Paul bremer would be the first to tell you that he has not had much time since he arrived in Baghdad just over a year ago to think about how he will go out. The proud finisher of 20 marathons, Bremer was a distance runner thrown into a sprint, a mad 13-month dash to try to create a new government and something approaching stability out of the fractious void that Iraq became in the wake of the coalition overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003. If the U.S. occupation of Iraq has proved that Secretary of State Colin Powell was right to remind President Bush before the war that if the U.S. broke Iraq, the U.S. would own it, then Bremer was the guy who got handed the broom. He was tasked with sweeping up the mess, responsible for everything from making sure the electricity was on, to putting together a new central bank, to coming up with a workable political system in a country where politics had, for the past 24 years, come at the end of the barrel of a gun. "I probably made several hundred decisions a day," he told TIME, "and I surely can't be getting them all right."
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