(CHICAGO)(December 14, 2006) I was Christmas shopping along State Street this week and dropped into the Borders bookstore to purchase a copy of the Iraq Study Group report. There is much to report on that document and our analysis will come in parts.

     As I later read the report on a CTA train, one thing stood out and struck me.

     There was no mention of Paul Bremer. I read the appendices. The Iraq Study Group (“ISG”) had listed its interviewees in detail. The ISG had time for numerous journalists. Military and diplomatic personnel were listed.

     But no Paul Bremer.

     He is the man who wasn’t there.

     What a change from 2003. It was a cold November night in Chicago when I read the Washington Post online and saw that Bremer was at the White House. Bush and Bremer were railing at “Internet journalists” who were criticizing the Great One in Baghdad. Bush never liked me. I was the one they had in their sights. I was staring a bunk at the Guantanamo Hilton in the face.

     The Post said Bremer and Bush were popping popcorn, pumping iron, doing their thing.

     I remembered Bremer’s arrival in Iraq. May, 2003. Not since the last Viceroy of India arrived to dismantle the raj had there been such a show. Bremer was a great one for show.

     Unfortunately he was all show.

     I blanched when “Paulie Baghdad” received the “Medal of Freedom” for his incompetence. What had this blowhard done to deserve a medal? A boot in the butt was more like it.

     I began criticizing Paul Bremer in June, 2003. For a long time I was the first and only. My competitors in the media continued to treat Bremer as a competent, serious person. Whoa.

     I saw immediately he was the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time. Paulie would be a disaster. And he was.

     Bremer did not appreciate my criticism, or my characterization of his Green Zone as the Emerald City. No, he was very unhappy.

     I never asked to meet Bremer, and I never did. I knew he was doomed from the start.

     During the early days when Iraq was peaceful, during “Baghdad Summer 2003” when the insurgency did not exist, Bremer was asleep.

     I called Bremer the “little man on the wedding cake,” and he was.

     I remember his falsetto voice when he said “We got him,” referring to the capture of Saddam Hussein. I wrote another of my hate-mail-from-Neanderthal-Republicans columns in which I said that with the capture of Saddam, the insurgency would begin in earnest. And it did. I was pilloried for writing the truth and predicting the future.

     And so as I leafed through the ISG Report I searched and searched for Bremer’s name. For any interview. For any meeting with the ISG. I could find none. (Please note: if I somehow missed Bremer’s name, please let me know and I will amend this column.)

     How could the ISG study Iraq and not meet with “Jerry” Bremer? How could a Building Department study the collapse of a structure and not meet with the architect? How?

     But Bremer was nowhere to be found in the ISG Report. He was a non-person. Nonexistent. A nonentity.

     Bremer has become the Typhoid Mary of George Bush’s Iraq fiasco. The fall guy. The dupe. The dunce. He has been forgotten, and buried alive. He wrote a book. But it obviously did not impress the ISG. They totally ignored him.

     No more invites to the White House for Mr. Bremer. No more private meals. No more popcorn with the president. No more pumping iron with the president. No more. Nothing. Nada.

As Hughes Mearns wrote in The Psychoed:

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

      Indeed.

     Mr. Bremer has gone away. And left behind a mountain of a mess in Iraq.

     More popcorn, anyone?