My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book review

MY YEAR IN IRAQ The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope Author: L. Paul Bremer III Published by: Threshold Editions/HarperCollins, New York, 2006, 420pp, $34.99.

This is a fascinating memoir by one of the best, most honourable members of the lamentably ideological and blinkered Bush team: Ambassador Paul Bremer (an idealistic diplomat who has, nonetheless, worked as Managing Director for Kissinger Associates, which helps to better appreciate his ill-informed messianic zeal for 'liberation' via half-baked regime change in Iraq).

My Year in Iraq details the agonising, gruelling process by which Bremer tried, under great stress, as Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, to bring some kind of democratic choice to the long-suffering Iraqi people before enacting a transfer of 'sovereignty' on 30 June 2004. However, four years of war have led to a ruined country with what some have called a 'regional tsunami' of displaced people escaping its borders into Egypt, Jordan and Syria; with car bombings and random violence claiming an average of 100 people per day, and with 65 per cent of Iraqis unable to secure fresh water. In this terrible context of 2007, Bremer's account of all the political manoeuvrings of Shia and Sunni clerics and of the discredited Chalabi clan reads like a Boy Scoutish account of nation-building premised on a serious misreading of Middle Eastern (especially Arabist) perceptions of Saddam's Iraq. Bremer's sincere zeal as one of the more constructive and idealistic 'neo-conservatives' justifying the invasion is worth reading, but his over-enthusiastic, sometimes crass insider's memoir (peppered with diaristic entries about important meetings with the President, 'Condi' Rice et al) only serves to remind us of how grossly the Bush team mis-judged the Iraq situation, and it presents a 'star-spangled; rosy-eyed view of Iraq's slow progress on 'the rough road to democracy' and to a nominally sovereign Iraq.

The key problem that crowded Bremer's plate was the strength of the insurgency (for example Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army of radical Shia militias) and the manifold difficulties caused by the de-Baathification of the Republican Army and the impossible logistical task of quickly training new Iraqi police recruits which had been left to New York's Bernie Kerik (a decisive veteran of the 9/11 horrors). But, of course, what really bedevilled Bremer's task was Rumsfeld's initial experiment in shying away from Colin...