# Paul Bremer **L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III** (b. September 30, 1941) was the American diplomat who ran occupied Iraq as administrator of the [[Coalition Provisional Authority]] from May 12, 2003 to June 28, 2004. He held what one account called the most powerful foreign post held by any American since MacArthur in Japan. His first two orders, [[De-Baathification]] and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, are the most criticized decisions of the [[Iraq War]]. ## Before Iraq Bremer was a career Foreign Service officer and a Kissinger protégé: - assistant to Henry Kissinger (1972–76), including the Middle East shuttle diplomacy - executive secretary of the State Department (1981–83) - ambassador to the Netherlands (1983–86) - the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism (1986–89) He then moved into consulting as managing director at Kissinger Associates and later chairman and CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting. He had no experience of Iraq or Arabic, a point his critics made from the start. ## The viceroy [[George W. Bush]] named him presidential envoy to Iraq on May 9, 2003, replacing the short-lived Jay Garner operation. Within two weeks Bremer issued: - **CPA Order No. 1 (May 16),** purging senior Baath Party members from public life. - **CPA Order No. 2 (May 23),** dissolving the army and security services and putting roughly 400,000 armed men out of work. The orders were drafted in [[Donald Rumsfeld]]'s Pentagon, but Bremer owned their execution and defended them for the rest of his life. His memoir *My Year in Iraq* (2006) argues the army had already dissolved itself and that Shia and Kurdish Iraqis would not have accepted a Baathist force. ## The money A January 2005 audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that the CPA could not account for about **$8.8 billion** of Iraqi funds it had disbursed to ministries. Bremer defended his tenure before Congress in February 2007. ## After In December 2004 Bush gave Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with [[George Tenet]] and General Tommy Franks. That ceremony became shorthand for the Iraq War's accountability deficit: the three officials most associated with its failures were honored within months of leaving their posts. Bremer later took up oil painting and worked as a ski instructor in Vermont. ## See also - [[Coalition Provisional Authority]] · [[De-Baathification]] · [[Iraq War]] · [[Iraqi History Hub]] - [[Paul Wolfowitz]] · [[Donald Rumsfeld]] · [[George Tenet]] · [[Islamic State]]