Wealth & Money Quote by Paul Bremer

Bremer’s line is a neat piece of occupation-era rhetoric: it turns a political catastrophe into a maintenance problem. By blaming Saddam’s “35 years stealing and wasting money,” Bremer offers a ready-made villain and a tidy timeline, implying Iraq’s collapse was already baked in long before American administrators arrived. It’s an argument designed to preempt accountability: if the house was rotten, the renovators can’t be faulted when the walls cave in.

The phrase “fragile and brittle” does double work. Technically, it evokes infrastructure in disrepair - grids, ministries, supply chains - but it also smuggles in a claim about society itself: that Iraqi institutions (and, by extension, Iraqi governance) were too weak to survive sudden change. “You try to fix one thing and something else gets in trouble” is the language of technocracy, the worldview of someone accustomed to levers and systems, not legitimacy and consent. It recasts power as a service call: well-intentioned experts confronted by cascading failures.

Context sharpens the subtext. Bremer led the Coalition Provisional Authority after the 2003 invasion, when decisions like de-Baathification and dissolving the army helped trigger unemployment, insecurity, and insurgency. In that setting, “fixing” becomes a euphemism for radical redesign under foreign authority, while the inevitable “something else” that “gets in trouble” reads as an alibi for policy choices with human costs.

The quote’s intent isn’t just diagnostic; it’s defensive. It asks the listener to accept complexity as exoneration, and to treat political upheaval as the unfortunate byproduct of tinkering with a broken machine.