L. Paul Bremer

L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer (1941-) is an American diplomat who became Presidential Envoy to Iraq after the Iraq War, heading the Coalition Provisional Authority serving from 2003 to 2004. He now spends full time painting scenes of Vermont, going back to his undergraduate days of studying art history.

He was a strong supporter of the policies of George W. Bush, an important issue in a time of both internal infighting in the Administration and external criticism. The press has been curiously reluctant to report my constant public support for the president's strategy in Iraq and his policies to fight terrorism. I have been involved in the war on terrorism for two decades, and in my view no world leader has better understood the stakes in this global war than President Bush.

He agreed with the President that "The direction that all of us followed was from the president, and his direction was quite clear: that we were going to try to set the Iraqis on a path to democratic government and help them rebuild their country." In his mind and the President's, the job was not just reconstruction, but democratization of a society that had never knwn democracy. Bush later presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Iraq
"In mid-April 2003 Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz contacted former Ambassador Bremer to serve as the senior American official in Iraq. Bremer would replace Jay Garner and Khalilzad in leading Coalition efforts to help shape the new Iraq. President Bush publicly announced the decision on 6 May 2003, 17 days after Garner arrived in Baghdad as the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA).The CPA’s stated mission was to “restore conditions of safety and stability, to create conditions in which the Iraqi people can safely determine their own political future, and facilitate economic recovery, sustainable reconstruction and development.” The US Government never issued a formal order dissolving the ORHA." Some of its staff members joined the CPA, and Garner returned to civilian life.

He came to the job as a terrorism expert, not an expert on the area or culture. It was tougher than he expected, in part, because "The planning, as it turns out, was based on the wrong assumptions. … In some ways, even more importantly, the information that we had about the state of the Iraqi economy was not good."

Debaathification
He said that he did not create the policy, but was given it by Pentagon staff.

Garner said that he had protested full debaathication to Bremer, who said "These are the directions I have. I have directions to execute this..."

"Well, I didn't give it to Chalabi. I did make a mistake. The de-Baathification policy was the right policy -- absolutely satisfied with that. It was based very much like the de-Nazification after World War II, because the Baath Party, as Saddam himself said publicly and often, was modeled on the Nazi Party, including having children spies. …

The implementation is where I went wrong. I knew that we, the foreigners --- whether it was Americans or British or Australians or Romanians or Poles -- we were going to have a hard time making the kind of fine distinctions that de-Baathification policy required. Did [a person] join the party because he was a real believer, or did he join it because he wanted to be a teacher, and to be a teacher you had to join the party? I said: "We're not going to be able to make those distinctions. I need to turn it over to Iraqis."

The mistake I made was turning it over to the Governing Council. I should have turned it over instead to a judicial body of some kind. The Governing Council, in turn, turned it over to Chalabi. I did not turn it over to Chalabi. It is true that once the Governing Council took it over, they started interpreting the policy, implementing the policy much more broadly, and we had to walk the cat back in the spring of 2004. ..."

Private enterprise and advisory service
Before Iraq, he was chairman and CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting,M arsh Crisis Consulting, a risk and insurance services firm which is a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., a trustee on the Economic Club of New York, and a board member of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Akzo Nobel NV, the Harvard Business School Club of New York and The Netherlands-America Foundation. He served on the International Advisory Boards of Komatsu Corporation and Chugai Pharmaceuticals. Before Marsh, he was Managing Director of Kissinger Associates.

Appointed Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism by House Speaker Dennis Hastert in 1999, he was also a member of the the National Academy of Science Commission examining the role of Science and Technology in countering terrorism. In late 2001, along with former Attorney General Edwin Meese, he co-chaired the Heritage Foundation's Homeland Security Task Force, which created a blueprint for the White House's U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Foreign Service
He was a career Foreign Service Officer for 23 years under six Secretaries of State, rising to the grade of Career Minister and retiring in 1989. Bremer was an assistant to Henry Kissinger between 1972 and 1976. He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Oslo, Norway from 1976-79, returning to Washington to take a post of Deputy Executive Secretary of State where he remained from 1979-81. In 1981 he became Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Alexander Haig. Bremer was named ambassador to the Netherlands in 1983, and was appointed ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism by Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1999, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert appointed him chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism.

His first assignment was as a general-duties officer in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1967. He was also assigned in Blantyre, Malawi as Economic and Commercial Officer from 1968 to 1971.

Early life
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he went to high school Phillips Academy, graduated from Yale University in 1963, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1967. He also earned a Certificate of Political Studies (CEP) from Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (more widely referred to as Sciences Po). He speaks Arabic, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Farsi, German, and Spanish.