Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Page B

of the ministry’s dozen top posts were now empty. A third of the staff was gone.
This is crazy,
Browning thought as he walked through the ministry’s offices.
This is a huge mistake.
    David Nummy, a Treasury Department specialist who was an adviser to the Finance Ministry, told one of Bremer’s aides, “If you want me to enforce this, I’m leaving on the next plane out of the country, because it’s ill-advised, and you have no idea how far you’re gonna set us back. If those people disappear, we don’t have the tools to find the next generation.”
    Nummy held on for a month, until he left. Then his successors handed out the pink slips.
    Tim Carney, the senior adviser to the Ministry of Industry, played the role of dutiful bureaucrat. A few weeks earlier, he had told ministry employees that de-Baathification would be an Iraqi-led process. Now he had to tell them the rules had changed.
    From that moment on, most of his work with the ministry was devoted to de-Baathification. He held interminable meetings with the ministry’s management, first to explain the policy and then to comb through employment records to identify
firka
s and those above. He eventually removed twelve of forty-eight directors of state-owned companies. The interim minister also had to go. He had been a regular Baath Party member.
    â€œIt was a terrible waste of time,” Carney said later. “There were so many more important things we should have been doing, like starting factories and paying salaries.”
    A few weeks into the purge, two travel-weary men in their late thirties came to see him. They introduced themselves as shop floor workers at a fertilizer plant in Bayji. They said they were former soldiers who had been captured by Iranian forces in 1981, the second year of the Iran-Iraq War, and held as prisoners of war for seventeen years. Upon their release, Saddam promoted both men, who had been Baath cadets, to
firka.
They said they didn’t care about the rank, but you couldn’t turn down a promotion in Saddam’s Iraq, not unless you were willing to do another seventeen years in an Iraqi prison. Besides, they said, the promotion had resulted in a monthly bonus of about twenty-five dollars.
    â€œWe are poor and the money is important to us,” one of the men said.
    â€œTake the
firka
bonus away,” the other said. “But just let us keep our jobs. We are not important people. We are just ordinary men.”
    Carney was so moved by their story that he sent a request to Bremer for a humanitarian exemption for the men. Bremer granted it—six months later.
    Around the time Carney submitted his petition, the CPA began to receive reports that ten thousand to fifteen thousand teachers had been fired. They were
firka
s who had joined the party because they were told to do so by the Ministry of Education. The CPA’s education advisers were worried. As a result of de-Baathification, entire schools were left with just one or two teachers in some Sunni-dominated areas.
    Bremer said that an Iraqi-led de-Baathification commission would handle appeals from the teachers. Then he allowed Ahmed Chalabi to take charge of that commission.
    â€œIt was like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” one CPA official told me. Chalabi sat on the appeals. If the Ministry of Education needed more teachers, they should hire new ones, he said. When CPA officials complained to Bremer, he downplayed the problem and trumpeted the overall importance of de-Baathification.
    â€œIt’s the single most important thing we’ve done here,” he said. “And it’s the most popular thing too.”
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    A few days before the war began, Doug Feith called his predecessor, Walter Slocombe, a centrist Democrat who’d had the job for six years under President Clinton and was well known in the Pentagon. “We’d like you to be the civilian in