Paul Bremmer, the Washington-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that administered the occupation of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq in 2003-04, wrote a brief letter to the Economist trying to refute the common belief that the Iraqi state was effectively dismantled in the wake of the dictator's fall, i.e. that the blanket de-Baathification pushed by the Allies hollowed out Iraqi government ministries. No, Bremmer writes, only the top 1 percent of the Baath party was purged - and the government kept running just fine.
You'd think from this letter - especially the concluding protest that Iraq's economy grew by a whopping 43 percent (according to the IMF) in 2004 - that today we're celebrating Iraq as the shining example of Western-imposed Arab democracy that it is.
Bremmer is right that the situation in Iraq wasn't as bad as the near-daily headlines of IEDs, suicide bombings, and skirmishes with militants and insurgents suggested: life was pretty normal for most Iraqis in the early post-Saddam years, and it got better but for the simple fact that years of sanctions, followed by the proudly hailed US "shock-and-awe" campaign to bomb the country back to the stone age, meant that things couldn't have gotten any worse.
But removing the top 1 percent of the Baath party was effectively an emasculation of the state apparatus in the one realm that overrides all others: security. The Baath leadership was removed because it was structured in the manner of a police surveillance state which oversaw the organs of daily governance and administration. It was so designed to give Saddam's family and inner circle a seamless channel to transfer their security assets to any part of the bureaucratic apparatus in order to protect it against both non-state threats and internal disloyalty. Though this system had weakened over the years after the first Gulf War (1991), it was still the only thing holding most of the country together. And it was this mechanism of internal security that, once dismantled, has proven impossible to satisfactorily replace to the present day.
Closely related to this, what Bremmer wouldn't want to mention is that the decision to disband the 400,000-strong Iraqi army - for the same reason that its command structure was designed according to Saddam's Baath police state - was the immediate cause of the insurgency that erupted in the Sunni triangle in late spring and early summer 2003.
Granted, the Baath leadership couldn't have been left intact as is: some shakeup was indeed necessary post-Saddam, not least while he was still at large. But American, Western, and Shia Iraqi aversion to the Sunni Baathist police state as a whole - not just to Saddam's immediate clan or tribe - drove thousands of critical ex-military and ex-security personnel into the ranks of the insurgency in the early days, which should instead have been co-opted (as many were later) to snuff out foreign jihadists like Zarqawi who wasted no time planting themselves into the security vacuum of the Sunni triangle.
Ultimately, what makes a state? Quite bluntly, the monopolization of violence in a given geographic area - no more, no less.
As Mao Zedong would say, revolutions are violent and nasty affairs: they're not dinner parties. Today, we Americans are paying the price for inciting revolutions when in fact all we had the resources (and guts) to accomplish was small-scale, cosmetic dictator swaps.
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