This made their perfidy more effective and durable than what we see today - in the age of bureaucracy over knowledge, hierarchy over fact. An unwillingness - perhaps inability - to rapidly correct errors with new technique is typical of politics (and political discussion) and corporate life.
As we are witnessing, this is no way to run an empire.
.d.
...
Welcome to the Green Zone
By William Langewiesche, Atlantic Monthly 11/04 Oct 1, 2004, 11:07
<snip>
Living in isolation was not what the American administrators had in mind when they first came to the Green Zone on the heels of the invasion, in April of 2003. The original team was known as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA. It was headed by a retired general named Jay Garner, who was assisted by a group of former officers and ambassadors, all of whom were high-powered and competent people. They were an affable, self-deprecating bunch, given to calling themselves "space cowboys," in reference not to their state of mind but to a Clint Eastwood comedy in which a group of aging astronauts are called out of retirement to make one final flight. After weeks impatiently waiting in a five-star hotel in Kuwait, they established their administration in the vandalized and looted Republican Palace, where they slept on cots, and gladly endured the heat and dust and confusion of the time. People later came to name them Orhanians. They were folksy and unafraid. They were also on a wildly optimistic mission. Washington had decided that war is like surgery, and that all that was needed now was to fill in for the top Baathists who had been excised. According to that model (which included the Iraqi public's adoring acceptance of their liberators), the Iraqi government would continue to function, and society would remain intact. With that in mind, the Orhanians were utterly unprepared to handle the dual reality of governmental disintegration and catastrophic social collapse.
And so in came the Cpathians. Paul Bremer arrived on May 12, 2003, with instruction to assume full governmental control. Bremer seemed made for this task. He was a tough, shrewd operative with strong conservative credentials, who had initially risen through the State Department, but was certainly no diplomatic pansy. In Washington he was considered to be an expert on terrorism. With his own people he was severe. His attitude, one of them said to me, was "You're here for the mission. Get the job done. If you can't cut it, fuck off." Fine. Bremer was not big on compliments. He was smart, flexible, and very hard-working. He called Washington, D.C., "the squirrel cage" and detested getting caught up in it. Even those who bore the brunt of his scorn admired him for his style. He was the Dude exuding power, the Anointed One. He would fly around Iraq in the early days, dressed in a business suit and combat boots, responding to the immediate problems that he encountered, and snapping out orders to make things right. This was not necessarily the best way to go about running a nation ("I want a law prohibiting potholes" is how someone described it to me), and follow-up turned out to be a problem, but Bremer was confident and decisive, and so, therefore, was his newly formed CPA.
Those were heady times. People in the Green Zone talked about democracy, and they believed in it in the long run, but for many of them the more immediate operative belief was that the potential for personal wealth and comfort could be made to prevail over all other forces in Iraqi society. The handouts would end, and business opportunity would win the peace: Iraq would be remade into the American ideal of a free-market state. Because Iraq had had a socialist economy for generations, dominated by large state-owned enterprises, this was a radical goaland certainly far beyond the mandate of the U.S.-led invasion. However, the CPA had essentially unlimited resources to spend preparing the ground, and the assistance of the contractors who were arriving in force; there seemed to be no limit to what could be achieved. The assumption was that the United States would maintain full and formal control for several years, and that the political environment would be benign. The United States, in other words, was going to found a whole new nation, and worry about the political structure and the transition to sovereignty later on. Moreover, there would be no need to negotiate with stubborn constituencies like those that fetter business back home. In Iraq things were going to get done, simply because no one would say no. Of course, the Iraqis then turned out to be the most stubborn constituents of all. But those troubles were still to come. For the first few months the country was relatively docile, and Iraq seemed almost like a blank slate. For people at the CPA that was the thrilling side of the breakdown that had occurred. In the Green Zone you could make a mark on history.
There were excesses, as might be imagined. The hiring of the senior CPA staff was steered by Donald Rumsfeld and his conservative deputies at the Pentagon, who, by insisting on rigid agendas, effectively ruled out some of the more worldly officials and diplomats who might otherwise have been willing to intervene. In their place came zealous amateurs, often from the private sector, whose chief qualifications seemed to be their Republican credentials and their eagerness to get involved. To their credit, most of them eased off the ideology once they faced the practical realities of Iraq. They muddled through and sometimes got something done before getting out; they left no marks.
A few of the most zealous, however, refused to back down, and, indeed, upon arriving in the Green Zone seemed to think of Iraq as a living laboratory, a testing ground for their ideas. A high-ranking military officer with deep experience in the turmoil of the Third World, and who had worked closely with these people, later described them to me with a mixture of wonder and amusement. One of the characters was a cigar-chewing banker, who at that time was the president of Michigan State. He was a Republican partisan named Peter McPherson, whose obsession for a while seemed to be to keep the French out. The officer laughed hard remembering this. He said, "He was so fucking paranoid about the French! He was absolutely rabid! He wanted to make sure they didn't get a look into anything. We went through this discussion about the mobile phones, the networks, because you know the French are big in the region in mobile phones. McPherson wanted to find a way to construct a public tender that would"he laughed again"that would somehow exclude the French." If so, apparently he did not entirely succeed: The Egyptians won the contract for central Iraq, but awarded a large contract in turn to the French communications company Alcatel. So much for lofty thoughts. McPherson eventually returned to Michigan State.
[...]
But those were the standout cases. Even from within the Green Zone few of the Americans fooled themselves about the growing hostility of the Iraqi populationand indeed, they were if anything too concerned about it. Moreover, the idea, which was widespread among the Baghdad press corps, that the CPA was nothing but a radical neoconservative construct turned out to be operationally wrong. In practice the CPA was a broad American construct, and for better or worse it functioned as a piece of ourselves. It is true that most of the rank and file had supported the invasion, and continued to believe that they were contributing to the struggle against terrorism, but they were not ideologues so much as ordinary, overconfident, mildly presumptuous college graduatesfreshly scrubbed Americans of the sort who inhabit Washington, D.C., nestling up to power.
A man from the inner circles of the Republican Palace, who was known to be a wise and experienced observer, told me I had it wrong when I said that there was something about the CPA staff that reminded me of student utopians. He said, "It wasn't that idealistic. You're right that there were a lot of young people who came in, particularly in the governance and policy area. Very nice, very personable peoplenothing against them. But they had no knowledge whatsoever of Iraq, very very little of the region, and absolutely no prior experience in post-conflict operations. They were not so much idealistic as on a tripa power trip. I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but they wanted to be Machiavellian, in the sense of 'How do we shape the politics in this country? How do we get the result of having a government friendly to the United States?' And every step that they took to try and achieve that achieved the opposite."
"Why?"
"Because it was manipulative. Because it was not transparent. Because it was done in every possible way calculable that would make the Shiites suspicious."
If anything the maneuvers were not Machiavellian enough. In his description of an effective prince, Machiavelli wrote, "He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless, and devout. And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be such that if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how." And to know how, the prince needs to understand, and never to underestimate, the people he would rule.
[...]
full at -
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