OUT ON THE STREET.

Jon Lee Anderson talks about what went wrong in Iraq

On April 19, 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad, an advance "jump group" of Americans commanded by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner was flown into the city to manage the occupation of Iraq. One of the first to arrive was Stephen Browning, whose previous assignment had been as director of programs on the West Coast for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Two months earlier, Browning had been summoned to Washington to join a group of experts charged with planning for postwar Iraq. Within a day or two of his arrival in Baghdad, Browning was given the job of getting the Ministry of Health up and running.

Baghdad's hospitals were in a calamitous state. Many had been looted, and the doctors and nurses had fled. In the Shiite slum of Saddam (now Sadr) City, home to two million people, clerics and armed vigilantes loyal to the radical Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr had taken control of the medical facilities."When I went into the Ministry of Health, there was no clear leader, no one willing to say, 'I represent the Iraqis for the health ministry,' " Browning recalled. "Then Dr. Ali Shinan al-Janabi, an optometrist who had been a deputy minister, stepped forward. He told us that he was a member of the Baath Party. And--well, the fact is there was no one else to go to. I asked around, did a lot of research, and almost everyone I spoke to seemed to regard him as an honorable figure, even though he was a Baathist. And, after getting to know him, I came to feel he was a brave and admirable man."

Browning decided early on that in order to get things done he needed to work with members of the Baath Party. The Party had been virtually synonymous with Saddam Hussein's regime; it was the instrument through which Iraqis were brutalized. At the same time, its members filled jobs at every level of society and anchored the middle class. On his own initiative, Browning says, he asked Shinan to sign a letter renouncing his membership in the Baath Party. Shinan did so, and Garner named him the acting Minister of Health. "We started working together," Browning said. "We made real progress in a very short amount of time."

A few weeks later, Browning and Shinan held a press conference. A reporter from the BBC asked Shinan if he was a Baathist. "He said he was, but that he had signed a letter of renunciation," Browning told me. "The BBC guy insisted, though. 'Will you denounce the Baath Party in front of us right now?' Ali's response was 'This is not an issue right now; we need to move on with the emergencies we have facing us.' And then he said, 'I was just doing my job.'

"The minute I heard him say that--it sounded so close to what the Nazi sympathizers said in their own defense in Germany after the Second World War--I knew how it would sound to the press outside Iraq, in the West, and I knew right then and there that Ali's political career was finished," Browning said. "I walked out of the conference with him hand in hand, and the next morning told him what we had to do. Ali was fine about it; he asked only that he be allowed to continue working as an optometrist. I agreed. Ali said, 'You are my brother.' We both had tears in our eyes."

Still, Browning was troubled by Shinan's refusal to denounce the Baath Party, and he asked him why he hadn't. "He told me that if he did so in public the vengeance on his family would be catastrophic. Which is probably true. There was nobody stopping anything from happening back then--our troops weren't much in the way of a protection force."