Barbara Bodine on UCTV

I caught the question and answer portion of what was probably an interesting lecture on UCTV while riding on one of those exercise bikes with a video screen at the gym this morning. Video is available online here.

The speaker was Barbara Bodine, former Ambassador to Yemen and coordinator for central Iraq in charge of Baghdad at the outset of the war in 2003, and her talk seemed to focus primarily on the situation in Iraq.

While answering a couple of questions (at about the 38 minute mark), Bodine brought up a few things which I had heard before but had almost forgotten about and which I think get right to the core of how the United States screwed up the reconstruction and just how criminally inept Bush's Department of Defense really was.

First, there was the "de-Baathification" of the Iraqi government shortly after Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech. Basically, anybody who had been a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party was not allowed to participate in the new government. While this might sound like a reasonable policy to someone unfamiliar with the social and political dynamics in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, in reality it was a tragically unfair decision. It was unfair because membership in the Baath party was not really voluntary. Bodine gave one example of a man who had never been a member of the party until his daughter was accepted into Baghdad University and he was told that he had to join the party or she would not be permitted to attend. Baghadad University was among the top universities in the country, so he did what any loving father who wanted the best for his bright daughter would do -- he joined the Baath party. Many others joined the party out of fear of being tortured or killed if they refused to join, or because it was simply what you had to do to keep your job. For the United States to make a sweeping judgment that everyone who had been a member of the party was a Saddam loyalist and therefore must be kept out of the new government must have deeply hurtful to all of those people who had only been doing what they had to do in order to stay alive and keep food on their family's table in a repressive regime. What's more, the former Baath party members were often the most experienced and well qualified people for the jobs that they were being denied now by the new Coalition Provisional Authority. This meant that the United States was effectively ensuring a lower quality of government employees across the board at all levels.
[More on the nature of the Baath Party and their tactics of intimidation to maintain control here.]

The second point brought up by Bodine was about the dissolution of the Iraqi National Army. Here again, the U.S. showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the social and political dynamics of Saddam's Iraq when they dissolved the army under the assumption that the army was loyal to Saddam. In reality, Saddam himself never fully trusted the army, which was why he decided to create the Republican Guard! Yet, here we were coming in and again making this unfair, sweeping judgment as to the integrity of a huge number of people. What made this decision even worse though, was that it created a large population (almost 400,000) of unemployed, angry young men who knew how to shoot guns and blow stuff up. This population almost surely provided a huge boost to the numbers of recruits joining the budding insurgency.

Finally, there was the determination of the U.S. Department of Defense to almost completely ignore the 18 months of work that had gone into the State Department's Future of Iraq Project. The Project was intended to answer the question of how to deal with an Iraq in which Saddam Hussein had been removed from power. It involved working groups that in total included over 250 Iraqi exiles in the U.S. from many different ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds, as well as international experts, academics and State Department officials. Basically, it was a fount of valuable information about what the U.S. should do in the days and weeks following Saddam's defeat. More than just ignore it, though, the Defense Department explicitly excluded anyone who had participated in the Future of Iraq Project from participating in the actual post-war reconstruction efforts. Effectively, "the more you knew about the reconstruction of Iraq, the less your chances of getting a job in the reconstruction of Iraq," according to Bodine. This attitude of excluding outside opinions and sources of information, more than anything else, sealed the fate of post-war Iraq.