Overall, the State Department was filling less than 40 percent of the slots it was slated to fill on the governance teams...I asked the director of administration at the Pentagon, Raymond DuBois, to coordinate financial and personnel support to the CPA. He became so frustrated with the State's lack of cooperation that he personally canvassed the retired Foreign Service officer community for volunteers.
In order to get up to speed, I encouraged Bremer to work closely with Garner...But Bremer seemed not to want much assistance from those who had been engaged in Iraq before he arrived. he was eager to send Garner back to America and excluded him from key meetings during their transition...
Bremer refused to meet with the four-star commander of Joint Forces Command, Admiral Ed Giambastiani, when he was in Iraq working on a lessons-learned project, which proved to be a valuable assessment of what actually took place in the days after Saddam's ouster.
Most troubling was that Bremer proved reluctant to cede any significant authority to the Iraqis. In his memoir he noted that several weeks before he arrived in Baghdad he heard on the radio that "Jay Garner had announced his intention to appoint an Iraqi government by May 15." Upon hearing the news, Bremer wrote, "I almost drove off the George Washington Parkway." Garner's plan, in fact, would have consisted of a group of Iraqis advising the CPA, not a total handover of authority. Through political conferences in the Iraqi cities of Nasiriyah and Baghdad, Garner has skillfully cultivated leaders for the new Iraq, among internals as well as externals. He also had ensured there was an Iraqi presence in each of the country's twenty-three ministries. When Bremer departed for Baghdad, I believed he would work with Garner to build on this momentum...
At the State Department's insistence, I reluctantly had agreed to a month or so delay in implementing the Iraqi Interim Authority when the policy was established in March. I agreed that Bremer needed a chance to find his footing in Baghdad....Bush, at least in my presence, never wavered in his desire to turn power over to the Iraqis as quickly as possible. Then again, he never firmly resisted the State Department's efforts to slow the timeline either. This ambiguity may have been just enough for Bremer to decide he had Bush's support for the delay...
For at least the first month of his tenure, in fact, Bremer continued to report back to me and Defense officials that he was implementing the President's plan to create an interim Iraqi government as soon as possible...
By July, however, Bremer, echoing Colin Powell, apparently had concluded that a power-sharing arrangement between the coalition and Iraqis would not work. He asserted that there could only be one government at a time--the CPA or an Iraqi one, but not both...
Bremer's arrival marked an unfortunate psychological change in Iraq--from a sense of liberation, with gratitude owed to the American military and our allies, to a growing sense of frustration and resentment that Iraq had come under the rule of an American occupation authority.
pp.509-513
