On Iraq, U.S. Turns to Onetime Dissenters

Brinkley persuaded Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England to authorize funding to repair as many as 200 factories. England's predecessor, Paul D. Wolfowitz, was among the administration officials who opposed resuscitating state-owned firms in 2003.

It's not clear how effective Brinkley's initiative will be. Many of the factories are in dangerous, Sunni-dominated areas of the country. Electricity remains in short supply. Raw materials can be hard to come by. And given the intensity of the sectarian conflict, giving Iraqis jobs may not be enough to get them to put down their weapons.

Even if the odds are slim, the Bush administration wants to give it a try. Brinkley's team is focusing on 10 factories that it thinks could be open and employing more than 11,000 Iraqis by the end of this month.

"Any counterinsurgency strategy has to have an economic component to it," said Celeste Ward, who spent last year in Iraq as Chiarelli's political adviser. "It might give us a marginal increase in stability by getting some people off the street. You want people to start saying, 'Hey, we're a normal country where people go to work.' "

De-Baathification

"This is a big mistake," Carney thought in May 2003, when Bremer told senior CPA officials that he would soon issue an edict prohibiting many former members of Hussein's Baath Party from holding government jobs. The one-and-a-half-page decree, which was drafted in the Pentagon office of then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, banned anyone who had been in the party's top four ranks; it also banned hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file members from holding senior management positions in government ministries. Bremer's stated goal was to cleanse Iraq's government of the former president's cronies.

Carney and the other Americans tapped to run Iraq's ministries knew that the senior managers in almost all government departments were Baathists. Hussein's government had forced them to join the party, but that didn't mean they all had blood on their hands or that they were all close associates of the former leader. And without them, it would be much more challenging to get the government running again.

With unemployment at more than 40 percent, Carney also knew that anyone kicked out of a government job wasn't going to find work elsewhere. They would be unemployed and angry.

Carney was one of many CPA officials to object. But Bremer refused to soften the policy.

The de-Baathification expert in the CPA's headquarters was Meghan O'Sullivan, then an aide to Bremer and now a deputy national security adviser working on Iraq. Although she voiced initial misgivings, she quickly became a vigorous and uncompromising enforcer of the edict.

From the moment the order was issued, most of Carney's time was devoted to de-Baathification. He held long meetings with the industry ministry's management, first to explain the policy and then to comb through records to identify people who were ineligible for future employment.

"It was a terrible waste of time," Carney said. "There were so many more important things we should have been doing, like starting factories and paying salaries."

After a few months, the CPA began to receive reports that 10,000 to 15,000 teachers had been fired because of the de-Baathification order. In some Sunni-dominated areas, entire schools were left with just one or two teachers.