I came across L. Paul Bremer's memoir, "My Year in Iraq" at the library and picked it up to see what insights it might provide. I was hoping for an honest and straightforward account of the things he went through and what the atmosphere was like. I was desperately hoping it wasn't a politicized fairy tale coloring the current administration as fearless defenders of all that is right.

At this writing, I am on page 7 and I'm hoping that I can finish the book. It is already bad.

First, there's the dissembling and misdirection, such as when the author describes the "coalition forces" and makes it sound like just lots of other nations banded together to invade Iraq. He quotes the military force as 170,000 strong, including "more than 20,000 British and a much smaller number of Australians, as well as troops from NATO countries, including our new Central European allies." Wow. Sounds like a lot, huh?

As of August 2005, according to GlobalSecurity.org, there are approximately 27,000 non-US troops in and around Iraq, from 26 foreign nations. Big, important nations, such as Albania (120), Armenia (~45), Azerbaijan (151), Bosnia and Herzegovina (36), Bulgaria (~400-450), Czech Republic (~90), El Salvador (380), Estonia(~34-35), Georgia (~850), Kazakhstan (27), South Korea (~3,300), Latvia (136), Lithuania (~120), Macedonia (35), Mongolia (~130), Poland (1,500), Romania (~730), Slovakia (~100), and Ukraine (~950). And then a few more from nations you've actually heard of, such as Australia (~1,370), Denmark (540), Italy (3,030), Japan (~800), Netherlands (4), and Norway (~10). And then of course a whopping 12,000 from the United Kingdom. A cynical person would look at those troop strengths and think that maybe almost all of those nations sent a token force just to get their name on the "Coalition Forces" list. Really. It might be interesting if Mr Bremer at some point in his narrative describes the politics behind that arrangement, but somehow I doubt he will.

Then he goes on to describe how, during his arrival for the first time in Iraq, the C-130 in which he and his party were flying was cruising at a really low altitude—200 feet—explaining: "[t]he purpose of flying fast, 'down on the deck.' had been. . . to minimize the risk from ground fire. During the invasion a month earlier, automatic weapons and small arms had mauled US attack helicopters passing over these sleepy farming compounds."

Now, even though I was in the Air Force for 10 years, I don't claim to be an expert on anti-aircraft measures. However, that sentence makes absolutely no sense. If the only threat to aircraft had been from random small arms fire, a higher cruising altitude would have been a safer tactic. Rifle bullets can only go so high, and even then the accuracy is minimal. Does Mr Bremer not have any common sense, or does he just believe anything the military tells him? Because flying low to avoid small arms fire fails the logic test.

That was on page 5. On page 6, where he was listing his qualifications for being selected as the American "viceroy of Iraq," he mentioned that he had been the chairman of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism. All well and good. However, leaving his "bipartisanship" in the dust, he went on to proclaim that 9/11 was all Clinton's fault. What he actually said was: "In our report to President Bill Clinton in June 2000, the blue-ribbon commission had predicted mass-casualty terror attacks on the American homeland 'on the scale of Pearl Harbor.' As with most such panels, our recommendations had been largely ignored until the attacks of September 11, 2001, proved our point.

The report was made to a second-term president six months before he would be leaving office, so the chances of that administration being realistically unable to do anything of consequence with that information would have been apparent to someone with perhaps more political and foreign affairs experience than Mr Bremer. I have no political or foreign affairs experience and it is obvious to me. But you'll notice the follow-on administration gets a bye from Mr Bremer, even though that's when the intelligence and security mistakes were made that led to the successful attacks on September 11th, almost nine months into the new administration of George W. Bush. Even though his "blue ribbon commission" report was still sitting in some Bush administration official's in-box or filing cabinet. But hey, if President George W. Bush ignored a briefing written especially for him with the clear and unambiguous title "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," I guess the predictions of a bipartisan panel presented to a previous president rated much less attention. Funny that President Bill Clinton is the only one mentioned in conjunction with ignoring this dire warning of impending doom.

I am highly suspicious that this book will reveal nothing of importance concerning the first year of American occupation in Iraq except the skewed opinions that George W. Bush and his administration struggled to do the best they could to recover from this failure of the Clinton administration to prevent an attack almost a year into the Bush presidency. Honestly, I can get that fairy tale from the talking heads at FOX News.