two of his arrival in Baghdad, Browning was given the job of getting the Ministry of Health up and running.

Baghdad’s hospitals were in a calamitous state. Many had been looted, and the doctors and nurses had fled. In the Shiite slum of Saddam (now Sadr) City, home to two million people, clerics and armed vigilantes loyal to the radical Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr had taken control of the medical facilities.“When I went into the Ministry of Health, there was no clear leader, no one willing to say, ‘I represent the Iraqis for the health ministry,’” Browning recalled. “Then Dr. Ali Shinan al-Janabi, an optometrist who had been a deputy minister, stepped forward. He told us that he was a member of the Baath Party. And—well, the fact is there was no one else to go to. I asked around, did a lot of research, and almost everyone I spoke to seemed to regard him as an honorable figure, even though he was a Baathist. And, after getting to know him, I came to feel he was a brave and admirable man.”

Browning decided early on that in order to get things done he needed to work with members of the Baath Party. The Party had been virtually synonymous with Saddam Hussein’s regime; it was the instrument through which Iraqis were brutalized. At the same time, its members filled jobs at every level of society and anchored the middle class. On his own initiative, Browning says, he asked Shinan to sign a letter renouncing his membership in the Baath Party. Shinan did so, and Garner named him the acting Minister of Health. “We started working together,” Browning said. “We made real progress in a very short amount of time.”

A few weeks later, Browning and Shinan held a press conference. A reporter from the BBC asked Shinan if he was a Baathist. “He said he was, but that he had signed a letter of renunciation,” Browning told me. “The BBC guy insisted, though. ‘Will you denounce the Baath Party in front of us right now?’ Ali’s response was ‘This is not an issue right now; we need to move on with the emergencies we have facing us.’ And then he said, ‘I was just doing my job.’

“The minute I heard him say that—it sounded so close to what the Nazi sympathizers said in their own defense in Germany after the Second World War—I knew how it would sound to the press outside Iraq, in the West, and I knew right then and there that Ali’s political career was finished,” Browning said. “I walked out of the conference with him hand in hand, and the next morning told him what we had to do. Ali was fine about it; he asked only that he be allowed to continue working as an optometrist. I agreed. Ali said, ‘You are my brother.’ We both had tears in our eyes.”

Still, Browning was troubled by Shinan’s refusal to denounce the Baath Party, and he asked him why he hadn’t. “He told me that if he did so in public the vengeance on his family would be catastrophic. Which is probably true. There was nobody stopping anything from happening back then—our troops weren’t much in the way of a protection force.”

Browning asked Shinan to continue to assist him, and he agreed. A few days later, he disappeared. Browning later learned that Shinan and his family had left Baghdad. By then, an assassination campaign had begun against former Baathists who were coöperating with the occupation, and also against some who weren’t. The victims of the campaign, which is ongoing, have included doctors, engineers, and teachers, sparking an exodus of Iraqi professionals to other countries.

Not long after, Garner himself was fired, and President Bush named L. Paul Bremer III as the head of what became known as the Coalition Provisional Authority. On May 16, 2003, Bremer issued a sweeping ban of the Baath Party: all senior party members were barred from public life; lower-level members were also barred, but some could appeal. In effect, Bremer had fired the entire senior civil service. The origins of the decree have never been clarified, but Coalition officials I spoke to said they believed that Bremer was following orders from the White House. A week later, he disbanded the Iraqi Army.

Browning recalled a meeting that he and other officials had with Bremer before the announcement. “Bremer walked in and announced his de-Baathification order. I said that we had established a good working relationship with technicians—not senior-level people—of the Baath Party, and I expressed my feeling that this measure could backfire. Bremer said that it was not open for discussion, that this was what was going to be done and his expectation was that we would carry it out. It was not a long meeting.”

The order had an immediate effect on Browning’s work. “We had a lot of directors general of hospitals who were very good, and, with de-Baathification, we lost them and their expertise overnight,” he told me. At the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which was another of his responsibilities, “we were left dealing with what seemed like the fifth string. . . . Nobody who was left knew anything.”

An American special-forces officer stationed in Baghdad at the time told me that he was stunned by Bremer’s twin decrees. After the dissolution of the Army, he said, “I had my guys coming up to me and saying, ‘Does Bremer realize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out there and they all have guns?’ They all have to feed their families.” He went on, “The problem with the blanket ban is that you get rid of the infrastructure; I mean, after all, these guys ran the country, and you polarize them. So did these decisions contribute to the insurgency? Unequivocally, yes. And we have to ask ourselves: How well did we really know how to run Iraq? Zero.”

One of the issues we need to ponder for reference in future conflicts is the difference between de-Nazifying Germany after just over a decade of rule by Hitler vs. trying to do something similar in a country that had been run by the Ba'ath Party for forty years.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 23, 2004 10:01 AM