Hearts and Minds by Hannah Gurman

Author:Hannah Gurman [Gurman, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595588432
Publisher: New Press, The

THE NEW IRAQ

L. Paul Bremer III liked to wear combat boots as a martial counterpoint to his cufflinks and pocket square—a combination that matched the daring spirit of his mission, no doubt. But he looked exactly like what he was—a wealthy Republican ideologue with no Iraq experience, drafted from the corporate world to run a country of over 30 million people. Bremer embodied the American occupation: as arrogant as he was out of touch with reality. The plan he had been sent to implement was simple: erase everything. Raze the institutions of the old Iraq and a new nation would be born from its ruins. Bremer ruled by decree, and his infamous “100 Orders” disbanded the four-hundred-thousand-member Iraqi armed forces, dismantled all of the institutions of the state, radically privatized the economy, and installed a group of expatriate Iraqis with no local support in positions of power.1

Given an $18 billion budget and authority over Iraq’s massive oil revenues, Bremer’s billions and the army of foreign contractors that flooded into the country failed to replace the state he had dismantled.2 Thousands of newly unemployed Iraqi soldiers protested the dissolution of the army.3 Oil workers protested the privatization of state industries.4 Ordinary Iraqis across the country protested the lack of electricity, water, health care, education, security, and jobs. They marched in demonstrations that Western commentators reminded the world would have been illegal under Saddam Hussein.

The Western commentators were right. After decades of war and dictatorship, an Iraqi civil society was struggling to be born. In the first days of the occupation, independent newspapers were launched, Iraqi nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) opened their doors, and everyone from oil workers to doctors tried to organize unions. Iraqis, emerging from a stifling dictatorship, sought to exercise their newfound freedoms of speech and assembly, and—time and again—they were shot down in the street.

April 15, 2003, Mosul: 10 protesters killed5

April 29, 2003, Fallujah: 13 protesters killed6

April 30, 2003, Fallujah: 2 protesters killed7

June 18, 2003, Baghdad: 2 protesters killed8

June 24, 2003, Basra: 4 protesters killed9

August 10, 2003, Basra: 1 protester killed10

August 13, 2003, Baghdad: 1 protester killed11

October 4, 2003, Baghdad: 1 protester killed12

October 4, 2003, Basra: 1 protester killed13

December 31, 2003, Kirkuk: 2 protesters killed14

Cloistered inside the cavernous marble-clad halls of the old Republican Palace, Bremer continued his work. He rewrote Iraq’s laws and held countless upbeat press conferences, seemingly undeterred by the country on the other side of what became known as the Green Zone. His administration arrested Iraqi and Arab journalists, shut down newspapers that “encouraged attacks on Coalition Forces,”15 maintained Saddam-era laws banning unions, arrested clerics who preached against the occupation, and presided over a military crackdown on street protests. “Iraq is open for business!” Bremer announced to a room full of reporters, as he signed into law the most radical and unpopular set of economic reforms in modern Iraqi history.16 At some point during that first long year of occupation, Iraqi civil society suffocated and the resistance began.

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