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The New York Times (dead tree edition) leads today with the appointment of former ambassador Paul Bremer to be the new civilian Proconsul in Iraq – replacing, or least upstaging, the current military governor, Gen. Jay Garner.

As usual, the political knife fighting over this has been both very obvious and very obscure. We know the courtiers have been savaging each other behind the scenes, but we don't exactly know who’s knife has been left stuck in who’s back.

This is typical of big disfunctional bureaucracies. It’s a less extreme version of the Third Reich syndrome, in which the gang members all try to claw their way into the position Martin Bormann eventually reached – the man always standing next to, and a little behind, The Leader.

Decline of the Best

This kind of thing always gets worse when lines of institutional authority break down – as they have been breaking down in the executive branch since the start of the Cold War. The decline of cabinet government (never strong in the American system) has created an huge power vacuum at the level immediately below The Leader.

When the foreign policy stakes are low and relations between the principles are relatively (relatively) good – as they were through most of the Clinton Administration – this problem is tolerable. And when the stakes are very high – as during the Cuban Missile Crisis – national security bureaucrats may rise to the occasion. (Even then, though, the family connection between President Kennedy and his Attorney General gave the ExCom some badly needed glue.)

But when the stakes are somewhere in between – as they are now – personal power struggles can turn deadly: not for the participants, of course, but for the poor schmoes (U.S. and foreign) who wind up being used as pawns. Vietnam was one example. So was the Iranian hostage crisis. So was Iran-Contra. And now we have another.

This is the key to understanding Bremer, I think. Looking at his career, particularly his recent career, I see a man who excels at only one thing: not making enemies. It’s the ultimate bureaucratic skill -- and the key to emerging as the consensus pygmy when the giants are at each other’s throats.

Whether that same skill will serve him as well in Iraq – where you don’t have to make enemies because they make you – is more doubtful. But given Bremer’s track record, you probably can bet on one thing: Whatever happens in Baghdad, he’ll emerge without a fleck of mud on his well-tailored suits.

Up From Malawi

When I first heard Bremer’s name mentioned last week, I drew a complete blank. Press coverage of his career focused on his stint as an ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism in the Reagan Administration, from 1986 to 1989. So I called up a friend – a journalist who covered the Reagan State Department – and asked him what he remembered about the guy. Which was: virtually nothing.

“I don’t think (Bremer’s office) was in the loop,” he told me. “It seemed to be kind of a sleepy place. I’d always end up going somewhere else to get information.”

This wasn’t because the counterterrorism brief was a bureaucratic backwater at the time. There was the Lockerbie bombing and the disco bombing in Berlin, and that small matter of the hostages in Lebanon and our “opening” to Iran, and . . . so on.

But – thanks to some of the side effects of that Iran initiative – the Reagan Administration was in considerable disarray at the time. Bremer’s boss, Secretary of State George Schultz, was going at it with Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Half the National Security Council was in the dock and the other half was in the suicide ward. So maybe we shouldn’t blame Bremer for not getting much done.

In any case, when Bush Sr. and Jim Baker came in, Bremer went out – to join his old boss, Henry the K, the Prince of Darkness, at Kissinger and Associates.

In doing this Bremer returned to his true calling: being a lower appendage of higher officials. This was the ticket that had taken him from the job of Commercial Officer in Malawi (about the lowest link there is on the diplomatic food chain) to Deputy Chief of Mission in a NATO country (Norway) in less than five years.

OK, so it was just Norway. Still, that’s damn good for someone who five years earlier was reviewing banana export applications and taking the Third Secretary in the Malawian Labor Ministry out to lunch – Dutch treat.

Here’s Bremer’s flight itinerary on Air Kissinger:

Secretariat Staff Officer of the Executive Secretariat: (1971-72)
Staff Assistant (1972-73)
Special Assistant (1973-74)
Executive Assistant to the Secretary of State (1975-76)

And then off to Oslo. Back from his Norwegian tour in 1979, Bremer was given the job of Deputy Executive Secretary (a secretary to Cyrus Vance’s secretary.) Not a bad place to be (close to power but not in power) as Vance and the Carter Administration lurched towards their doom in Iran.

One can easily imagine many late night phone calls between the Bremer and Kissinger residences.

State Servant

Reagan’s election allowed all the little GOP moles to emerge from hiding. Bremer soon got his old job back: Special Assistant, this time to Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig – Kissinger’s co-conspirator, cough, deputy at the Nixon National Security Council.

One can easily imagine even more late night phone calls between the Bremer and Kissinger homes. Or maybe not. A man who can serve within the space of a few years as special assistant to both Henry Kissinger and Al Haig is probably someone who knows when to keep his mouth shut.

In 1983, Bremer finally got his payoff for 12 years of toting other people’s briefcases. This time it was a real Dutch treat. He was made ambassador to the Netherlands. Three years later, he was brought back to Washington to fill the counter-terrorism post.

Other than his shoe-shining skills, it’s not clear what Bremer brought to the counter-terrorism table -- Malawi, Norway and the Netherlands not exactly being known (then or now) as hotbeds of international terrorism.

Bremer’s bio claims he ran the State Department’s crisis management center for four years. So maybe that was it. But this blurb – from a rubber chicken gig he did in Texas last month – says he ran it while he was Al Haig’s Executive Secretary. Which would be interesting if true, since Bremer only held that job for two years, according to this Reagan Administration press release.

A flexible resume certainly comes in handy in the war on terrorism.

Being the head of State’s crisis management center wasn’t quite like being the Maytag repairman – people did call. And certainly they called a lot during the early 1980s, particularly from the Middle East. But the State Department’s Executive Secretary has a few other bureaucratic housekeeping responsibilities as well:

The Executive Secretariat, comprised of the Executive Secretary and four Deputy Executive Secretaries, is responsible for coordination of the work of the Department internally, serving as the liaison between the Department's bureaus and the offices of the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretaries. It also handles the Department's relations with the White House, National Security Council, and other Cabinet agencies.

The Secretariat Staff works with the various offices of the Department in drafting and clearing written materials for the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretary for Political Affairs. This staff also is responsible for taking care of advance preparations for the Secretary's official trips -- domestic and international -- and staffing the "mobile office" and keeping the Secretary's schedule on track during the trip.

So it’s hard to say, strictly on the merits, why Paul Bremer ultimately emerged as the State Department’s point man on terrorism. But, deserved or not, the job would be the making of the latter part of Bremer’s career – thanks in large part to our old friend Osama bin Laden.

Fine and Private Places

After three years as the reluctant counter-terrorism dragon, Bremer quit and went back to licking Henry Kissinger’s boots -- this time for profit as well as fun. But after three years as COO at Kissinger Associates, he moved on to Marsh and McLennan, an insurance brokerage slash “risk management” firm.

Along the way, Bremer also grabbed a slot on the board of a company called Air Products, where he somehow managed to avoid being tarred by this corporate financial scandal (Derivatives? Hey, don’t look at me -- I’m just the anti-terrorism guy!)

A little later, Bremer added a directorship at Akzo Nobel to his income stream, where he somehow managed to avoid being tarred by this price-fixing scandal. (Anti-trust? Hey, don’t look at me – I’m just the anti-terrorism guy!)

Through most of the ’90s, Bremer remained snugly tucked away in the private sector. We can presume he made a shitload of money – not just from Air Products (a bureaucratic core competency, after all) but also as the chairman of Marsh and McLennan’s political risk practice, where he specialized in providing corporate “thought leadership” on risk-related issues.

A (blessedly brief) example:

When a massive labor strike threatens a company's ability to achieve its financial goals or even survive, Management needs to be ready to manage that challenge with a comprehensive, fully integrated Crisis Readiness program. That program should include plans, education, training exercises and more. Moreover, in order to be effective, it must be designed, developed and implemented within the context of that particular organization's "corporate governance" structure.

OK, so maybe Air Products are Bremer’s specialty.

Mr. Chairman

The clarion call back to public service came in 1999, when Bremer was anointed by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to chair the “bipartisan” National Commission on Terrorism. And when I say bipartisan, I mean in the usual sense of including every shade of opinion from extreme right to center right, with a couple of Democratic “moderates” added for cover.

Bremer's panel was not, by the way, the same as the better-known U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, created by the Clinton Administration to advise the Pentagon on terrorism issues. That one was co-chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. Clinton’s terrorism commission also included a somewhat broader spectrum of opinion (extreme right to center left).

Shortly after Clinton left office, in February 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission issued its report, which was later (too much later) praised as both a timely warning of the terrorist threat and a sensible action plan for dealing with it. Timely, sensible – and a legacy of the Clinton Administration. Naturally, the Hart-Rudman report was completely ignored by the incoming Bush Administration.

Bremer’s NCT was the Republican “Team B” alternative to Hart-Rudman’s Team A. Despite the token Democrats, it was basically a neocon pony show -- with Bremer and Maurice Sonneberg, vice chairman of Bear Stearns (keeping Wall Street terrorism free since 1923) as the masters of ceremony.

The NCT hustled its report out in the summer of 2000, beating its cross-town rival to the punch. Still, the NCT report probably would have sunken like a stone, if it hadn’t made the rather startling (at the time) suggestion that the Pentagon should, under some fairly broad circumstances, take the lead counter-terrorism role here in what we had not yet learned to call the homeland.

This recommendation would have virtually overturned a 130-year-old law, the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from direct involvement in U.S. police work. That was a bit too much (at the time) for even GOP stomachs to digest. The report triggered a minor media flap, then sank like a stone.

But in Washington, no bad deed goes unrewarded. The NCT reestablished Bremer as a counterterrorism “expert,” leaving him perfectly postioned to capitalize on 9/11. That, in turn, led to a report for the Heritage Foundation, and then a slot on Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council . . . and now the imperial nod to go to Iraq.

A Man for All Factions

Bremer's rewards are richly deserved, from a bureaucratic point of view. If you look at the way he handled the NCT, you begin to see why he has continued to rise, bubble-like, through the ranks of the National Security State for more than 30 years – despite an almost total lack of anything that could reasonably be described as “career accomplishments.”

Here he was -- a known, card-carrying Kissingerite -- rubbing elbows with some of the biggest Kissinger haters around: guys like James Woolsey and Fred Ickle. And apparently doing a good job of convincing them he was one of them.

This is an impression Bremer has continued to cultivate. Earlier this year, for example, he publicly pledged allegiance to a crucial part of the neocon creed on the op-ed page of the Washington Times:

This struggle is not about Israel and Palestine. To argue that America must "reengage" in the "peace process" as a way of dealing with the "root causes" of Islamic extremism is fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of the new terrorist threat.

For a former State Department man, this comes close to heresy. Middle East peace is the Holy Grail of four decades of American diplomacy, which has long viewed a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians as a key – maybe not the key, but a key – to defusing anti-American anger in the Arab world.

“Good” neocons, on the other hand, know the root cause of Islamic extremism is the absence of democracy in the Arab world (either that, or the presence of living, breathing Arabs on Planet Earth – it seems to vary.) In any case, Bremer, the apostate in striped pants, had crossed over.

Or had he? The interesting thing is that Bremer still seems to be in perfectly good graces with the “realist” wing of the foreign policy establishment. He’s a regular at events sponsored by the ultra-realist Nixon Center, and was recently the subject of a fawning interview in the realist house organ, The National Interest. Bremer also shows up frequently at the annual meetings sponsored by the World Economic Forum – an even more dovish, if still respectably corporate, outfit.

Yet, Bremer’s neocon credentials were solid enough to earn him a slot on a pro-war campus road show put together earlier this year by Bill Bennett and fellow neocon ultras James Woosley and Frank Gaffney.

Beat the Press

What’s really fascinating is the way the constructive ideological ambiguity that Bremer has cultivated continues to work its magic even now – particularly with the press. This story sees Bremer’s appointment as a victory for Colin Powell. This one, as confirmation of Rumsfeld’s iron grip on Iraq.

Clearly this is a man with some chops when it comes to pleasing everybody. This isn’t something to sneeze at. The ability to play the human chameleon was one of the character traits that made Bill Clinton such a successful politician -- if a less than successful human being.

But Clinton had the policy chops (and, when needed, the ruthlessness) to back up his people skills. Does Bremer? It’s not immediately apparent from his career history. And some former colleagues have their doubts:

Another former senior State Department official who worked with Bremer said (he) is a "voracious opportunist with voracious ambitions.”

"What he knows about Iraq could not quite fill a thimble,” he said. "What he knows about any part of the world would not fill a thimble. But what he knows about Washington infighting could fill three or four bushel baskets.”

This is the problem with Third Reichish bureaucracies: as internal power struggles become the central reality of policymaking, crucial appointments are made not on the basis of competence for the task at hand, but competence at playing the bureaucratic game. Amiable careerists who can avoid making enemies have a definite leg up in this game.

Third Reichish bureaucracies usually do OK as long as they only have to deal with the realities they themselves have created. When the struggle for power is the program, sheer military might can overcome a lot of flaws in the policymaking process.

But we’re moving beyond that point now in Iraq. Occupation (and occupational) realities have a way of getting away from the bureaucrats back in the capital – whether its Berlin or Washington.

Our Man in Baghdad

Bremer’s skill set may serve him well as he tries to reconcile the conflicting interests behind the U.S. occupation of Iraq. After all, knowing how to pull the strings back home is one of the first bullet items on a Proconsul’s job description. But it’s also a relatively narrow skill set to take to a place like Iraq. Bremer may quickly find he’s hopelessly mismatched.

In the classic ‘60s play How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a window washer rises quickly through a corporate bureaucracy using a few simple tricks learned from a book. But his masquerade falls apart when he moves into the advertising department, because for the first time he actually has to come up with some creative ideas.

Bremer is betting his system gaming skills will work anywhere. So he’s taking his Washington show on the road. But those Baghdad audiences – they can be real tough. Like the window washer turned business executive, Bremer may discover the secret to running a neo-imperialist colony in the Middle East isn’t in his book of tricks.

But given his track record, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t find a way to escape with his reputation intact -- however it goes in Iraq. In fact, from what I’ve learned about Paul Bremer so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find him in some future GOP administration -- standing right next to, and a little behind, his president.