Review
“Nobody was better situated than Allawi to provide readeres with unique insights to the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq and how the occupation and reconstruction efforts were handled."--Frederick Smith, United States Department of Defence (Frederick Smith)
"The most comprehensive historical account to date of the disastrous aftermath of the American invasion."—Edward Wong, New York Times Book Review (Edward Wong New York Times Book 2007-05-27)
“Ali A. Allawi, until recently an Iraqi minister, is one of Iraq's most respected politicians of the post-Saddam era. His study of the crisis in Iraq is by far the most perceptive analysis of the extent of the disaster in his country, and how it might best be resolved. It is the first real attempt to suggest the Middle East might pull out of its death spiral."--Patrick Cockburn, correspondent for the Independent and author of The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Patrick Cockburn)
“While many books have been written about Iraq's tragedy, Ali Allawi's story offers a unique insider's perspective of the global forces, local passions and diverse personalities that converged to create a situation that will haunt us for decades. An indispensable source of ideas about what happened - and what is likely to happen - in Iraq.”—Moises Naim, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim)
“A comprehensive survey of the occupation of Iraq that highlights the complacency and failings of the American project. This is a sobering account, written from the rare view of an Iraqi insider. Allawi reveals how often the Iraqis were ignored in the chaotic rebuilding of their country and explains the complex dynamics behind Iraq's descent into violent sectarainism.”—Rory McCarthy, Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian and author of Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq (Rory McCarthy)
"Poignant. . . . Others have chronicled what went wrong [with the invasion of Iraq]. Few have witnessed events so close up, and with so intimate a knowledge of the gap between (Iraq) reality and (American) expectation."—Daniel Pudles, The Economist (Daniel Pudles The Economist 2007-04-20)
"Ali Allawi . . . tells the war's story from an Iraqi perspective. But what makes The Occupation of Iraq perhaps the most compelling of all books written to date about the war is that he does so with Americans in mind."—World Magazine (World Magazine 2008-07-05)
“Magisterial. . . . Pure gold. . . . Will certainly become the benchmark work against which all later books will have to be measured. It is authoritative, incisive, dispassionate, devastating in its important judgments, and wholly original. Allawi is one of a handful of men who can tell the whole story of policy, government and administration from the basis of close, personal experience.”—Roger Owen, Harvard University (Roger Owen)
From the Author
Q: What have been the main causes of the catastrophe of post-Saddam Iraq?
A: Iraq continues to be racked by violence and intractable political problems. The United States embarked on its invasion with little understanding of the country and with only cursory prewar planning. Iraqis were unrealistically expected to adapt quickly to the premises of Western liberal democracy. A dysfunctional occupation administration ran Iraq in an uneasy partnership with a divided Iraqi political class. Decades of dictatorship had covered up the fault lines in Iraqi society. A revolutionary redrawing of the political map ensued, which empowered the disadvantaged Shia and Kurdish communities. Arab Sunnis rejected the implications of this dramatic change and launched a broad resistance.
Q: Is federalism the answer to the current quagmire?
A: The present framework of the Iraqi state is inherently unstable. Decision making is paralyzed by power-sharing formulas. The machinery of the government itself is too decrepit and corrupt to manage the country. The fiction that Iraq can be maintained in its present form without prolonged violence and instability must be abandoned. A regional solution may be the only possible answer. It must be fair, well planned, and executed with equitable revenue-distribution.
Q: What is your view of the best path the U.S. and its allies can now take?
A: New regional governing authorities with wide powers and resources would be necessary. Federal institutions have to act as adjudicators between regions. Security must be decentralized until such time as confidence between the communities is reestablished. Federalism in Iraq has to be underwritten by an international treaty that would include regional powers. U.S. troops would then be replaced by an international force to stabilize the new federal system.
About the Author
Ali A. Allawi is research professor, National University of Singapore. He was appointed Iraq’s first postwar civilian Minister of Defense in 2004 and in 2005 was appointed Minister of Finance. This is his third book. He lives in London and Baghdad.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Rajiv Chandrasekaran It was almost four years ago that L. Paul Bremer made a decision that may have doomed U.S. attempts to create a new Iraq: The American proconsul issued his infamous order banning many mid-level members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from working for Iraq's largest and most coveted employer, its government. In the following months, the Sunnis who had dominated the old ruling elite argued that postwar national reconciliation depended on modifying the decree. Meanwhile, leaders of Iraq's once-oppressed Shiite majority insisted on keeping the policy intact. In recent months, desperate to promote peace among Sunnis and Shiites, the Bush administration has reentered the fray, calling for Iraq's Shiite-led government to allow more ex-Baathists to return to their old jobs.
In all of the back-and-forth, nobody of any stature has suggested that Bremer's approach toward the Baathists was too soft. But now, in a compelling, detailed history of the occupation, Iraq's first postwar civilian defense minister makes just that argument. In the first major account from an Iraqi insider, Ali A. Allawi contends in The Occupation of Iraq that one of Washington's principal mistakes was that Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority did not go far enough in dismantling the Baathist structure of Iraq's bureaucracy.
"The CPA did not demolish the state that it had inherited and then start to rebuild it along the lines that it prescribed," Allawi writes. "The unwillingness to treat the Ba'ath legacy for what it was -- a totalitarian state with a privileged elite -- and therefore in need of a radical overhaul, made the CPA reforms essentially tentative and nominal. It was as if a huge, decrepit building had been struck unevenly by a demolition ball that succeeded in inflicting only minor damage to the edifice."
Saying that Bremer didn't go far enough is a striking and controversial argument. Allawi -- a former banker who left Iraq to study at MIT in 1964, lived in exile until 2003, and later served as the country's postwar finance minister -- maintains that Bremer's "blunderbuss approach" to de-Baathification was too focused on high-ranking officials; Allawi laments that Bremer's occupation government did not do enough to root out Baathists and their network of sympathizers from important mid-level positions in the government. Allawi's hard-line views on de-Baathification aren't shared by many of the Americans who have been involved in crafting Iraq policy. There's a growing consensus, even at the White House, that Bremer's policy needlessly alienated anxious Sunnis and helped fuel the insurgency.
But Allawi, a secular Shiite who still advises Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has a real-world basis for his argument: He ran three different Iraqi ministries, where he encountered firsthand the dysfunction of the country's corrupt, lazy and nepotistic bureaucracy. Although Bremer's CPA has been knocked for focusing on minutiae -- rewriting Iraq's traffic law and tax code, for instance -- instead of more quickly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis, Allawi wishes the Americans had tinkered with more, not less. It wasn't just de-Baathification that he thinks was too timid; he contends that the CPA should have overhauled state-owned businesses by pushing for more free-market reforms. It is understandable that former exiles such as Allawi would seek an even more aggressive overhaul of Iraq's government, but it's difficult to imagine that many Iraqis who stayed put during the Baath tyranny would have tolerated an American occupation that sought to do so.
Indeed, Allawi's lament is shared by many former Iraqi exiles who returned to their country after Hussein's fall, dreaming of modernizing their homeland and sharing all they had gleaned in their years overseas. But the Iraq they encountered was very different from the one they left: It was decrepit and dangerous, riven by ethnic and religious tension. In the end, Allawi is just as critical of his fellow Iraqis as he is of the Americans. It is his countrymen, he concludes, who have failed to put aside their sect and work for the common good.
Thankfully, Allawi's book is not simply a polemic. It is a thorough account of the effort to govern and reconstruct Iraq as told by an Iraqi who was deeply involved in the process. Though dense at points, The Occupation of Iraq is packed with fascinating details for those who have closely followed America's misadventure in Iraq, and it's a valuable primer for those who haven't. His insider account of the past four years -- and his views of what the United States should have done differently -- adds a valuable new voice to the ongoing debate about Iraq.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
