Meet the Wizard of Oz

Paul Bremer, the U.S. envoy who ran Iraq for over a year, will testify before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007.  This rare opportunity to see what the man we call the Wizard of Oz is rare, so CorpWatch plans to attend. Why do we call him the "Wizard of Oz", you may ask? Well, for those of you who remember the children's book by L. Frank Baum, the man who ran the land of the Munchkins, was protected from his subjects by special soldiers in the Emerald City.

And "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" is the title of a simply incredible book, that every member of Congress and the public at large, should first read to understand why Iraq is such a mess today. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the bureau chief of the Washington Post in Baghdad for almost two years, published an account of the so-called Green Zone, the six square miles that the new rulers of Iraq have lived in ever since they occupied the country in April 2003.

This books lays out in hilarious detail the adventures of Paul Bremer, protected by his private security detail from Blackwater, and two of the three other men who testify on Tuesday: Tim Carney and David Oliver.

Tim Carney has just been appointed by Condoleeza Rice to oversee U.S. reconstruction and development projects in the country. Chandrasekaran tells us that Carney, who was in charge of the ministry of industry and minerals, was also a big game hunter who has hunted elephants, cape buffalo, giraffes, warthogs and two species of zebra, but sadly had no experience in either industry or minerals. (He was however a personal friend and ex-deputy to Paul Wolfowitz) In "Emerald City" we learn about his disastrous attempts to privatize Iraq's industries.

David Oliver, was Bremer's budget chief in the Emerald City. He first drew up a plan to fix Iraq that would have cost $60 billion. Bremer asked him to cut it to $18 billion and Oliver obligingly slashed the budget to ribbons.

Chandrasekaran's book is easily the funniest in what is now a library of books on the U.S. in Iraq, although ultimately it tells a tragic tale. The stories he tells reveal an incompetent and ideological group of inexperienced people. He lets us know that the nickname for the first group of advisors - Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance or ORHA - was the "Office of Really Hapless Americans" and that the organization that Bremer ran - the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA - was also known as "Can't Produce Anything."

Some gems from his book:

• An exchange between, Bernard Kerik, the New York cop who was put in charge of the Iraq police, in conversation with Robert Gifford, his predecessor, about a group of Iraqi judges who came to visit him.
  

"Bob, who are these people? Who the fuck are these people?"
"Oh, those are Iraqis"
"What are they doing here?"
"Bernie, that's the reason we are here.

• John Agresto, the director of St John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who was a friend of both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's wife, was put in charge of Iraq's university system.
  
  He left the country after saying to Chandrasekaran what must be one of the most compelling confessions of failure by a Bush supporter: "I'm a neoconservative who has been mugged by reality."
  

And Chandrasekaran has a wonderful description of life inside the Emerald City aka the Green Zone, catered by Halliburton.

"You could dine at the cafetaria in the Republican palace for six months and never eat hummus, flatbread or a lamb kebab. The fare was always American, often with a southern flavor. A buffet featured grits, cornbread and a bottomless barrel of pork, sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. There were bacon cheeseburgers, grilled bacon-and-cheese sandwiches and bacon omelets."

"Hundreds of Iraqi secretaries and translators who worked for the occupation authority had to eat in the dining hall. Most of them were Muslims, and many were offended by the presence of pork. But the Americans running the kitchen kept serving it. The cafeteria was all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food."

Chandrasekaran, who had first hand access to Paul Bremer, provides a delightful antidote to the more ponderous and self-important book by his chief subject: "My Year in Iraq" (Simon and Schuster, 2006).  Although it should be said that Bremer's book is an important insight into why the U.S. failed in Iraq, chronicling in minute detail how he worked to manipulate Iraq's politics by creating the Iraqi Governing Council.

But read Bremer's book only after you read Chandrasekaran, and another book that I also heartily recommend: "Babylon by Bus" (Penguin, 2006) by two young volunteers from the United States named Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann, who worked under Bremer, who were put in charge of non-governmental organizations in Iraq.

The book, which is a modern day equivalent of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" consists of them boasting about their complete lack of qualifications for the job and the chaos that they took advantage of by getting stoned on Valium, drive around rip-roaring drunk, helped soldiers get illegal steroids. The book, which is alternately funny and horrifying, explains that they did what they thought was best under the circumstances but admitted freely that they had no idea what they were doing.

"Babylon by Bus" concludes with the person that they selected to take over their job being targeted and killed in June 2004 and an apology to the people of Iraq:

"(W)e apologize for the reckless, unplanned, understaffed, corrupt, and wasteful way in which our country occupied and failed at rebuilding your shattered nation. For every innocent (person) who was killed, tortured, or injured by our country, we extend our deepest sympathy."

Blood Money

But back to the hearing on February 7th, 2007, in Washington DC. The fourth man that will testify is also a staunch friend of the administration: Stuart Bowen. There the similarity between the four men ends, because Bowen is honest and competent, and has dedicated his last three years to uncovering fraud in Iraq.

To learn about his work you need to check out the website of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) although I dare say that you will find it rather dry reading, being composed of serious audit reports and project assessments.

If that does not draw your fancy, check out a sobering and well written book by T Christian Miller, titled "Blood Money" (Little, Brown 2006) that portrays Bowen, a former fund raiser for George Bush in Texas, as a man who is a mix of "professor, political junkie and prosecutor." And also read a series of articles by Ed Harriman of the London Review of Books, who has been following SIGIR's work in detail. Another journalist who has tracked the work of SIGIR practically daily is James Glanz of the New York Times.

Back to Miller. Some more gems from his excellent book, which members of Congress and the public really should read, to get an adequate picture of what went wrong in Iraq's reconstruction.

• "A nation-building process crafted with the care of a sand castle."
  
  
• "The rebuilding process was like an enormous bulldozer with a cinder block on the gas pedal, grinding blindly forward but accomplishing little." " Achievements were tallied like body counts: another 100 schools painted, another clinic opened, another 1000 Iraqis employed - statistics that said little about the reality on the ground. It was rebuilding without a foreman or blueprints"
  

(Miller is perhaps one of the best investigative journalists who has tracked infrastructure and corruption projects until the Los Angeles Times put him on the environment beat. His work is as relentless as Chandrasekaran's is humorous, although both do an excellent job of explaining why the U.S is failing so badly, with their intimate portraits of the real heart of the occupation.)

He interviews Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, at his home in Washington about the infamous Halliburton no-bid contracts and Dick Cheney. He tracks down the failure of Halliburton to fix Iraq's oil fields and restore the natural gas supply, perhaps one of the few detailed accounts available in print on what has really happened to Iraq's main source of revenue.

Miller visits Parsons engineering at the company headquarters in Pasadena, California, and at the Green Zone in Baghdad, and tells how they botched the job of fixing Iraq's infrastructure. "Fear and confusion were better reasons than greed for explaining the way that the company acted the way it did." The company was "caught in a crossfire between customer satisfaction, profit and death."

The book tells the sad tale of Colonel Ted Westhusing, who reportedly committed suicide (a matter of some dispute) soon after discovering allegations of fraud by a Carlyle Group subsidiary that was training Iraqi commandos.

And lastly, but not least, it also has excellent descriptions of how David Oliver and Paul Bremer botched the plan for Iraq's reconstruction.

Our next posting, hopefully, will come from the inside the Throne Room, where Henry Waxman, playing the role of Dorothy Gale, will attempt to uncover the real story behind the Throne of the Wizard of Oz.

• 187 Privatization