Beyond  /  Longread

Orders of Disorder

Who disbanded Iraq’s army and de-Baathified its bureaucracy?

Aboard the U.S. Air Force C-130, Bremer edited two draft documents he intended to issue when he arrived. One provided for “de-Baathification,” prohibiting senior officials from Saddam Hussein’s party from participating in the new Iraq. The other disbanded the Iraqi army and other security organs. Looking out the plane windows, Bremer and his deputy, Clay McManaway, saw fire after fire stretching toward the horizon. “Industrial-strength looting,” McManaway yelled over the churn of the propellers. “Lots of old scores to settle.”

In a way no one on the flight could have realized, these succinct observations would go a long way toward explaining the ultimate consequences of the documents in Bremer’s briefcase. Over the last 20 years, as the United States has reckoned with the human toll and costly legacy of its disastrous war of choice in the Middle East, those two infamous decisions of Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority—CPA Order 1, de-Baathifying the Iraqi state, and CPA Order 2, dissolving the Iraqi military—have been held up as some of the worst mistakes of the war. They are seen as sparks that would ignite the insurgency to come and set Iraq aflame for years, a period of disorder that would claim the lives of thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

And yet the orders that paved the way for all that chaos and bloodshed have remained shrouded in mystery. At the time, not even senior U.S. leaders such as CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell understood where they had come from or who had approved them. Two decades later, after piecing together memoirs from key participants, archival documents, and fresh interviews with a dozen former top U.S. officials, a more complete origin story is finally available. 

The two orders, it turns out, had very different backstories and very different paths through the policymaking process. Although both were drafted by relatively unknown mid-level Pentagon officials, the de-Baathification order emerged from the murky world of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office, whereas the order disbanding the country’s military and security apparatus was finalized on the ground in Iraq. Perhaps surprisingly, although both orders overturned the White House’s prewar plans, neither was seen as a particularly big deal at the time by those who rolled out the new approach. Like much of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq, the story of CPA Orders 1 and 2 is a tale of belated planning, misplaced assumptions, and bungled execution—all occurring amid a rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.