Former CPA head L. Paul Bremer on the past, present, and future of Iraq
BY BECCA FRIEDMAN

As a close advisor to the Bush Administration and the head of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer has been a major shaper of America's current foreign policy. He has also been a lightning rod for criticism. HPR had the chance to interview Bremer about his work in Iraq and his long diplomatic career.

HPR: How do you think history is going to look upon the American campaign in Iraq?

L. Paul Bremer: I am hopeful about the situation in Iraq. When we succeed there, which I think we will, it will be very important because it will show skeptics that Arabs are capable of self-government and government under a representative, democratic, liberal constitution. That will be a very important model.

HPR: So, how would you define success in the context of Iraq? What does that look like?

LPB: Well, I believe that you have to be fairly modest. I believe that success in Iraq is a representative government. I don’t say it’s going to be like an American democracy; it’ll be different. I foresee a representative government living in a relatively stable situation. It won’t be violence-free because there is an enormous amount of weaponry in Iraq and has been in these sort of violent countries for a long time. Additionally, Iraq should be at peace with its neighbors and pose no threat to them, and it should not be a base for terrorism, and it should not have weapons of mass destruction. It should be an open, liberal economy and in a sense, a modern economy, with a secular structure. That to me would be the definition of a good outcome.

HPR: And how does the US figure into that vision of success?

LPB: We’re still very important there and will be for some time to come because of the size of our presence, both diplomatic and military. Our economic presence is going to diminish quite a bit because funds for reconstruction were appropriated. American funds continue to be spent, and there are some projects still going on. But I think we’ll have significant political, diplomatic and military presence there for some time.

HPR: Do you think that, sitting here now on October 9, 2007, there is an exit strategy? Is that even a concept we should be thinking about?

LPB: I’m not very attracted to the idea of exit strategies. I think the question should be to design a policy that will look after American interests, however those are defined. If, in the end, those can be advanced by having no American troops in Iraq, fine. If, on the other hand, American interests still suggest that we should have troops there, then we should have troops there.

I don’t like the idea of saying, “We have to have an exit strategy”. I don’t get that. The question is: what’s in America’s interest?

HPR: There is a lot of academic debate about whether democracy is possible everywhere—Western-style democracy, or just democracy as a general concept. As someone who has worked on the ground in Iraq, do you think that Iraqi culture is conducive to democracy?

LPB: When I joined the diplomatic service, more than 40 years ago, my first assignment was Afghanistan. All of our experts said, “Well you know, these Afghans could never be democratic.” They have a democratic government now. It’s not ideal, but they have an elected government today. In the 1970s, when I was Henry Kissinger’s chief of staff, there was a lot of talk about Korea, which was still under a strongman, and people said, our Korean experts said, confidently, “Koreans can never be democratic because it’s an old patriarchical society of strongmen that goes back 5000 years.” Well, today Korea is a democracy.

So I don’t buy these so-called academic and diplomatic experts who say there is a kind of people somewhere, in this case Arabs, who are not capable of self-government. I think it’s cultural arrogance to say that. I think every culture is capable of democratic, representative government.

HPR: Some people think the road to peace in the Middle East is through Jerusalem, and others think it’s through Baghdad. Do you think that there’s truth to either one of these approaches?

LPB: The argument for focusing on Iraq, in the sense of a stable Middle East, actually has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. It has more to do with being able to show a model where Arabs are capable of moderate, representative self-government. And if you believe, in the end, that democratic governments are less likely — history suggests it’s true — to go to war, then it should be in America’s interest.

It’s not just a question of ideology, it’s a question of our hard-nosed interest to promote representative government in this region. It doesn’t mean that the way you solve the Arab-Israeli conflict is based upon what happens in Iraq, but I do think in the broader context of stability in the region, it’s very important to succeed in Iraq.

HPR: You mentioned that you’ve been working on terrorism since the 1970s. How do you think the face of terrorism has changed since then, and how can policymakers react to those changes?

LPB: The main difference is the terrorists we faced in the ’70s essentially saw terrorism as a tactic, as a way to draw attention to their cause. And generally speaking, they didn’t kill a lot of people and didn’t themselves want to die. There were almost no suicides. It just wasn’t done.

What we found on the National Commission on Terrorism was that in the ’90s, suicides picked up enormously, and we began to see mass casuality terrorist attacks. And that’s a different kind of threat. To defeat the old terrorists, we had a strategy of treating them like criminals, because they didn’t want to go to jail, they didn’t want to get caught. That was perfectly adequate, you could argue, for the old kind of terrorist, but it’s completely inadequate for these new guys. They don’t care about jail; they’re prepared to die.

HPR: So given these new circumstances, do you think that the War on Terror is a war that can be won?

LPB: I’m very confident we can win this war. However, I think it’s a generational war, in some ways like the Cold War. And means it’s going to have to have bipartisan support. No one party can sustain this war for a couple of generations.¨ ]]>