Over the rainbow

The handover has taken place. Paul Bremer, a very bright man, leaves Iraq. He worked 18 hours a day. His goal was to put a stabilized Iraq on the road to democracy. He tried. He minimally achieved but few of his expectations.

All the blame should not be charged to Bremer. Rebuilding Iraq was headed for disaster because the Bush administration had no realistic plan for the postwar era. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz relied on a convenient fiction. Ahmad Chalabi provided them the phony human intelligence that they wanted to hear: that Iraqis would welcome us with open arms, Chalabi would be president and peace and democracy would flourish ever after.

In reality, the Coalition Provisional Authority could not achieve the minimum stability and security necessary for building anything. Bremer's first major mistake affected all that followed. He dismissed the Iraqi army. Many of Saddam's unemployed soldiers became fresh terrorists. The Iraqi army is one-third the size that Bremer had promised. Seventy percent of the police officers have not been trained. At various times when the Iraqi army and police force have been called to action they have refused to perform their duties.

Bremer promised 250,000 jobs by Christmas 2003. It was a mammoth, naive goal for a country in shambles. Only 15,000 jobs have been created.

There was a gigantic looting spree that the undermanned U.S. Army was unable to stop. Baghdad was a wreck -- nothing worked. Hospitals, schools, museums and most every governmental ministry, except the oil ministry, were ransacked. Electricity generation was vandalized and collapsed and has only been partially restored. The waterworks did not function. The shortage of troops has left borders and oil pipelines unprotected.

Congress appropriated $18.6 billion for reconstruction, but only a small percentage of that has been spent. One hundred billion dollars will be spent to support our troops. Hundreds of billions will be needed for reconstruction and salaries of the Iraqi military, police, civil defense and border guards.

Then there is the Iraqi debt of $383 billion -- unless wholly or partially forgiven.

If the Bush administration had planned for what would be needed in postwar Iraq, some of the things that Bremer promised might have been achieved.

From the outset, the notion that Iraq would be a model of a democracy and that other Middle Eastern nations would copy it was fanciful. According to a recent poll done by the CPA, 85 percent of Iraqis expressed "gross dissatisfaction" with the American performance, and only 10 percent think things are better off now with Saddam gone.

Bremer dreamt that by this time Iraq would be able to provide its own security and we could focus on a massive reconstruction program. That dream turned into a nightmare. Bremer wanted to privatize Iraq but found there were, other than oil operations, mostly bare bones to privatize.

Gen. Mark Kimmett, the TV general, said we would challenge the terrorists in Fallujah and root them out. Then that strategy failed, and the Marines withdrew. Former Republican Guard troops were sent in. Despite some American bombing, Fallujah remains a hotbed of terrorists.

Some positive things have been done. Almost 2,500 schools have been repaired. Textbooks have been supplied. Children have been immunized. Loans have been made to small businesses. All of these positives have been overwhelmed by the lack of security.

American soldiers are hated, yet the new Iraqi interim government cannot survive without them. A free and fair election in January will be virtually useless unless some sense of order is restored. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. We cannot even see the tunnel. We must disabuse ourselves of this fateful notion of democracy in Iraq. The best we can hope for is an authoritarian government that is not overly repressive by regional standards. Call it Egypt-lite.

There is an overwhelming consensus in both political parties that we cannot cut and run. It appears that NATO may give us token help with the training of the Iraqi army but will leave the dying to us.

The interim government seems to be off to a good start with Prime Minister Iyad Allawi having a 73 percent approval rating, but radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, who now enters politics, has an 80 percent approval rating. Strange.

After the election and when a president is sworn in, he should indicate that, while democracy would be a nice thing, the objective is stability. Democracy is somewhere over the rainbow.

Thomas F. Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.