Paul Bremer's Quotes

Remember L. Paul Bremer? The Bush team's hand-picked head of the Provisional Govenrment in Iraq? The guys who ran the country from May 2003 until the June 28th handover to Iraqis?

He talks about some things he should know about, discussing the looting and disorder when he got there:

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

Oh, earlier he also said:

In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, Bremer said, according to the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Ind.

Bremer is now backing off these comments, sort of:

"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in an e-mailed statement. He said all references in recent speeches to troop levels related to the situation when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 -- "and when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."

Bremer "strongly supports" Bush's re-election.

I read this as, I tried to tell them but they would not listen to me. The occupation's problems are not my fault. I support Bush's re-election publicly, but I just dropped a bomb on it. You decide.

I am very curious to see the Bush camp's spin on all of this. Is Bremer simply wrong? A disgruntled former employee trying to cover is own behind for failures over there? Or will they admit a mistake?

So, the Bush administration on post-war Iraq ignored the Army War College planning, General Shinseki (Army Chief of Staff), and their own people. They have discounted their own National Intelligence Estimate. Joe Klein in Time magazine even wrote: "For one thing, the President's obvious skepticism about this National Intelligence Estimate stands in stark contrast to his wanton embrace of the NIE he received in October 2002, which said that Saddam probably possessed weapons of mass destruction. That report was produced after Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pressured the CIA to come up with stronger evidence for invading Iraq. The current assessment is more credible. It comes from a cautious, chastened CIA. My second thought was pretty wicked: Scott McClellan is beginning to sound like Baghdad Bob, the infamous spokesman for Saddam who announced hallucinatory Iraqi victories as the American troops closed in on Baghdad."

In the pre-war planning they, similarly ignored anything that did not fit their worldview. There is a great list here, by the admittedly progressive Center for American Progress. They ignored experts on the famed aluminum tubing- the nuclear program that wasn't. They have repeatedly overstated intelligence on Iraq, ignoring and discounting differing views. Anything in opposition is "not supporting our troops" and "no way to win the war on terror." In this view, one can either march in lockstep, or undermine the country. As Andrew Sullivan wrote this week: Memo to Bush, we live in a democracy.