Paul Bremer to Al Jazeera, “The system was not working”
May 9th, 2008 . by HSLEADERFrom Al Jazeera
Paul Bremer was appointed by George Bush, the US president, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority immediately after the invasion of the country by US-led forces, taking up his position on May 11, 2003, until June 2004 when limited sovereignty was restored.
As part of Al Jazeera’s special series War Without End, he told Hoda Abdel Hamid about the challenges he faced in trying to restructure Iraq’s government institutions and infrastructure.
“In my very first meeting with president [George] Bush, which was on May 3 2003, he made it very clear that we were going to take our time to try to put Iraq on a long-term programme for political reconstruction and, of course, rebuild the economy.
But the clear message was let’s take our time and try to get it right in terms of political reconstruction.
Two things were pretty quickly apparent. One was that we did not have adequate security even in Baghdad because the looting was going on virtually from the day I arrived.
Within a week it became clear to me that we had a major problem that I had not anticipated which was how badly deformed the economy was, how much devastation Saddam had done to the economy.”
Leave a Reply