Bremer's Tale: The Top American in Iraq

DATE January 10, 2006 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Paul Bremer regarding his new memoir: "My Year in
Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

As the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, my guest, Paul
Bremer, oversaw the rebuilding of the country and its political process from
May of 2003 to the end of June 2004, when sovereignty was returned to the
Iraqis. He was the senior American civilian in Baghdad and the president's
personal envoy. Now he's written a memoir called "My Year in Iraq: The
Struggle to Build a Future of Hope." It describes his challenges and
frustrations trying to manage a transition to democracy when the
infrastructure was dysfunctional and insurgency was mounting and, as Bremer
wrote in a memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, `We were trying to
cover too many fronts with too few resources.'

Paul Bremer, welcome to FRESH AIR.

In retrospect, were you not prepared for how bad conditions were in Iraq when
you got there?

Mr. PAUL BREMER (Former Head, Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq): Well,
I have to say that I was surprised by, in particular, how run down the economy
was. I really did not get a good sense of that and found a situation that
was, I think, quite a lot more difficult--the economic situation--than I had
anticipated.

GROSS: Let me quote something that Peter MacPherson has said, the top
economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority: "The electricity
system is substandard, marginal and erratic. The supply of water in one of
the most fertile areas of the world is unreliable. The health system is a
disgrace and the communications and transportation system is a fourth-world
quality. Overall, the quality of the infrastructure of Iraq is much worse
than that in other countries that have successfully managed transition." Did
the state of the infrastructure--was that a clue about how difficult it was
going to be to create a transition from Saddam Hussein to democracy?

Mr. BREMER: Yes, very much so. That memo that you quoted from Peter
MacPherson who was one of my advisers on economic matters, I think came to me
within a month of my arrival. By then I had visited a number of very rundown
places: a refinery, a textile factory, a couple of cement factories which I
cover in the book. And so I'd seen with my own eyes what had happened. And I
think what happened here was you had really misallocation of capital,
underinvestment in maintaining facilities that had taken place over a period
of almost 30 years. That--Peter's memo, in particular, mentions health care.
Saddam Hussein during the 1990s cut health care by 90 percent, 9-0 percent,
and took a country that was one of the healthiest in the region to be the
country with the shortest life expectancy and highest infant mortality. It
was an example of kind of catastrophic economic mismanagement, and it
certainly made the transition more difficult.

GROSS: A lot of rebuilding in Iraq was supposed to be funded by Iraq's own
oil industry. An adviser told you that Iraq's three major refineries were so
old and poorly maintained under Saddam Hussein that that part of the industry
might soon cease to function altogether. And, you know, oil revenues have not
been able to fund the rebuilding of Iraq. Do you think that the Bush
administration was uninformed about what a disaster Iraq was in terms of the
infrastructure and the oil industry? Or do you think that they knew, but they
didn't completely inform you or the American public? Or do you think they
were delusional about how easy things were going to be in spite of the
problems? Like what do you think?

Mr. BREMER: I think they're probably--really, the most important problem was
that we did not have good information about how run down the economy was. I
don't think anybody was hiding it from me. They just didn't know. It isn't
that surprising that we didn't know, given the fact that, first of all, we'd
had no diplomatic relations for more than a decade. So we had nobody on the
ground who go out and visit textile factories. Secondly, by the way, even if
you had diplomats on the ground, because of the totalitarian nature of the
country, you would not have been able to go visit that textile factory that I
saw and see how badly done it was. So part of the problem was, and a major
part was, we just didn't know. The oil revenues actually have gone up quite
substantially, and last year in 2005 the oil revenues were five times what
they were the year I was there. So--and part of that, of course, is the oil
price increase, but part of it also is getting the production back up to about
two million barrels a day.

In the long run, Iraq will be able to finance a great part of its own
reconstruction. But we obviously had to step in--we, the American
people--with $18 billion on reconstruction ourselves.

GROSS: Do you think that the UN sanctions against Iraq, the economic
sanctions, contributed to the bad shape the economy was in?

Mr. BREMER: Well, you'd have--I suppose it had some effect. In certainly
made, in some cases, it more difficult for the Iraqis to get equipment. But
the real problem in the '90s was not that. It was Saddam's continued
misallocation of capital. The health care I mentioned earlier is a good
example. I mean, the whole oil-for-food program was set up on the premise
that it would provide Iraqis with health care and food that they needed. But
in the '90s, Saddam instead cut health care spending back to about 50 cents
per capita. One of my first decisions there was to increase health care
spending from $17 million to $935 million. That was money that the Iraqis
could have spent on health care during the '90s but didn't. And it was clear
that it was getting around the sanctions and getting around the oil-for-food
program that caused most of the problems.

GROSS: Two of your most controversial decisions were two of your first
decisions when you got to Iraq. I want to quote George Packer here from his
recent book, "The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq." And he writes about you,
"Before he had been in Baghdad four days, Bremer made three momentous
decisions. He dissolved the Iraqi army, he fired high-ranking Baathists from
the civil service, and he stopped the formation of an interim government. A
more cautious viceroy would have gauged the lay of the land and spoken with a
range of Iraqis before taking such far-reaching steps." You say in your book,
though, that the decision to de-Baathify was actually made by Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld's office, and that you were basically informed that this
decision would be made. Do I have that right?

Mr. BREMER: Well, I was--there had been a lot of talk and, by the way, a lot
of talk with Iraqis about the de-Baathification. Packer's wrong about that.
Those discussions took place from this office of the secretary of Defense, not
Rumsfeld himself but the Office of Policy there. They'd talked to a lot of
Iraqis, and Iraqis had been very clear that there could be no place in the
future for de-Baathification. In fact, State Department did a study with
several hundred Iraqis, and one of their main conclusions was that the Baath
Party had to be outlawed. So there's no question that that was a decision
that was popularly supported by the vast majority of Iraqis. I did issue that
as my very first order the week I arrived there, and I believe it was an
important decision.

Now it's also the case that I made a mistake in how this very important order
was implemented. I made the mistake of turning it over to a political body,
the Iraqi Governing Council, Iraqi politicians, where it got all tied up in
internal Iraqi politics, and I should have foreseen that and turned it over
rather to a judicial organization of some kind rather than to a political
organization.

GROSS: Well, the de-Baathification process was overseen by Ahmed Chalabi, and
some people say that he used this as a way to just punish his political
opponents.

Mr. BREMER: Well, there's certainly--it wasn't actually overseen by him
directly, but a colleague of his took over the de-Baathification council, as
they called it, and the problem was that they implemented it in a much broader
fashion. The initial decree, which I signed, affected only 1 percent of the
Baath Party members, so it was really a very narrowly designed policy, but it
was interpreted much more broadly, and that became a problem.

GROSS: Well, I think at least 35,000 mostly Sunni employees, including I
think about 12,000 schoolteachers, lost their jobs in the process.

Mr. BREMER: Well, that's right. The decree itself was directed at about
20,000 people in the top four levels of the Baath Party, a great many of whom,
by the way, had already left the country by the time I got there, because they
were committed and deeply believing Baathists and did not want to be tried for
their crimes in Iraq, so the number affected, it was actually probably smaller
than that. But in effect, what happened was teachers--in order to become a
teacher under Saddam Hussein, you had to join the Baath Party, and I said when
I signed the decree the very first day and told the press, `Look, implementing
this is going to have to be done by Iraqis, because we Americans in the
coalition, we're not going to be able to make a distinction between a woman
who joined the party because she was a real believer and became a teacher or a
woman who wanted to be a teacher and joined the party because she had to join
the party. And that was a distinction, really, much too fine for, I thought,
non-Iraqis to make, which is why I wanted to turn it over to Iraqis. And
you're right, one of the areas where there was a real problem was in the
laying off of teachers, people who probably just joined because they had to
join the party in order to become a teacher.

GROSS: Let's get to the decision to disband the Iraqi military. James
Fallows, in a cover story in The Atlantic magazine, recently wrote about this
decision, and he said not enough thought about--said there was not enough
thought about how to handle the Iraqi military once it had surrendered or been
defeated. `The CPA disbanded the Iraqi military and simply sent its members
home without pay.' Do you think that doing that added to the insurgency? Do
you think that the insurgency was fueled, in part, by this decision and that
some of the Iraqi military that was sent home without pay became members of
the insurgency?

Mr. BREMER: Well, it's important to get the facts straight here at the
outset, because there's been a lot of misinformation about this. I mean,
first of all, in your question, there were two mistakes repeated not by you
but by Fallows. They were paid, so--and I'll come to that in a minute. Here
was the situation when I arrived. There was not a single Iraqi military unit
anywhere in the country. They basically went home. The Iraqi military was
made up of about 400,000 Shia conscripts and a couple of hundred thousand
Sunni officers. The Shia draftees were brutalized, mistreated by their
officers, and when they saw which way the war was going, that we were winning
very quickly, they basically deserted. They went home to their villages and
their farms and their families. They weren't going to fight anymore. And so
there were no units standing.

And so effectively, the question that was before us was: Should we try to
recall the army, which, as my senior adviser for national security affairs--a
wonderful guy named Walt Slocum, who was President Clinton's undersec--number
three man in the Pentagon--Walt Slocum said it means you're going to have to
send American soldiers into the villages and homes and farms and force these
draftees back into a hated army at gunpoint. Well, that wasn't something I
was going to do.

Moreover, recalling the army would have been a political signal directly
contrary to the whole purpose of the war. It would have persuaded the Kurds
basically to secede from Iraq. They were not going to stick around if we were
going to recall Saddam's army. And the Shia, I might also add, who are 60
percent of the population, were cooperating with the occupation. They had
been brutalized by that army, and if we had tried to recall the army, we ran a
real risk of stopping Shia cooperation or even provoking a Shia uprising. So
the decision to recognize reality and say the army was disbanded, I think, was
absolutely the right one.

Now we recognize that there had to be some way to reintegrate these soldiers
into life in Iraq, and I said in my message something that people like Fallows
sometimes leave out. I said in my message that anybody who was in the old
army who wants to serve in the new army or in the police force or in the civil
defense force, the national guard we were setting up, is welcome to come and
serve in those forces. And by the time I left 14 months later, virtually 80
percent of the people in the new Iraqi army were old soldiers, soldiers who'd
come from the old army, and a hundred percent of the non-commissioned officers
and officers were from the old army. So we made a place for them, and we paid
every month to those officers who were not working in the army a stipend.
They were paid. So the argument that they were not paid is simply wrong
factually, and I don't exclude that some of them may have joined the
resistance and the insurgency. That's possible. But it seems to me one needs
to be fairly clear about the realities about the situation that we faced.

GROSS: My guest is Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq. He's written a new memoir called "My Year in Iraq: The
Struggle to Build a Future of Hope." We'll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Paul Bremer, and he was the head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Iraq from May 2003 till the end of June 2004. He's
written a new memoir called "My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future
of Hope."

You write in your book that Andrew Card, who was then President Bush's chief
of staff, said to you while you were the head of the CPA--he said, `I've
gotten the impression that Washington is gaming you.' In other words, that
they were scapegoating you. For that? For the de-Baathification decision,
for disbanding the military?

Mr. BREMER: No, that particular conversation, which was in late October, had
more to do with a disagreement I had with people in our government over the
question of whether we shouldn't, in their view, simply turn sovereignty over
immediately to the Governing Council. And I believed very strongly that that
would be a mistake and it would undermine our objectives in Iraq. Why?
Because here's a country that's been under a brutal dictator for almost 40
years; no freedom of expression, no political parties allowed. They needed to
have some kind of a constitution to frame and bound political activity and
political discussion, and I felt very strongly it would be a mistake to turn
over sovereignty to any Iraqi group, unless we had some kind of a political
path and political framework in place.

And at that particular time, what Card was referring to were these pressures
to immediately turn sovereignty over to the Iraqis in the fall of 2003. I
resisted that. I told both Secretary Rumsfeld and the president why I thought
that would be a mistake, and in the end, they agreed with me.

GROSS: Do you think that they were trying to scapegoat you at some point?
Was Card right?

Mr. BREMER: Well, I think there were certainly pressures within the
government, most of them coming from the policy office of the Pentagon, not
from Rumsfeld himself but from the people in the policy office, to turn over
quickly, and when I was resisting that, there was a sense that, well, then,
you know, if you resist this, you're basically going to cause the problem to
become worse rather than better. I think that's wrong. I think, in fact, one
of our great accomplishments was getting an interim constitution written in
March of 2004, which laid out the political process that is being followed
right up to this day with the various elections last year, the referendum on
the constitution and so forth. We basically gave them a path forward, and it
was our most important legacy to the Iraqi people, in my view.

GROSS: What do you think drove that inclination, on the part of the Bush
administration, to quickly hand over sovereignty in Iraq? Was it a desire to
give Iraq the independence that the Bush administration wanted, or was it more
of an image to make it seem like, `Oh, victory, we're done, they're sovereign,
everything's good,' even though things were not going so well?

Mr. BREMER: Well, let's be careful. You say the Bush administration. That's
a rather broad term. This particular pressure was coming from one office in
the Pentagon more than anywhere else. It wasn't a policy of the
administration. It certainly was never a policy of the president. The
president, when I explained why I thought we needed to have a political
framework, agreed. Dr. Rice, who is herself a political scientist and
historian, was very strong on the view that we needed to put some kind of a
constitution in place. So it wasn't that it was an administration policy.

Where were the pressures coming from? Well, you know, we were in the middle
of an insurgency that was killing Americans in that time period--this is in
October when there really was a fairly big uptick of violence during Ramadan.
This was the period of the holy month of Ramadan there. And I'm sure there
were people who had a lot of different reasons for turning over sovereignty
quickly, but I think the idea was let's get some Iraqi faces in charge rather
than a coalition face in charge of things here, and maybe that will help
reduce violence. It's not a disreputable argument. It's a fair argument. I
just happened not to agree with it.

GROSS: So what office was the pressure coming from?

Mr. BREMER: Well, I think it was mostly coming from the office--as I said in
the book, the office of the undersecretary of political--or policy I guess
it's called--in the Pentagon.

GROSS: And who was that?

Mr. BREMER: At that time, it was Douglas Feith and people working for him.

GROSS: Before you actually assumed your position as head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, the RAND Corpor--or you read a study that was written
by the RAND Corporation, and the study said that security requires 20 troops
per thousand residents. And you say Iraq had only a third of the occupation
forces that the RAND study suggested was really needed. So you sent a copy of
this study to Donald Rumsfeld. He never responded. He never got back to you.
How did you interpret his lack of response?

Mr. BREMER: Well, that wasn't the only time I discussed the level of troops
with him or with others in the administration. This was an ongoing discussion
that ran, as you know from reading the book, pretty much through the whole
time I was there. Secretary Rumsfeld is an old friend of mine, by the way,
just by way of background. I've known him for 30 years, and I admire him. I
think he's been a great secretary of Defense. But we had a disagreement on
troop strength. The military advisers--and he has lots of military advisers.
I stress again I'm not a military expert, right? I'm a diplomat. He had a
lot of military experts. And a lot of them felt that having more troops on
the ground actually would make the situation worse because it would attract
more attacks on coalition troops, whether they were American or other
countries, and would actually exacerbate the situation.

I had the view that our most important responsibility to the Iraqi people was
to provide law and order. That's what governments do. The military argument
about attracting attacks is an argument that deserves respect. It's a
coherent argument. I just don't--I didn't agree with him. I had a different
view. And secretary of Defense always has access to lots of advisers,
including military experts, and they obviously were giving him advice on their
view.

GROSS: Paul Bremer is the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority
in Iraq. He's written a new memoir called "My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to
Build a Future of Hope." He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, Kevin Whitehead reviews Erwin Helfer's new CD of blues,
boogie-woogie and jazz called "Careless Love." We're listening to it now.
Plus, more with the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in
Iraq, Paul Bremer.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Paul Bremer. He was the head of
the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from May 2003 until June 2004 when
sovereignty was returned to the Iraqis. Ambassador Bremer has written a
memoir called, "My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope."

When you accepted the job as head of the CPA, did you expect that America
would be fighting an insurgency?

Ambassador PAUL BREMER: We didn't--as far as I can tell, nobody ever showed
me indications that before the war of liberation we expected a large-scale
insurgency. Of course, we expected there would be some violence, and for the
first couple of months, through the summer of 2003, it really was quite
low-level. It really didn't pick up until the end of the summer. So, yeah, I
did not expect to be fighting as difficult a fight as we have had. And the
president in one of his speeches in December--I can't remember which one--made
it very clear that this was a problem; that we had not expected it.

GROSS: Do you think you should have in retrospect?

Amb. BREMER: Well, look, here's the problem. The intelligence community,
American--not just ours--French, British, German, Russian; everybody was
focused on the major question for more than a decade under administration of
Bush--Bush 1 and then under Clinton and then under Bush 2--focused on the
major question of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. And if so,
where were they? And quite logically, the intelligence community focused its
major efforts in Iraq on that question. And as several members of the CIA,
who have since retired, have admitted, we didn't have a lot of intelligence
assets on the ground to begin with. So I would assume that when they said to
themselves, `What's our priority?,' because you always have to set priorities,
the focus was on weapons of mass destruction. It was less on the question of
the post-war insurgency and, certainly, even less than that, on the problems
of the state of the economy, which we talked about at the top of the hour,
which turned out to be quite a surprise.

GROSS: You think that we were slow to act against the insurgency,
particularly the part that was led by Muqtada al-Sadr?

Amb. BREMER: Well, slow to act against it? As I said, I think we--our
biggest problem was that we didn't have the intelligence. I mean, you can't
take effective military action without good intelligence. And our
intelligence, even after the war, was largely directed at the question of
trying to find out what happened to the weapons of mass destruction. My
concern, and I run through it in the book, was that we needed to also have
better intelligence on the actual insurgents. I said at one point to our
station chief there, `Look, it's not very likely that American soldiers are
going to be killed by chemical or biological weapons at this point. But they
are getting killed every day by improvised explosive devices and car bombs,
and we need to know who the people are who are setting those bombs off.' And
fortunately, my voice was heard on that, and by--oh I would guess, the end of
the year--certainly by the end of the year, maybe a little earlier, late 2003,
we had a substantial increase in the number of experts on terrorism attached
to the CIA station there.

GROSS: You shut down a newspaper in Iraq that was published by Muqtada
al-Sadr, and he was writing attacks against the Coalition Provisional
Authority and you in particular. He said that you were deliberately starving
the Iraqi people. Some people say that shutting down his newspaper helped
create part of the insurgency; the part that was led by Muqtada al-Sadr.
What do you think? Do you think in retrospect that this was a good or a bad
decision to shut it down?

Amb. BREMER: Muqtada al-Sadr, one has to understand, was--is a
rabble-rousing, young cleric from a very famous old family, but himself
without substantial theological education. In fact, probably no
ed--theological education. He came first to our attention when an Iraqi
judge, not an American--an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant for his having
ordered the murder of a very respected ayatollah, Ayatollah Haloy(ph),
basically, on April 9th--10th, the day after liberation in Najaf. So he was
wanted for murder. That was the key point of our relationship with him.

Now in the case of the newspaper, again the background is important. I go
into it a bit in the book. Muqtada for months had been setting up his own
courts, as he called them, to try people for whatever crimes they were. They
were not courts in any sense you and I would understand it. And he had his
own prisons. And we had firsthand reports of people who had been tortured in
those prisons. We had firsthand reports from women of being raped in those
prisons. In other words, he was setting up the kind of criminal justice, if
you can call it that--system that Saddam Hussein had done.

The immediate problem in terms of the newspaper was a series of very vitriolic
speeches he gave, not against me. He denounced the United States. He
denounced Israel. He called for death to the Americans, death to the Jews and
then he praised the 9/11 attack as a, quote, `miracle from God.' His newspaper
reprinted this repulsive sermon, and my lawyers at the CPA said it was a clear
incitement to violence and could lead to the death of Americans and Iraqis.
And incitement to violence was against the law, and it was for that basis that
I closed his paper down for 60 days. But he was already at that point in
violent opposition to the coalition. The closing of the newspaper gave him an
excuse, but he basically was in violent opposition and had been for
effectively almost a year.

GROSS: Is this an example of a time when you were, perhaps, in an impossible
situation? Because on the one hand, you know, you've explained your reasons
for wanting to shut it down. On the other hand, one of your reasons for being
there--I mean, your reason for being there--is to create a transition to
democracy and to help teach the Iraqis the meaning of democracy and how to run
a democracy. And democracy usually does not mean shutting down a newspaper.
I mean, that's--that doesn't sound real democratic. So is it one of those
impossible situations? Did you feel you were in an impossible situation where
it was like a no-win situation for you?

Amb. BREMER: Well, just as a general answer, and then I'll answer the
specific--in a situation such as I faced in Iraq, there are very few all-good
options. Almost anything you do had down sides. In this particular case,
let's be clear. Incitement to violence is against the law in every democracy.
You cannot go into a crowded theater and shout fire. It's against the law.
So there's nothing inconsistent with having laws against incitement to
violence and having a democracy.

While I was there and at the time I closed Muqtada's newspaper there were over
100 independent newspapers already operating in Iraq. There are now today 44
different radio stations. There are 25 television stations. So there's
nothing inconsistent about saying that it is against the law to incite
violence and basically encourage people to kill other people and to continuing
to have a robust democracy. So in this case it was not a tradeoff, though
your general point is right. There were always tradeoffs.

GROSS: My guest is Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq. He's written a new memoir called, "My Year in Iraq." We'll
talk more after a little break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Paul Bremer and he was the head
of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from May of 2003 until the end
of June 2004. And now he's written a new memoir called, "My Year in Iraq:
The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope."

The impression I get from your book is that you think America misjudged how
easy it would be train the military in Iraq and to train a new police force.
And you write that, you know, there's a big difference between an American
staff sergeant commanding a Bradley fighting vehicle and a new Iraq police
officer who might have fired his rusty, Soviet-era, nine-millimeter pistol a
few times. Can you talk a little bit about the problems that you think we
were facing there that we weren't prepared for?

Amb. BREMER: One of the things to bear in mind is that we started with the
proposition right from the beginning that security should be in the hands of
the Iraqi people. It's their country. They should be defending it. But it
was also the case that, if you looked at the security forces, what did we
have? We had a police force that was unprofessional, corrupt and most of
them, by the way, had, like the army, deserted at the time of liberation.

Now we called the police back and they came back, and we set up a program to
train the police. My advisors on police training, who included Bernie Kerik,
the former commissioner here in New York, said, `Look, it takes at least two
years to train a professional policeman.' And given the situation we had in
Iraq where the police stations, like so much else, had been looted and burned
down, we had no places in Iraq to do the training. We were going to have to
do it somewhere else. If we did it in Iraq, Kerik told me, it would take six
years to train an adequate police force for the country. I said, `That's
impossible. We've got to do it in two years.' And so we organized a very
professional course of training in Jordan where we could find the facilities
we needed.

In the case of the army, again, when I announced that we were going to create
a new army, I also said we'll start right away recruiting. And, in fact,
within two months of my arrival we had already begun the training of the new
army. And we graduated the very first battalion in early October.

Now the army that we initially designed has been--had to be redesigned because
of the size of the insurgency. We had thought of a small army of about
40,000; three divisions or so that would largely be directed at guarding the
borders. But as the insurgency grew, it became clear we had to expand that
army and it had to have some internal security oper--responsibilities as well.
I was always a little reluctant about having armies in Third World countries
take internal security roles, but there really was no choice.

I think the thing it--has to remember is it does take time to train
professional soldiers. We don't do it in this country in a year or two. It
takes time. And I kept saying to my colleagues while I was there that we
needed to be patient. We had--not to overestimate the capability of the
security forces.

GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about spending in Iraq on reconstruction.
$18.4 billion was set aside by Congress for Iraq's reconstruction. By the
time you left Iraq at the end of June of 2004 there was only about $499
million of the $18.4 billion that had been spent so far. Why is there such
need of reconstruction in Iraq, yet it's taken so long to actually spend the
money on projects?

Amb. BREMER: There really are three answers to that. It's a good question.
It certainly was very frustrating for me and my colleagues. One problem is,
obviously, security. I mean, a lot of the major reconstruction sites, you
know--dams, particularly electric power plants, anything dealing with the
oil--had been attacked rather repeatedly by the terrorists. So that's a
problem.

Secondly, we were--even though we were in an extraordinary situation in Iraq,
we were subject to regular bureaucratic and federal contracting regulations,
which are very cumbersome and very time-consuming. I'll give you an example.
In the summer when I got there I found, after a visit to Baghdad's children's
hospital, that a lot of the hospitals generators were so old--had never been
maintained--that they had to be replaced. And I asked my budget director what
we could do to buy generators for those hospitals quickly. He came back the
next day and he said, `Here are the alternatives. We can do it through the
usual federal contracting system. It will take four to six months to get the
generators here. Or we can use Iraqi money, which was not subject to federal
contracting, obviously. We can use Iraqi money and I can have them here in
eight days.' It's not too hard to figure out which I chose. I chose the
eight-day option. So that was a problem.

And the third problem, which was related to the second one, was that we had a
real shortage of personnel in the CPA throughout our time there. And in
particular, we had a shortage of experienced contracting officers. Because
the volume of work from the $18 billion reconstruction was such that we had
something over 5,000 projects we had to do. And once you lay down 5,000
projects, put on top of it the bureaucratic and regulatory requirements,
you're talking about a very substantial workload.

GROSS: According to the Coalition Provisional Authority inspector general's
report, $9 billion in Iraqi funds had gone missing under your watch. What
happened?

Amb. BREMER: Well, I--first of all, I don't know if it went missing. What
he said was he did not believe we had proper accounting for it. Now one of
the problems here was, and this is sort of a typical kind of a thing, the
inspector general group that went and looked into spending--they did an audit,
I think, in the spring of 2004--were basically people who were looking for
western-standard accounting procedures throughout Iraq. And they made a
number of recommendations, for example, that would have been, it seems to me,
completely wrong. They criticized us, for example, for paying Iraqi civil
servants and pensioners before we had a modern payroll system and payroll
scale system--grade scale system in place. Now it seems to me this is just
unrealistic. We had about a million and a half people working for us in the
government and an equal number of pensioners. They had not been paid for
three months when I arrived. It would have--it would take us another three to
four months to put into place an effective, modern payroll system. I,
obviously, chose instead to put into effect a very simple four-grade system
and start paying right away. And, you know, the inspector general says,
`Well, yeah, but the--you know, you didn't have really good receipts for all
of that.'

Well, again, it's--we were in a country at war. There was no banking system.
We had to pay people in cash; actually, in dollars because we had a shortage
of Iraqi dinars. Our monthly payroll was about $200 million. We had to do
this through the military all over the country and, of course, we were paying
out on slips of paper and I have no doubt some of that money went missing. I
took the problem of corruption very seriously. And the inspector general in
his report, I felt, did not pay adequate attention to the realities we faced
there. It was a very difficult situation and we were at war.

GROSS: As you watched the insurgency increase and the number of people from
Iraq and from outside Iraq fighting in that insurgency, did you think that the
war in Iraq was a good idea in terms of fighting the war on terror? Or did
you think that it was actually creating more terrorists and becoming a magnet
for people from other Muslim countries who wanted to become terrorists and
fight against American and other Western countries?

Amb. BREMER: Well, first of all, I very strongly support the war to liberate
Iraq. I think it was a noble thing we've done, and I think the sacrifices of
the American men and women there have been in a noble cause.

Secondly, it's important to step back a minute. The terrorists declared war
on us long before we went into Iraq. If you read the National Commission on
Terrorism report, which I chaired--bipartisan report which we reported to
President Clinton in mid-2000, we pointed out that the terrorists had
basically adopted a strategy of mass terrorism against Americans. This
started in the late '80s. This war was declared by them against us. And I
think the president was absolutely right in March of 2003 when he concluded
that time was not on our side, that Saddam was basically succeeding in his
effort to get the sanctions to erode, and that once the sanctions eroded he
would resume his WMD operations. So I absolutely believe the war was right
and I think it is now. Whatever one's position was on the war of liberation,
it's absolutely clear to me we've got to stay until the job is done.

GROSS: You mention in the beginning of your book that when the president
asked you to take the job as head of the CPA, you wanted to, but on the other
hand, your wife was sick. She has fibromyalgia, goes for long periods where
she's bedridden. Plus she had two popped discs in her back at the time. Was
it hard to figure out what decision to make in terms of what was right for
you and for your country and what was right for your family?

Amb. BREMER: Well, I describe in the book a very long conversation my wife
had as we were driving actually to a house we had just bought in New England.
And I make very clear that, if she had said no, I would not have taken the
job. My family has to come first. On the other hand, we had been married,
well, now almost 40 years. She is a--knows what it is to be married to
somebody in public service because I was in the government for most of my
life, and knows how important I think the war on terrorism is. I have been,
unfortunately, involved in that war for more than 20 years now. So in the end
she said yes.

GROSS: Was there a dry-cleaning service for your suit, which...

Amb. BREMER: No, there wasn't.

GROSS: ...for--cleaned it for you?

Amb. BREMER: No, I--it was--well, it may have looked clean on television. I
don't think it looked too clean up front. It got thrown away as soon as I
left.

GROSS: Paul Bremer, thank you very much for talking with us.

Amb. BREMER: Nice to be with you.

GROSS: Paul Bremer is the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority
in Iraq. His new memoir is called, "My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a
Future of Hope."

Tomorrow, we'll hear from Mark Etherington, a British civilian who worked
under the CPA as the governor of a province in southern Iraq. His compound
was attacked by Muqtada al-Sadr's army, and there were not enough coalition
troops to protect him and his staff. Etherington has written a memoir called,
"Revolt On the Tigris"

Coming up, Kevin Whitehead reviews a new CD of blues, boogie-woogie and
jazz by pianist Erwin Helfer. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: Erwin Helfer's new album, "Careless Love"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Pianist Erwin Helfer comes from Chicago where he was trained in boogie-woogie
and blues styles by old masters, like Clarence Lofton and Sunnyland Slim. For
years, he backed blues singer Mama Yancey before building his own career as a
solo performer. On his new album, Helfer is accompanied by a jazz bassist and
drummer. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says they don't cramp his style.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

KEVIN WHITEHEAD reporting:

Like other blues and boogie pianists, Erwin Helfer always keeps his favorite
rhythm section close by. It's his left hand rolling out rocking bass parts in
rock-steady time.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

WHITEHEAD: The old piano masters who taught his teachers prided themselves on
having a left hand like God, ready to carry a heavy load, sometimes including
a deadbeat rhythm section.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

WHITEHEAD: Helfer is that self-reliant, but he likes a little company in the
studio for inspiration.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

WHITEHEAD: On recent albums, Helfer's dueted with singers and saxophonists.
For the new "Careless Love" on the Sirens label, he invited modern jazz
drummer Avreeayl Ra and bassist John Whitfield. They must wonder why they're
here sometimes. To accommodate them, Helfer shifts attention to his
melody-playing right hand, at least until habit or enthusiasm run away with
him.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

WHITEHEAD: Erwin Helfer's a conservator of venerable traditions. In concert,
he introduces tunes with jokes his teacher's teachers might have told. But
he's also aware you have to personalize a tradition to keep it alive. He knows
all the old licks, but he makes his own mark with more modern ideas developed
in homemade ways.

On his solo feature, "Paris But I Don't Know Why," he steps away from blues
form, but keeps up the complex dance between two hands.

(Soundbite from "Paris But I Don't Know Why")

WHITEHEAD: Erwin Helfer's a native Chicagoan and well versed in Chicago
styles. But he got into blues piano in the 1950s while a college student in
New Orleans listening to local talent, like Professor Longhair and some
Louisiana Latin beats still surface in his playing.

The New Orleans mambo and Chicago blues mambo were never so far apart, but
Helfer unites them in his personal history. He lived it, which is one reason
the old tunes he plays don't sound like museum pieces.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

GROSS: Kevin Whitehead teaches English and American Studies at the University
of Kansas, and he's a jazz columnist for emusic.com. He reviewed "Careless
Love," featuring pianist Erwin Helfer on the Sirens label.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music from Helfer's new album)

GROSS: On the next FRESH AIR, Mark Etherington describes the chaos he faced
in southern Iraq while serving as one of the Coalition Provisional Authority's
governors. His compound was attacked by Muqtada al-Sadr's army and there were
not enough coalition troops to protect him and his staff. He's written a new
memoir. Join us for the next FRESH AIR.
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