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The Iraqi government recently reported that 85,000 civilians were killed between 2004 and 2008 during the worst of the sectarian violence that pushed the country to the brink of full-scale civil war. Thousands more were seriously injured.
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De-Baathification: The Origins of Failure

Of all the things that have gone wrong in the Iraq war and occupation, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) orders #1 and #2 – the de-Baathification of Iraqi society, now rank as some of the most egregious and costly mistakes taken so far, if not the worst!

Paul Bremer

Shortly after Paul Bremer took control of the CPA in late April of 2003, he received orders from the Bush administration to issue these two sweeping orders. These orders essentially fired Baath Party members throughout Iraq, no matter how essential they could be in keeping the society up and running. The second order fired the entire Iraq military establishment (numbering between 200,000 and 400,000) as well as the national police force.

These de-Baathification orders fired 15,000 teachers, all of the top professional ministers and their staffs within the previous government, as well as countless other civil servants with a wide range of skills and experiences – the very people Iraq would need to be on the job after the fall of Saddam.

Retired Army General Jay Garner at the time was Director of the Office of Reconstruction & Humanitarian Assistance, which he realized was going to be an assignment with only a threemonth window of opportunity, before Bremer took charge.

Garner had been led to believe that any de-Baathification plan would be a very modest and targeted plan. When he heard about the two orders, and realized how destructive and counterproductive they would be, he joined with the CIA station chief in a confrontational meeting with Bremer. Everyone had been blindsided by the orders, but Garner thought they could convince Bremer to hold off.

But Bremer was dismissive. He stood behind the orders, which he said had come from the pentagon. (We now know that the primary cheerleaders for the orders included Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, both now long gone.)

According to Garner, the CIA chief stared down Bremer and ended the meeting with this chilling and accurate prediction:

“Fine, go ahead and issue the orders, but know that by tonight you will have driven 50,000 Baathists underground. And you will come to regret this!”

In Mosul, General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, defied the orders. He allowed local tribal leaders to be involved in the decision-making process. He realized, like many in the military, that there was a vast difference between hardcore Baath party members who would remain the enemy of a free Iraq, and the greater number of party members who joined the party in order to keep their jobs or to protect their families from intimidation, or worse.

Petraeus and others understood that best thing you can do to prevent an insurgency from taking root is to keep people working, keep them from becoming marginalized and bitter.

The de-Baathification orders rendered thousands of Iraqis unemployed with the sweep of two edicts. And it left critical functions of their society to come to a grinding halt.

Bremer’s staff, filled with neocon “true believers” like Meghan O’Sullivan, considered Petraeus a maverick. One Bremer official is quoted as saying, “We make policy here! His job is to implement it. We’re in charge here.”

Now General Petraeus is in charge, and he has to deal with the terrible mess the De-Baathification program helped create. With the help of Plan V that can now be done.

The situation eventually got worse with the appointment of Ahmad Chalabi to head the Supreme National Committee for De-Baathification.

Chalabi, a Shiite, with suspicious ties to Iran, is the last person who will bring sanity to this program. His department is now under the wing of the De-Baathification committee within the Iraqi parliament, which is dominated by Moktada al-Sadr loyalists.

The Maliki government – no friend to the Sunni population – now controls this disastrous policy that we originally implemented.