A View From the Center Of the Iraq Maelstrom "My Year in Iraq The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope By L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell Illustrated. 417 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27. When Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in May of 2003 as America's proconsul in Iraq, he assumed the most powerful foreign post held by any American since Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan. While he knew little about Iraq when he was appointed by President Bush, Mr. Bremer became, as he writes in his revealing new memoir, ''the only paramount authority figure -- other than dictator Saddam Hussein -- that most Iraqis had ever known.'' His mandate was as sweeping as his powers: to oversee the remaking of an entire nation, from its political institutions to its economic machinery to its security infrastructure. When Mr. Bremer departed 14 months later, after handing off authority to an interim government, many critics -- in Washington, in the military and in the press -- were biting in their assessment of his record. The insurgency had blossomed, violence and casualties were on the rise, and hopes for a quickly stabilized, democratic Iraq were fading. Mr. Bremer was blamed for allowing the security situation to deteriorate. In particular, he was blamed for disbanding the old Iraqi army, an action that critics said contributed to the security vacuum and put several hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street with no job and no salary, as the New Yorker writer George Packer has argued. Mr. Bremer was also blamed for issuing an order that banned thousands of Baath Party officials from returning to their government jobs, thereby depriving the occupation of experienced Iraqi administrators. ''My Year in Iraq,'' an amalgam of spin and sincerity, is partly an explanation (or rationalization) of actions Mr. Bremer took as America's man in Baghdad, partly an effort to issue some ''I told you so's'' to administration colleagues, and partly an attempt to spread (or reassign) responsibility (or blame) by tracing just who in the White House, Pentagon and State Department signed off on or ordered critical decisions made during his tenure. Mr. Bremer deals with some issues like prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in an extremely cursory fashion, while explicating others, like the debate over the timetable for sovereignty, in considerable detail, and he cavalierly dismisses the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which critics say was sidelined because of tensions with the Pentagon, as not offering a practical plan for postwar Iraq. While the book is studded with familiar administration sound bites about the importance of deposing Mr. Hussein, it paints a troubling portrait of the administration's handling of the occupation. It is a portrait that in many respects ratifies what critics of the war and postwar have long been saying: that there were not enough American troops to provide security and contain a spreading insurgency; that, as Mr. Bremer told Vice President Dick Cheney in the fall of 2003, the United States did not have a practical ''military strategy for victory'' in the postwar; and that, as he told Condoleezza Rice in May 2004, the United States had become ''the worst of all things -- an ineffective occupier.'' At the same time, ''My Year in Iraq'' suggests that the decision-making process within the administration was frequently haphazard and self-defeating, leading, for instance, to procrastination about the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr instead of decisive action against him (as Mr. Bremer had urged) before his militant movement got out of hand. The book underscores the degree to which certain idées fixes held by members of the administration hobbled postwar planning, such as the notion that America could ''quickly turn full authority over to a group of selected Iraqi exiles'' like Ahmad Chalabi, even though, Mr. Bremer points out, those exiles lacked credibility in large sectors of the population. And finally, the book points up the huge gap between the reality on the ground in Iraq and the wishful thinking and bad intelligence that informed administration hawks' thinking. Assertions, for example, that oil exports would pay for the country's reconstruction, when, in fact, sabotage of pipelines and a decrepit industry infrastructure meant big expenditures just to get the Iraqi oil business up and running. And dismissals of insurgents as mere ''pockets of dead enders,'' when, in fact, Mr. Bremer says he read in the summer of 2003 a pre-invasion Iraqi intelligence document calling for a strategy of organized resistance to be put into effect when and if Saddam's regime collapsed. America's paucity of practical intelligence about ''the nature of the enemy'' stemmed in part, Mr. Bremer argues, from the priorities Washington set for the Central Intelligence Agency's Baghdad station -- ''hunting for weapons of mass destruction and capturing the senior Baathist fugitives made notorious on Centcom's Most Wanted deck of cards'' instead of focusing on ''the guys who are blowing up Humvees and killing our soldiers.'' Matters were exacerbated by the fact that the Coalition Provisional Authority was chronically understaffed: in July 2003, Mr. Bremer notes, none of the 250 people he had requested weeks before had arrived, and ''Washington red tape would slow reconstruction funds and personnel for almost a year.'' Although Mr. Bremer did not publicly call for more American troops while he was posted in Iraq, he said in the fall of 2004, before the presidential election, that inadequate forces had hampered the occupation by allowing widespread looting to create ''an atmosphere of lawlessness'' early on. In this volume, Mr. Bremer much more forcefully emphasizes his belief, throughout his tenure in Iraq, that more troops were needed to secure the country, and his fear that the Pentagon -- adhering to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's theory of streamlining the military -- was eager to ''replace U.S. troops with unprepared Iraqi police'' who had been rushed ''through truncated training courses.'' Mr. Bremer quotes a September 2003 memo in which Mr. Rumsfeld declared that ''our goal should be to ramp up the Iraqi numbers, try to get some additional international forces'' and ''reduce the U.S. role.'' And he writes that Colin L. Powell said this push was related to concerns that the president might have to mobilize more National Guard units, including ones from crucial states in an election year. Mr. Rumsfeld seems to have ignored Mr. Bremer's entreaties. Before leaving for Iraq in May 2003, Mr. Bremer sent the defense secretary a copy of a RAND report estimating that 500,000 troops would be needed to stabilize postwar Iraq -- more than three times the number of troops then deployed. ''I think you should consider this,'' Mr. Bremer wrote in his cover memo. He says he never heard back from Mr. Rumsfeld. The same thing happened a year later, Mr. Bremer recounts, when he sent Mr. Rumsfeld a message noting ''that the deterioration of the security situation since April had made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts with too few resources.'' He recommended that the Pentagon ''consider whether the Coalition could deploy one or two additional divisions for up to a year.'' Again, he says, he never heard back from Mr. Rumsfeld. As for President Bush, Mr. Bremer says he spoke to him about the RAND report in May 2003 and brought up the issue of troop levels again the following month in a video conference with the National Security Council, presided over by Mr. Bush. On the controversial matter of disbanding the Iraqi army, Mr. Bremer argues, as he has in interviews, that ''the old army had long since disappeared'' by the time he arrived in Iraq: ''when Iraqi draftees had seen which way the war was going in 2003, they simply deserted and went home to their farms and families.'' The decision to formally dissolve Mr. Hussein's army, Mr. Bremer contends, was meant to ''demonstrate to the Iraqi people'' that the United States had destroyed ''the underpinnings of the Saddam regime.'' That decision, Mr. Bremer adds, was hardly his alone, but was made in consultation with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and was authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld. The exclusion of former Baathists from the government was more complicated. Mr. Bremer writes that before he even got to Baghdad, Mr. Feith showed him a draft order for the ''De-Baathification of Iraqi Society'' and said he was thinking of having Mr. Bremer's predecessor in Baghdad, Jay Garner, issue the order right away. Mr. Feith was persuaded to let Mr. Bremer issue the decree himself, when he got to Baghdad. Its implementation, Mr. Bremer writes, was left largely to Iraqis on the Governing Council like Mr. Chalabi, who was close to Mr. Feith and other neo-conservatives at the Pentagon. ''Our de-Baathification policy had targeted only the top 1 percent of the party's members,'' he writes, ''but under Chalabi's direction, the Iraqi De-Baathification Council had broadened the policy, for example, depriving thousands of teachers of their jobs.'' In retrospect, Mr. Bremer adds, he ''had been wrong to give a political body like the Governing Council responsibility for overseeing the de-Baathification policy.'' At one point, talking about the Iraqi Governing Council, Mr. Bremer said to Mr. Wolfowitz, ''Those people couldn't organize a parade, let alone run the country.'' As this book makes clear, the hidden and not-so-hidden agendas of Washington officials and exiles like Mr. Chalabi, along with the clashing interests of various Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish representatives, turned many of Mr. Bremer's 18-hour days into marathons of frustrating conflict resolution. Combined with the daily exigencies of overseeing a country threatening to slip into chaos and the maddening bureaucratic problems of getting even the simplest plans off the ground, they give a whole new meaning to the phrase ''crisis management,'' and they leave the reader with a sobering sense of the staggering difficulties of the situation in Iraq. BOOKS OF THE TIMES"