Paul Bremer's Rough Ride

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But just after Bremer took over, he issued a series of orders that had the effect of fueling the insurgency that has blackened his entire tenure. Over the course of just three days in mid-May, he ordered a deep purge of Baath Party members from their jobs in government ministries, schools and universities. He then followed with an order to disband completely the Iraqi military. The results were disastrous. "All of a sudden we had about 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists that had gone underground," says a top U.S. official in Baghdad at the time. "We had about 200,000 still armed soldiers that had gone underground. And we had no Iraqi face to tell the Iraqi people what was happening. Within a couple of weeks, the insurgency began to rise, and it kept rising through the summer and into the fall."

Senior officials at the coalition authority in Baghdad say they tried to talk Bremer out of these decisions. Recalls one: "We said, 'Let's get Rumsfeld on the phone to soften it up a little bit.' But Bremer said, 'No, I'm issuing this today.' It went absolutely too deep, and he was told that, but he wouldn't change." (Rumsfeld said in an interview with TIME late last year that he took responsibility for disbanding the army, meaning that Bremer was just carrying out orders.) A former senior official in the CPA confronted Bremer about the order to disband the army. "What the hell are you doing this for?" the official asked. "We don't need them," he recalls Bremer saying of Iraqi soldiers. A former top adviser says, "We had things running good on Wednesday, and by Saturday we had 400,000 new enemies. I don't know if you can lay all this at Bremer's feet, but you can lay enough of it there to make it count."

It was only after weeks of angry protests by destitute Iraqi troops that the Americans agreed to pay former soldiers up to $150 a month. Last April, Bremer finally reversed the de-Baathification order, saying it had been "poorly implemented." Even to those who worked closely with Bremer and admire his diligence, his cocksure stubbornness was frustrating. "[He] takes in alternative views," says Bremer's British counterpart, Jeremy Greenstock, who worked in the green zone, "but he doesn't like changing his decisions."