The American engagement in Iraq has been looked at from many perspectives, including the flawed intelligence that provided the war’s rationale, the failed effort to secure an international mandate, the rapid success of the invasion, and the long ensuing counterinsurgency campaign.

This book focuses on the activities of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its administrator, L. Paul Bremer, who governed Iraq from his arrival on May 12, 2003, to his departure on June 28 of the following year. It is an account of that occupation, seen largely from American eyes—mostly from Americans working in Baghdad for the CPA.

It is based on interviews with many of those in Baghdad and Washington responsible for setting and implementing occupation policy, on the memoirs of American and Iraqi officials who have since left office, on journalists’ accounts of the period, and on nearly 100,000 internal CPA documents to which the authors were allowed access.

This book recounts and evaluates the efforts of the United States and its coalition partners to restore public services; reform the judicial and penal systems; fight corruption; reduce inflation; expand the economy; and create the basis for a democratic constitution, free elections, and representative government. It also addresses the occupation’s most striking failure: the inability of the United States and its coalition partners to protect the Iraqi people from the criminals and extremists in their midst.

This account is based largely on primary sources that include, in particular, the unclassified archives of the CPA. Because the CPA was a hastily improvised multinational organization, an unusually high portion of its work was, in fact, done on an unclassified basis. Nevertheless, a fuller history of the period will have to await the future release not just of classified CPA documents, but of the much more voluminous material held in Washington and by the U.S. military.

A comparable history of Combined Joint Task Force-7 (CJTF-7), the CPA’s military counterpart, would shed further valuable light on this critical period. Perhaps even more important to a fully rounded account of the period will be the development and exploration of Iraqi sources.

In its occupation of Iraq, the United States fell far short of the ambitious objectives set out by the Bush administration. This book illustrates how and why. It seeks to evaluate the CPA’s performance not just against the benchmarks set in administration rhetoric but also against the record of numerous other, more or less contemporaneous, efforts at postwar reconstruction and reform. Iraq was, after all, not the first, but the seventh society that the United States had helped liberate and then tried to rebuild in little more than a decade, the others being Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

The United Nations conducted an even larger number of nation-building missions over this same period. Iraq was among the largest and most challenging of these efforts, but it was not the first such attempt and will not be the last. It is useful, therefore, to judge how American efforts in Iraq stack up against other attempts to reform and reconstruct societies emerging from conflict.

Visit Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority Download Page

You can download Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority in PDF format.

Paperback: 275 pages
Publisher: RAND Corporation (June 25, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0833046659
ISBN-13: 978-0833046659

SUMMARY
L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, with a broad mandate and plenary powers. As administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, he was charged with governing Iraq and promoting the development of a functioning democracy that, it was hoped, would serve as a model for the entire Middle East. Bremer could dispose of all Iraqi state assets and direct all Iraqi government officials. He possessed full executive, legislative, and judicial authority. His instructions from Washington were quite general, and for the most part oral. Over the next several months he received plentiful advice but little further direction.

As a practical matter, Bremer’s powers were much more limited than they appeared. He had no direct authority over 98 percent of official American personnel in Iraq. They were under military command. Most Iraqi officials had abandoned their offices, which had in turn been ransacked in rampant looting that had stripped most public facilities throughout the country to the bare walls, and beyond. The Iraqi army had deserted en masse, as had much of the police force.

Several billion dollars in Iraqi funds were immediately available, but beyond this ready cash, the state was basically broke and producing no further revenue. Washington was still under the impression that the occupation would largely pay for itself and had made provision for only limited financial support to reconstruction. As a result, the CPA relied, throughout its lifespan, principally on Iraqi money to fund both reconstruction and Iraqi government operations.

Neither could Bremer count on much help from the rest of the world. The invasion had been launched against the advice of several of America’s most important allies. Many of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, were hostile to U.S. efforts and suspicious that the United States might eventually want to overthrow their regimes as well. The decision to treat Iraq, for legal purposes, as a conquered nation further increased the controversy associated with the enterprise.

The occupations with which most Iraqis were familiar were the British control of their country after World War I and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, then in its fourth decade. These were not reassuring precedents. An alternative to formal occupation would have been a UN-authorized “peace enforcement operation,” as in Bosnia or Kosovo. That sort of arrangement might have attenuated, but not eliminated, Iraqi and regional resistance to the American presence.

The price for such an international endorsement would have been some level of international oversight. In the bitter aftermath of the failed attempt to gain United Nations Security Council approval of the invasion, neither the United States nor the UN was interested in having the latter assume such a role in Iraq’s governance.

On May 22, 2003, the UN Security Council formally recognized but did not endorse the United States and the United Kingdom as occupying powers. Attempts were made to enlist as many coalition countries as possible, but with limited success. The United Kingdom had contributed a large contingent of troops for the invasion but soon scaled back its contribution to the occupation to less than 10 percent of the total. Other allied contingents were even smaller and generally less capable. Unlike the Balkans, where America’s allies had contributed 75–80 percent of the soldiers and money, the United States was going to have to man and pay for this operation largely on its own. ...

Comments (0)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment