Paul Bremer Talk

Went to go see Ambassador Bremer speak yesterday about the occupation and reconstruction in Iraq. He didn't say all that much that was news to me; it seemed like a very political speech and he stuck to his talking points pretty closely. The Daily story I've linked to above is a pretty accurate account. Someone did manage to get him to talk about the decision to disband the Iraqi army, though. His perspective was that at the war's end there were no organized units even remaining. The army was composed of a (bloated, with 12,000 generals) Baathist officer corps who we naturally didn't want, and around 350,000 Shia conscripts who deserted in droves throughout the course of the war. Re-constituting the army, he argues, would have meant enforcing Saddam's discriminatory conscription regime, not the best PR move, to say the least.

It was disappointing that several students took Bremer as a proxy for the administration and took up Q&A time trying to score points with snarling questions about the justification for the war. As I see it, Bremer was sent there to do a specific job, reconstruction, that had to be done whether or not the war was a good idea in the first place. I would have liked to hear more about that. Also, they said "only two more questions" when my buddy Erem was third in line. He was going to ask whether looking forwards, humanitarian concerns by themselves could be sufficient grounds for war (this would be a precedent Erem and I both support). Bremer would probably have given the same "there's no cookie-cutter response to these situations that you can apply in every case" answer he used a couple of other times, but we might have gotten a real answer if the question lacked the traditional accusatory tone. Oh well.