NEW YORK - In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi
government insider details in 500 pages the US 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."
Iraqis stand around a crater after a pickup truck loaded with
artillery shells exploded in the town of Mahmoudiyah, Iraq, 30 kilometers
(20 miles) south of Baghdad, Sunday, April 8, 2007. At least 15 people
were killed in the attack. [AP]
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"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 US-British invasion of Iraq, he
also writes with unusual detachment.
The US- 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 US 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 US 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, US 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 US 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."