# Coalition Provisional Authority The occupation government of Iraq from May 2003 to June 28, 2004: an American body, answering to the Pentagon, that ruled a country of 25 million by decree for fourteen months under [[Paul Bremer]], a former ambassador with no Iraq experience who replaced the retired general Jay Garner three weeks into the occupation. It is the institutional heart of the [[Iraq War]]'s failure and, for the vault, the reference case for what an unelected authority with total power and no accountability produces. ## The orders Bremer's first two decrees set the course. **Order 1** (May 16, 2003) barred the top four ranks of the Baath Party from public life — [[De-Baathification]] — removing tens of thousands of teachers, doctors and civil servants who had joined the party because employment required it. **Order 2** (May 23) dissolved the Iraqi army and security ministries, putting roughly 400,000 armed, trained, now-unpaid men on the street. Both went against the plans of the CIA, the State Department and the military commanders on the ground; both are conventionally credited with supplying the insurgency its cadre. Some hundred orders followed: a flat tax, the opening of every sector but oil to full foreign ownership, a new central bank and currency, the privatization of state enterprises, a legal code drafted by contractors. Bremer's **Order 17** gave contractors and coalition personnel immunity from Iraqi law — the shield behind [[Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal]]-era abuses and the Blackwater killings later. ## The money The CPA controlled the Development Fund for Iraq — Iraqi oil revenue and seized assets under UN resolution — and spent it in cash. About $12 billion was flown to Baghdad on pallets of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills; audits by the Special Inspector General found $8.8 billion for which the CPA could not account, and one $1.5 billion tranche went missing entirely. Reconstruction contracts went without competition to [[Halliburton]]'s KBR and a few others; the SIGIR's later inventory of the $60 billion U.S. reconstruction effort found a large share wasted or unaccountable. The [[Corruption Hub]] treats the CPA as the case where the absence of any institution able to say no — no legislature, no court, no auditor with authority — produced exactly the outcome that absence predicts. ## The handover Bremer signed sovereignty over to an interim Iraqi government two days early, on June 28, 2004, and left the country the same morning. The Transitional Administrative Law he left behind shaped the 2005 constitution; the de-Baathification commission he created became a sectarian weapon; the army he dissolved was rebuilt, then collapsed at Mosul in 2014. The [[Iraqi History Hub]] carries what came after; [[Paul Wolfowitz]] and the [[Project for the New American Century]] carry the theory the CPA was supposed to vindicate. ## See Also - [[Iraq War]] · [[Paul Bremer]] · [[De-Baathification]] · [[Iraqi History Hub]] · [[Halliburton]] · [[Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal]] - [[Corruption Hub]] · [[Paul Wolfowitz]] · [[Project for the New American Century]] · [[Neoconservatism]]