[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 16 (Tuesday, February 10, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E142-E151]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BLIND INTO BAGHDAD
______
HON. DAVID R. OBEY
of wisconsin
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, anyone interested in why there has been such
chaos in post-war Iraq needs to read the article I am inserting in the
Record by James Fallows which appeared in the most recent issue of the
Atlantic Monthly.
[From the Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004]
Blind Into Baghdad
(By James Fallows)
On a Friday afternoon last November, I met Douglas Feith in
his office at the Pentagon to discuss what has happened in
Iraq. Feith's title is undersecretary of defense for policy,
which places him, along with several other undersecretaries,
just below Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon's hierarchy.
Informally he is seen in Washington as ``Wolfowitz's
Wolfowitz''--that is, as a deputy who has a wide range of
responsibilities but is clearly identified with one
particular policy. That policy is bringing regime change to
Iraq--a goal that both Wolfowitz and Feith strongly advocated
through the 1990s. To opponents of the war in Iraq, Feith is
one of several shadowy, Rasputinlike figures who are shaping
U.S. policy. He is seen much the way enemies of the Clinton
Administration saw Hillary Clinton. Others associated with
the Bush Administration who are seen this way include the
consultant Richard Perle; Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, the chief
of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney; and the Vice
President himself. What these officials have in common is
their presumably great private influence and--even in the
case of the Vice President--their limited public visibility
and accountability.
In person Douglas Feith is nothing like Rasputin. Between a
Reagan-era stint in the Pentagon and his current job he was a
Washington lawyer for fifteen years, and he answered my
questions with a lawyer's affability in the face of presumed
disagreement. I could be biased in Feith's favor, because he
was the most senior Administration official who granted my
request for an interview about postwar Iraq. Like Donald
Rumsfeld, Feith acts and sounds younger than many others of
his age (fifty). But distinctly unlike Rumsfeld at a press
conference, Feith in this interview did not seem at all
arrogant or testy. His replies were relatively candid and
unforced, in contrast to the angry or relentlessly on-message
responses that have become standard from senior
Administration officials. He acknowledged what was ``becoming
the conventional wisdom'' about the Administration's failure
to plan adequately for events after the fall of Baghdad, and
then explained--with animation, dramatic pauses, and
gestures--why he thought it was wrong.
Feith offered a number of specific illustrations of what he
considered underappreciated successes. Some were familiar--
the oil wells weren't on fire, Iraqis didn't starve or flee--
but others were less so. For instance, he described the
Administration's careful effort to replace old Iraqi dinars,
which carried Saddam Hussein's image (``It's interesting how
important that is, and it ties into the whole issue of
whether people think that Saddam might be coming back''),
with a new form of currency, without causing a run on the
currency.
But mainly he challenged the premise of most critics: that
the Administration could have done a better job of preparing
for the consequences of victory. When I asked what had
gone better than expected, and what had gone worse, he
said, ``We don't exactly deal in `expectations.'
Expectations are too close to `predictions.' We're not
comfortable with predictions. It is one of the big
strategic premises of the work that we do.''
The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special
importance to Rumsfeld, ``who is death to predictions.''
``His big strategic theme is uncertainty,'' Feith said. ``The
need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to
predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the
limits on our intelligence.''
In practice, Feith said, this meant being ready for
whatever proved to be the situation in postwar Iraq. ``You
will not find a single piece of paper . . . . If anybody ever
went through all of our records--and someday some people
will, presumably--nobody will find a single piece of paper
that says, `Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you
what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we
need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out
of Rumsfeld's office so fast--if you ever went in there and
said,`Let me tell you what something's going to look like in
the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!''
``This is an important point,'' he said, ``because of this
issue of What did we believe? . . . . The common line is,
nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us
that everything was going to be swell.'' Chalabi, the exiled
leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often been blamed
for making rosy predictions about the ease of governing
postwar Iraq. ``So we predicted that everything was going to
be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell.''
Here Feith paused for a few seconds, raised his hands with
both palms up, and put on a ``Can you believe it?''
expression. ``I mean--one would really have to be a
simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody
think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not
that dumb, that how can people write things like that?'' He
sounded amazed rather than angry.
No one contends that Donald Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, or
Douglas Feith, or the Administration as a whole is dumb. The
wisdom of their preparations for the aftermath of military
victory in Iraq is the question. Feith's argument was a less
defensive-sounding version of the Administration's general
response to criticisms of its postwar policy: Life is
uncertain, especially when the lid
[[Page E143]]
comes off a long-tyrannized society. American planners did
about as well as anyone could in preparing for the
unforeseeable. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in
lazy, unfair second-guessing. ``The notion that there was a
memo that was once written, that if we had only listened to
that memo, all would be well in Iraq, is so preposterous,''
Feith told me.
The notion of a single memo's changing history is indeed
farfetched. The idea that a substantial body of knowledge
could have improved postwar prospects is not. The
Administration could not have known everything about what it
would find in Iraq. But it could have--and should have--done
far more than it did.
Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq
since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was the subject of
extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is
particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest
realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad:
that occupying the country is much more difficult than
conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can
jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently
nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn
control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out;
that the Sunni center of the country is the main security
problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen
less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.
All this, and much more, was laid out in detail and in
writing long before the U.S. government made the final
decision to attack. Even now the collective efforts at
planning by the CIA, the State Department, the Army and the
Marine Corps, the United States Agency for International
Development, and a wide variety of other groups inside and
outside the government are underappreciated by the public.
The one pre-war effort that has received substantial recent
attention, the State Department's Future of Iraq project,
produced thousands of pages of findings, barely one paragraph
of which has until now been quoted in the press. The
Administration will be admired in retrospect for how much
knowledge it created about the challenge it was taking on.
U.S. government predictions about postwar Iraq's problems
have proved as accurate as the assessments of pre-war Iraq's
strategic threat have proved flawed.
But the Administration will be condemned for what it did
with what was known. The problems the United States has
encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies
warned against. Exactly what went wrong with the occupation
will be studied for years--or should be. The missteps of the
first half year in Iraq are as significant as other classic
and carefully examined failures in foreign policy, including
John Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961,
and Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate U.S. involvement in
Vietnam, in 1965. The United States withstood those previous
failures, and it will withstand this one. Having taken over
Iraq and captured Saddam Hussein, it has no moral or
practical choice other than to see out the occupation and to
help rebuild and democratize the country. But its missteps
have come at a heavy cost. And the ongoing financial,
diplomatic, and human cost of the Iraq occupation is the more
grievous in light of advance warnings the government had.
before september 11, 2001: the early days
Concern about Saddam Hussein pre-dated the 9/11 attacks and
even the inauguration of George W. Bush. In 1998 Congress
passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation
Act, which declared that ``it should be the policy of the
United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed
by Saddam Hussein from power.'' During the 2000 presidential
campaign Al Gore promised to support groups working to unseat
Saddam Hussein. In the week before Bush took office, Nicholas
Lemann reported in The New Yorker that ``the idea of
overthrowing Saddam is not an idle fantasy--or, if it is,
it's one that has lately occupied the minds of many American
officials, including people close to George W. Bush.'' But
the intellectual case for regime change, argued during the
Clinton years by some Democrats and notably by Paul
Wolfowitz, then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, shifted clearly toward
operational planning after the destruction of the World Trade
Center.
For much of the public this case for war against Iraq
rested on an assumed connection (though this was never
demonstrated, and was officially disavowed by the President)
between Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorist hijackers.
Within the government the case was equally compelling but
different. September 11 had shown that the United States was
newly vulnerable; to protect itself it had to fight
terrorists at their source; and because Saddam Hussein's
regime was the leading potential source of future ``state-
sponsored'' terrorism, it had become an active threat,
whether or not it played any role in 9/11. The very next day,
September 12, 2001, James Woolsey, who had been Clinton's
first CIA director, told me that no matter who proved to be
responsible for this attack, the solution had to include
removing Saddam Hussein, because he was so likely to be
involved next time. A military planner inside the Pentagon
later told me that on September 13 his group was asked to
draw up scenarios for an assault on Iraq, not just
Afghanistan.
Soon after becoming the Army Chief of Staff, in 1999,
General Eric Shinseki had begun ordering war-game exercises
to judge strategies and manpower needs for possible combat in
Iraq. This was not because he assumed a war was imminent. He
thought that the greater Caspian Sea region, including Iraq,
would present a uniquely difficult challenge for U.S. troops,
because of its geography and political tensions. After 9/11,
Army war games involving Iraq began in earnest.
In his first State of the Union address, on January 29,
2002, President Bush said that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea
were an ``axis of evil'' that threatened world peace. ``By
seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a
grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to
terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They
could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United
States.''
By the time of this speech efforts were afoot not simply to
remove Saddam Hussein but also to imagine what Iraq would be
like when he was gone. In late October of 2001, while the
U.S. military was conducting its rout of the Taliban from
Afghanistan, the State Department had quietly begun its
planning for the aftermath of a ``transition'' in Iraq. At
about the time of the ``axis of evil'' speech, working groups
within the department were putting together a list of postwar
jobs and topics to be considered, and possible groups of
experts to work on them.
one year before the war: the ``future of iraq''
Thus was born the Future of Iraq project, whose existence
is by now well known, but whose findings and potential impact
have rarely been reported and examined. The State Department
first publicly mentioned the project in March of 2002, when
it quietly announced the lineup of the working groups. At the
time, media attention was overwhelmingly directed toward
Afghanistan, where Operation Anaconda, the half-successful
effort to kill or capture al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, was
under way.
For several months before announcing the project the State
Department had been attempting to coordinate the efforts of
the many fractious Iraqi exile organizations. The Future of
Iraq project held the potential for harnessing, and perhaps
even harmonizing, the expertise available from the exile
groups.
It was also in keeping with a surprisingly well established
U.S. government tradition of preparing for postwar duties
before there was a clear idea of when fighting would begin,
let alone when it would end. Before the United States entered
World War II, teams at the Army War College were studying
what went right and wrong when American doughboys occupied
Germany after World War I. Within months of the attack on
Pearl Harbor, a School of Military Government had been
created, at the University of Virginia, to plan for the
occupation of both Germany and Japan. In 1995, while U.S.
negotiators, led by Richard Holbrooke, were still working at
the Dayton peace talks to end the war in the Balkans, World
Bank representatives were on hand to arrange loans for the
new regimes.
Contemplating postwar plans posed a problem for those who,
like many in the State Department, were skeptical of the need
for war. Were they making a war more likely if they prepared
for its aftermath? Thomas Warrick, the State Department
official who directed the Future of Iraq project, was
considered to be in the antiwar camp. But according to
associates, he explained the importance of preparing for war
by saying, ``I'm nervous that they're actually going to do
it--and the day after they'll turn to us and ask, `Now what?'
'' So he pushed ahead with the project, setting up numerous
conferences and drafting sessions that would bring together
teams of exiles--among them Kanan Makiya, the author of the
influential anti-Saddam book, Republic of Fear, first
published in 1989. A small number of ``international
advisers,'' mainly from the United States, were also assigned
to the teams. Eventually there would be seventeen working
groups, designed systematically to cover what would be
needed to rebuild the political and economic
infrastructure of the country. ``Democratic Principles and
Procedures'' was the name of one of the groups, which was
assigned to suggest the legal framework for a new
government; Makiya would write much of its report. The
``Transitional Justice'' group was supposed to work on
reparations, amnesty, and de-Baathification laws. Groups
studying economic matters included ``Public Finance,''
``Oil and Energy,'' and ``Water, Agriculture and
Environment.''
In May of 2002 Congress authorized $5 million to fund the
project's studies. In the flurry of news from Afghanistan the
project went unnoticed in the press until June, when the
State Department announced that the first meetings would take
place in July. ``The role of the U.S. government and State
Department is to see what the Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans
want,'' Warrick said at a conference on June 1, 2002. ``The
impetus for change comes from [Iraqis], not us. This is the
job of Iraqis inside and outside.''
That same day President Bush delivered a graduation speech
at West Point, giving a first look at the doctrine of pre-
emptive war. He told the cadets, to cheers, ``Our security
will require all Americans to be forward-looking and
resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary
to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.'' Later in the
summer the doctrine was elaborated in a new
[[Page E144]]
National Security Strategy, which explained that since
``rogue states'' could not be contained or deterred, they
needed to be destroyed before they could attack.
Whenever National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was
interviewed that summer, she talked mainly about the thinking
behind the new policy. When Vice President Dick Cheney was
interviewed, he talked mainly about Saddam Hussein's defiance
of international law. But when Secretary of State Colin
Powell was interviewed, he constantly stressed the value of
an international approach to the problem and the need to give
UN arms inspectors adequate time to do their job.
War with Iraq was not inevitable at this point, but it
seemed more and more likely. Daily conversation in
Washington, which usually reverts to ``So, who do you think
will be the next President?,'' switched instead to ``So, when
do you think we're going to war?''
It was in these circumstances that the Future of Iraq
project's working groups deliberated. Most of the meetings
were in Washington. Some were in London, and one session, in
early September, took place in Surrey, where representatives
of a dozen mutually suspicious exile groups discussed
prospects for democratic coexistence when Saddam Hussein was
gone. (Along with Chalabi's INC the meeting included several
rival Kurdish groups, Assyrian and Turkomen organizations,
the Iraqi Constitutional Monarchy Movement, and others.)
The project did not overcome all the tensions among its
members, and the results of its deliberations were uneven.
Three of its intended working groups never actually met--
including, ominously, ``Preserving Iraq's Cultural
Heritage.'' The ``Education'' group finally produced a report
only six pages long, in contrast to many hundreds of pages
from most others. Some recommendations were quirky or
reflected the tastes of the individual participants who
drafted them. A report titled ``Free Media'' proposed that
all Iraqi journalists be taken out of the country for a
month-long re-education process: ``Those who `get it' go back
as reporters; others would be retired or reassigned.'' A
group that was considering ways of informing Iraq about the
realities of democracy mentioned Baywatch and Leave It to
Beaver as information sources that had given Iraqis an
imprecise understanding of American society. It recommended
that a new film, Colonial America: Life in a Theocracy, be
shot, noting, ``The Puritan experiments provide amazing
parallels with current Moslem fundamentalism. The ultimate
failures of these US experiments can also be vividly
illustrated--witch trials, intolerance, etc.''
But whatever may have been unrealistic or factional about
these efforts, even more of what the project created was
impressive. The final report consisted of thirteen volumes of
recommendations on specific topics, plus a one-volume summary
and overview. These I have read--and I read them several
months into the occupation, when it was unfairly easy to
judge how well the forecast was standing up. (Several hundred
of the 2,500 pages were in Arabic, which sped up the reading
process.) The report was labeled ``For Official Use Only''--
an administrative term that implies confidentiality but has
no legal significance. The State Department held the report
closely until, last fall, it agreed to congressional requests
to turn over the findings.
Most of the project's judgments look good in retrospect--
and virtually all reveal a touching earnestness about working
out the details of reconstructing a society. For instance,
one of the thickest volumes considered the corruption endemic
in Iraqi life and laid out strategies for coping with it.
(These included a new ``Iraqi Government Code of Ethics,''
which began, ``Honesty, integrity, and fairness are the
fundamental values for the people of Iraq.'') The overview
volume, which appears to have been composed as a series of
PowerPoint charts, said that the United States was
undertaking this effort because, among other things,
``detailed public planning'' conveys U.S. government
``seriousness'' and the message that the U.S. government
``wants to learn from past regime change experiences.''
For their part, the Iraqi participants emphasized several
points that ran through all the working groups' reports. A
recurring theme was the urgency of restoring electricity and
water supplies as soon as possible after regime change. The
first item in the list of recommendations from the ``Water,
Agriculture and Environment'' group read, ``Fundamental
importance of clean water supplies for Iraqis immediately
after transition. Key to coalition/community relations.'' One
of the groups making economic recommendations wrote,
``Stressed importance of getting electrical grid up and
running immediately--key to water systems, jobs. Could go a
long way to determining Iraqis' attitudes toward Coalition
forces.''
A second theme was the need to plan carefully for the
handling and demobilization of Iraq's very sizable military.
On the one hand, a functioning army would be necessary for
public order and, once coalition forces withdrew, for the
country's defense. (``Our vision of the future is to build a
democratic civil society. In order to make this vision a
reality, we need to have an army that can work alongside this
new society.'') On the other hand, a large number of Saddam's
henchmen would have to be removed. The trick would be to get
rid of the leaders without needlessly alienating the ordinary
troops--or leaving them without income. One group wrote,
``All combatants who are included in the demobilization
process must be assured by their leaders and the new
government of their legal rights and that new prospects for
work and education will be provided by the new system.''
Toward this end it laid out a series of steps the occupation
authorities should take in the ``disarmament, demobilization,
and reintegration'' process. Another group, in a paper on
democratic principles, warned, ``The decommissioning of
hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel that [a
rapid purge] implies could create social problems.''
Next the working groups emphasized how disorderly Iraq
would be soon after liberation, and how difficult it would be
to get the country on the path to democracy--though that was
where it had to go. ``The removal of Saddam's regime will
provide a power vacuum and create popular anxieties about the
viability of all Iraqi institutions,'' a paper on rebuilding
civil society said. ``The traumatic and disruptive events
attendant to the regime change will affect all Iraqis, both
Saddam's conspirators and the general populace.'' Another
report warned more explicitly that ``the period
immediately after regime change might offer these
criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing,
plunder and looting.'' In the short term the occupying
forces would have to prevent disorder. In the long term,
according to a report written by Kanan Makiya, they would
need to recognize that ``the extent of the Iraqi
totalitarian state, its absolute power and control
exercised from Baghdad, not to mention the terror used to
enforce compliance, cannot be overestimated in their
impact on the Iraqi psyche and the attendant feeling of
fear, weakness, and shame.'' Makiya continued, ``These
conditions and circumstances do not provide a strong
foundation on which to build new institutions and a modern
nation state.''
Each of the preceding themes would seem to imply a long,
difficult U.S. commitment in Iraq. America should view its
involvement in Iraq, the summary report said, not as it had
Afghanistan, which was left to stew in lightly supervised
warlordism, but as it had Germany and Japan, which were
rebuilt over many years. But nearly every working group
stressed one other point: the military occupation itself had
to be brief. ``Note: Military government idea did not go down
well,'' one chart in the summary volume said. The ``Oil and
Energy'' group presented a ``key concept'': ``Iraqis do not
work for American contractors; Americans are seen assisting
Iraqis.''
Americans are often irritated by the illogic of ``resentful
dependence'' by weaker states. South Koreans, for example,
complain bitterly about U.S. soldiers in their country but
would complain all the more bitterly if the soldiers were
removed. The authors of the Future of Iraq report could by
those standards also be accused of illogical thinking, in
wanting U.S. support but not wanting U.S. control. Moreover,
many of the project's members had a bias that prefigured an
important source of postwar tension: they were exiles who
considered themselves the likeliest beneficiaries if the
United States transferred power to Iraqis quickly--even
though, precisely because of their exile, they had no obvious
base of support within Iraq.
To skip ahead in the story: As chaos increased in Baghdad
last summer, the chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul ``Jerry''
Bremer, wrestled constantly with a variant of this exile
paradox. The Iraqi Governing Council, whose twenty-five
members were chosen by Americans, was supposed to do only the
preparatory work for an elected Iraqi government. But the
greater the pressure on Bremer for ``Iraqification,'' the
more tempted he was to give in to the council's demand that
he simply put it in charge without waiting for an election.
More than a year earlier, long before combat began, the
explicit recommendations and implicit lessons of the Future
of Iraq project had given the U.S. government a very good
idea of what political conflicts it could expect in Iraq.
TEN MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR: WAR GAMES AND WARNINGS
As combat slowed in Afghanistan and the teams of the Future
of Iraq project continued their deliberations, the U.S.
government put itself on a wartime footing. In late May the
CIA had begun what would become a long series of war-game
exercises, to think through the best- and worst-case
scenarios after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. According to
a person familiar with the process, one recurring theme in
the exercises was the risk of civil disorder after the fall
of Baghdad. The exercises explored how to find and secure the
weapons of mass destruction that were then assumed to be in
and around Baghdad, and indicated that the hardest task would
be finding and protecting scientists who knew about the
weapons before they could be killed by the regime as it was
going down.
The CIA also considered whether a new Iraqi government
could be put together through a process like the Bonn
conference, which was then being used to devise a post-
Taliban regime for Afghanistan. At the Bonn conference
representatives of rival political and ethnic groups
agreed on the terms that established Hamid Karzai as the
new Afghan President. The CIA believed that rivalries in
Iraq were so deep, and the political culture so shallow,
that a similarly quick transfer of sovereignty would only
invite chaos.
Representatives from the Defense Department were among
those who participated in the first of these CIA war-game
sessions.
[[Page E145]]
When their Pentagon superiors at the Office of the Secretary
of Defense (OSD) found out about this, in early summer, the
representatives were reprimanded and told not to participate
further. ``OSD'' is Washington shorthand, used frequently in
discussions about the origins of Iraq war plans, and it
usually refers to strong guidance from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Feith, and one of Feith's deputies, William Luti. Their
displeasure over the CIA exercise was an early illustration
of a view that became stronger throughout 2002: that postwar
planning was an impediment to war.
Because detailed thought about the postwar situation meant
facing costs and potential problems, and thus weakened the
case for launching a ``war of choice'' (the Washington term
for a war not waged in immediate self-defense), it could be
seen as an ``antiwar'' undertaking. The knowledge that U.S.
soldiers would still be in Germany and Japan sixty-plus years
after Pearl Harbor would obviously not have changed the
decision to enter World War II, and in theory the Bush
Administration could have presented the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein in a similar way: as a job that had to be done, even
though it might saddle Americans with costs and a military
presence for decades to come. Everyone can think of moments
when Bush or Rumsfeld has reminded the nation that this would
be a longterm challenge. But during the months when the
Administration was making its case for the war--successfully
to Congress, less so to the United Nations--it acted as if
the long run should be thought about only later on.
On July 31, 2002, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
invited a panel of experts to discuss the case for war
against Iraq. On August 1 it heard from other experts about
the likely ``day after'' consequences of military victory.
Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, was then the
chairman of the committee. That first day Biden said that the
threat of WMD might force him to vote in favor of the war (as
he ultimately did). But he worried that if the United States
invaded without full allied support, ``we may very well
radicalize the rest of the world, we may pick up a bill
that's $70 billion, $80 billion, we may have to have
extensive commitment of U.S. forces for an extended period of
time in Iraq.''
Phebe Marr, an Iraq scholar retired from the National
Defense University, told the committee that the United States
``should assume that it cannot get the results it wants on
the cheap'' from regime change. ``It must be prepared to put
some troops on the ground, advisers to help create new
institutions, and above all, time and effort in the future to
see the project through to a satisfactory end. If the United
States is not willing to do so, it had best rethink the
project.'' Rend Rahim Francke, an Iraqi exile serving on the
Future of Iraq project (and now the ambassador from Iraq to
the United States), said that ``the system of public security
will break down, because there will be no functioning police
force, no civil service, and no justice system'' on the first
day after the fighting. ``There will be a vacuum of political
authority and administrative authority,'' she said. ``The
infrastructure of vital sectors will have to be restored. An
adequate police force must be trained and equipped as quickly
as possible. And the economy will have to be jump-started
from not only stagnation but devastation.'' Other witnesses
discussed the need to commit U.S. troops for many years--but
to begin turning constitutional authority over to the Iraqis
within six months. The upshot of the hearings was an emphasis
on the short-term importance of security, the medium-term
challenge of maintaining control while transferring
sovereignty to the Iraqis, and the long-term reality of
commitments and costs. All the experts agreed that what came
after the fall of Baghdad would be harder for the
United States than what came before.
SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR: GETTING SERIOUS
One week before Labor Day, while President Bush was at his
ranch in Texas, Vice President Cheney gave a speech at a
Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville. ``There is
no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
destruction [and that he will use them] against our friends,
against our allies, and against us,'' Cheney said. Time was
running out, he concluded, for America to remove this threat.
A few days later CNN quoted a source ``intimately familiar
with [Colin] Powell's thinking'' as saying that Powell was
still insistent on the need for allied support and would
oppose any war in which the United States would ``go it alone
. . . as if it doesn't give a damn'' about other nations'
views. Just after Labor Day, Powell apparently won a battle
inside the Administration and persuaded Bush to take the U.S.
case to the United Nations. On September 12 Bush addressed
the UN General Assembly and urged it to insist on Iraqi
compliance with its previous resolutions concerning
disarmament.
Before the war the Administration exercised remarkable
``message discipline'' about financial projections. When
asked how much the war might cost, officials said that so
many things were uncertain, starting with whether there would
even be a war, that there was no responsible way to make an
estimate. In part this reflected Rumsfeld's emphasis on the
unknowability of the future. It was also politically
essential, in delaying the time when the Administration had
to argue that regime change in Iraq was worth a specific
number of billions of dollars.
In September, Lawrence Lindsay, then the chief White House
economic adviser, broke discipline. He was asked by The Wall
Street Journal how much a war and its aftermath might cost.
He replied that it might end up at one to two percent of the
gross domestic product, which would mean $100 billion to $200
billion. Lindsay added that he thought the cost of not going
to war could conceivably be greater--but that didn't placate
his critics within the Administration. The Administration was
further annoyed by a report a few days later from Democrats
on the House Budget Committee, which estimated the cost of
the war at $48 billion to $93 billion. Lindsay was widely
criticized in ``background'' comments from Administration
officials, and by the end of the year he had been forced to
resign. His comment ``made it clear Larry just didn't get
it,'' an unnamed Administration official told The Washington
Post when Lindsay left. Lindsay's example could hardly have
encouraged others in the Administration to be forthcoming
with financial projections. Indeed, no one who remained in
the Administration offered a plausible cost estimate until
months after the war began.
In September, the United States Agency for International
Development began to think in earnest about its postwar
responsibilities in Iraq. It was the natural contact for
nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, from the United
States and other countries that were concerned with relief
efforts in Iraq.
USAID's administrator, Andrew Natsios, came to the
assignment with a complex set of experiences and instincts.
He started his career, in the 1970s, as a Republican state
legislator in Massachusetts, and before the Bush
Administration he had been the administrator of the state's
``Big Dig,'' the largest public-works effort ever in the
country. Before the Big Dig, Natsios spent five years as an
executive at a major humanitarian NGO called World Vision. He
also served in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Gulf War, as
an Army Reserve officer. By background he was the
Administration official best prepared to anticipate the
combination of wartime and postwar obligations in Iraq.
At any given moment USAID is drawing up contingency plans
for countries that might soon need help. ``I actually have a
list, which I will not show you,'' Natsios told me in the
fall, ``of countries where there may not be American
troops soon, but they could fall apart--and if they do,
what we could do for them.'' By mid-September of 2002, six
months before the official beginning of Operation Iraqi
Freedom, Natsios had additional teams working on plans for
Iraq. Representatives of about a dozen relief
organizations and NGOs were gathering each week at USAID
headquarters for routine coordination meetings. Iraq
occupied more and more of their time through 2002. On
October 10, one day before Congress voted to authorize the
war, the meetings were recast as the Iraq Working Group.
five months before the war: occupiers or liberators?
The weekly meetings at USAID quickly settled into a
pattern. The representatives of the NGOs would say, ``We've
dealt with situations like this before, and we know what to
expect.'' The U.S. government representatives would either
say nothing or else reply, No, this time it will be
different.
The NGOs had experience dealing with a reality that has not
fully sunk in for most of the American public. In the nearly
three decades since U.S. troops left Vietnam, the American
military has fought only two wars as most people understand
the term: the two against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But through
the past thirty years U.S. troops have almost continuously
been involved in combat somewhere. Because those
engagements--in Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Haiti, Somalia,
Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere--have no obvious
connection with one another, politicians and the public
usually discuss them as stand-alone cases. Each one seems an
aberration from the ``real'' wars the military is set up to
fight.
To the NGO world, these and other modern wars (like the
ones in Africa) are not the exception but the new norm:
brutal localized encounters that destroy the existing
political order and create a need for long-term international
supervision and support. Within the U.S. military almost no
one welcomes this reality, but many recognize that
peacekeeping, policing, and, yes, nation-building are now the
expected military tasks. The military has gotten used to
working alongside the NGOs--and the NGOs were ready with a
checklist of things to worry about once the regime had
fallen.
An even larger question about historical precedent began to
surface. When Administration officials talked about models
for what would happen in Iraq, they almost always referred to
the lasting success in Japan and Germany--or else to
countries of the former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. (A
civilian adviser who went to Baghdad early in the occupation
recalls looking at his fellow passengers on the military
transport plane. The ones who weren't asleep or flipping
through magazines were reading books about Japan or Germany,
not about the Arab world. ``That was not a good sign,'' he
told me.) If one thought of Iraq as Poland, or as the former
East Germany, or as the former Czechoslovakia, or as almost
any part of the onetime Soviet empire in Eastern Europe other
than Romania, one would naturally
[[Page E146]]
conclude that regime change in itself would set the country
well along the path toward recovery. These countries were
fine once their repressive leaders were removed; so might
Iraq well be. And if the former Yugoslavia indicated darker
possibilities, that could be explained as yet another failure
of Clinton-era foreign policy.
Many NGO representatives assumed that postwar recovery
would not be so automatic, and that they should begin working
on preparations before the combat began. ``At the beginning
our main message was the need for access,'' I was told by
Sandra Mitchell, the vice-president of the International
Rescue Committee, who attended the USAID meetings. Because of
U.S. sanctions against Iraq, it was illegal for American
humanitarian organizations to operate there. (Journalists
were about the only category of Americans who would not
get in trouble with their own government by traveling to
and spending money in Iraq.) ``Our initial messages were
like those in any potential crisis situation,'' Mitchell
said, ``but the reason we were so insistent in this case
was the precarious situation that already existed in Iraq.
The internal infrastructure was shot, and you couldn't
easily swing in resources from neighboring countries, like
in the Balkans.'' The NGOs therefore asked, as a first
step, for a presidential directive exempting them from the
sanctions. They were told to expect an answer to this
request by December. That deadline passed with no ruling.
By early last year the NGOs felt that it was too dangerous
to go to Iraq, and the Administration feared that if they
went they might be used as hostages. No directive was ever
issued.
Through the fall and winter of 2002 the International
Rescue Committee, Refugees International, InterAction, and
other groups that met with USAID kept warning about one
likely postwar problem that, as it turned out, Iraq avoided--
a mass flow of refugees--and another that was exactly as bad
as everyone warned: the lawlessness and looting of the ``day
after'' in Baghdad. The Bush Administration would later point
to the absence of refugees as a sign of the occupation's
underreported success. This achievement was, indeed, due in
part to a success: the speed and precision of the military
campaign itself. But the absence of refugees was also a sign
of a profound failure: the mistaken estimates of Iraq's WMD
threat. All pre-war scenarios involving huge movements of
refugees began with the assumption that Saddam Hussein would
use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops or his
own Kurdish or Shiite populations--and that either the fact
or the fear of such assaults would force terrified Iraqis to
evacuate.
The power vacuum that led to looting was disastrous. ``The
looting was not a surprise,'' Sandra Mitchell told me. ``It
should not have come as a surprise. Anyone who has witnessed
the fall of a regime while another force is coming in on a
temporary basis knows that looting is standard procedure. In
Iraq there were very strong signals that this could be the
period of greatest concern for humanitarian response.'' One
lesson of postwar reconstruction through the 1990s was that
even a short period of disorder could have long-lasting
effects.
The meetings at USAID gave the veterans of international
relief operations a way to register their concerns. The
problem was that they heard so little back. ``The people in
front of us were very well-meaning,'' says Joel Chamy, who
represented Refugees International at the meetings. ``And in
fairness, they were on such a short leash. But the dialogue
was one-way. We would tell them stuff, and they would nod and
say, Everything's under control. To me it was like the old
four-corners offense in basketball. They were there to just
dribble out the clock but be able to say they'd consulted
with us.''
And again the question arose of whether what lay ahead in
Iraq would be similar to the other ``small wars'' of the
previous decade-plus or something new. If it was similar, the
NGOs had their checklists ready. These included,
significantly, the obligations placed on any ``occupying
power'' by the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was signed in
1949 and is mainly a commonsense list of duties--from
protecting hospitals to minimizing postwar reprisals--that a
victorious army must carry out. ``But we were corrected when
we raised this point,'' Sandra Mitchell says. ``The American
troops would be `liberators' rather than `occupiers,' so the
obligations did not apply. Our point was not to pass judgment
on the military action but to describe the
responsibilities.''
In the same mid-October week that the Senate approved the
war resolution, a team from the Strategic Studies Institute
at the Army War College, in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania,
began a postwar-planning exercise. Even more explicitly than
the NGOs, the Army team insisted that America's military
past, reaching back to its conquest of the Philippines, in
1898, would be a useful guide to its future duties in
Iraq. As a rule, professional soldiers spend more time
thinking and talking about history than other people do;
past battles are the only real evidence about doctrine and
equipment. The institute--in essence, the War College's
think tank--was charged with reviewing recent occupations
to help the Army ``best address the requirements that will
necessarily follow operational victory in a war with
Iraq,'' as the institute's director later said in a
foreword to the team's report. ``As the possibility of war
with Iraq looms on the horizon, it is important to look
beyond the conflict to the challenges of occupying the
country.''
The study's principal authors were Conrad Crane, who
graduated from West Point in the early 1970s and taught there
as a history professor through the 1990s, and Andrew Terrill,
an Army Reserve officer and a strategic-studies professor.
With a team of other researchers, which included
representatives from the Army and the joint staff as well as
other government agencies and think tanks, they began high-
speed work on a set of detailed recommendations about postwar
priorities. The Army War College report was also connected to
a pre-war struggle with yet another profound postwar
consequence: the fight within the Pentagon, between the
civilian leadership in OSD and the generals running the Army,
over the size and composition of the force that would conquer
Iraq.
four months before the war: the battle in the pentagon
On November 5, 2002, the Republicans regained control of
the Senate and increased their majority in the House in
national midterm elections. On November 8 the UN Security
Council voted 15-0 in favor of Resolution 1441, threatening
Iraq with ``serious consequences'' if it could not prove that
it had abandoned its weapons programs.
Just before 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld had been thought of as
standing on a banana peel. The newspapers were full of leaked
anonymous complaints from military officials who thought that
his efforts to streamline and ``transform'' the Pentagon were
unrealistic and damaging. But with his dramatic metamorphosis
from embattled Secretary of Defense to triumphant Secretary
of War, Rumsfeld's reputation outside the Administration and
his influence within it rose. He was operating from a
position of great power when, in November, he decided to
``cut the TPFDD.''
``Tipfid'' is how people in the military pronounce the
acronym for ``time-phased force and deployment data,'' but
what it really means to the armed forces, in particular the
Army, is a way of doing business that is methodical, careful,
and sure. The TPFDD for Iraq was an unbelievably complex
master plan governing which forces would go where, when, and
with what equipment, on which planes or ships, so that
everything would be coordinated and ready at the time of
attack. One reason it took the military six months to get set
for each of its wars against Iraq, a comparatively pitiful
foe, was the thoroughness of TPFDD planning. To its
supporters, this approach is old-school in the best sense: if
you fight, you really fight. To its detractors, this approach
is simply old--ponderous, inefficient, and, although they
don't dare call it cowardly, risk-averse at the least.
A streamlined approach had proved successful in
Afghanistan, at least for a while, as a relatively small U.S.
force left much of the ground fighting to the Northern
Alliance. In the longer run the American strategy created
complications for Afghanistan, because the victorious
Northern Alliance leaders were newly legitimized as warlords.
Donald Rumsfeld was one member of the Administration who
seemed still to share the pre-9/11 suspicion about the risks
of nation-building, and so didn't much care about the postwar
consequences of a relatively small invasion force. (His
deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was more open to the challenge of
rebuilding Iraq, but he would never undercut or disobey
Rumsfeld.) In November, Rumsfeld began working through the
TPFDD, with the goal of paring the force planned for Iraq
to its leanest, lightest acceptable level.
The war games run by the Army and the Pentagon's joint
staff had led to very high projected troop levels. The Army's
recommendation was for an invasion force 400,000 strong, made
up of as many Americans as necessary and as many allied
troops as possible. ``All the numbers we were coming up with
were quite large,'' Thomas White, a retired general (and
former Enron executive) who was the Secretary of the Army
during the war, told me recently. But Rumsfeld's idea of the
right force size was more like 75,000. The Army and the
military's joint leadership moderated their requests in
putting together the TPFDD, but Rumsfeld began challenging
the force numbers in detail. When combat began, slightly more
than 200,000 U.S. soldiers were massed around Iraq.
``In what I came to think of as Secretary Rumsfeld's
style,'' an Army official who was involved in the process
told me recently, ``he didn't directly say no but asked a lot
of hard questions about the plan and sent us away without
approval. He would ask questions that delayed the activation
of units, because he didn't think the planned flow was right.
Our people came back with the understanding that their
numbers were far too big and they should be thinking more
along the lines of Afghanistan''--that is, plan for a light,
mobile attack featuring Special Forces soldiers. Another
participant described Rumsfeld as looking line by line at the
deployments proposed in the TPFDD and saying, ``Can't we do
this with one company?'' or ``Shouldn't we get rid of this
unit?'' Making detailed, last-minute adjustments to the TPFDD
was, in the Army's view, like pulling cogs at random out of a
machine. According to an observer, ``The generals would say,
Sir, these changes will ripple back to every railhead and
every company.''
The longer-term problem involved what would happen after
Baghdad fell, as it inevitably would. This was distinctly an
Army rather than a general military concern. ``Where's the
Air Force now?'' an Army officer asked rhetorically last
fall. ``They're back on their bases--and they're better off,
[[Page E147]]
since they don't need to patrol the `no-fly' zones [in
northern and southern Iraq, which U.S. warplanes had
patrolled since the end of the Gulf War]. The Navy's gone,
and most of the Marines have been pulled back. It's the Army
holding the sack of shit.'' A related concern involved what a
long-term commitment to Iraq would do to the Army's ``ops
tempo,'' or pace of operations--especially if Reserve and
National Guard members, who had no expectations of long-term
foreign service when they signed up, were posted in Iraq for
months or even years.
The military's fundamental argument for building up what
Rumsfeld considered a wastefully large force is that it would
be even more useful after Baghdad fell than during actual
combat. The first few days or weeks after the fighting, in
this view, were crucial in setting long-term expectations.
Civilians would see that they could expect a rapid return to
order, and would behave accordingly--or they would see the
opposite. This was the ``shock and awe'' that really
mattered, in the Army's view: the ability to make clear who
was in charge. ``Insights from successful occupations suggest
that it is best to go in real heavy and then draw down
fast,'' Conrad Crane, of the Army War College, told me. That
is, a larger force would be necessary during and immediately
after the war, but might mean a much smaller occupation
presence six months later.
``We're in Baghdad, the regime is toppled--what's next?''
Thomas White told me, recounting discussions before the war.
One of the strongest advocates of a larger force was General
Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff. White said, ``Guys
like Shinseki, who had been in Bosnia [where he supervised
the NATO force], been in Kosovo, started running the numbers
and said, 'Let's assume the world is linear.' For five
million Bosnians we had two hundred thousand people to
watch over them. Now we have twenty-five million Iraqis to
worry about, spread out over a state the size of
California. How many people is this going to take?'' The
heart of the Army's argument was that with too few
soldiers, the United States would win the war only to be
trapped in an untenable position during the occupation.
A note of personal rancor complicated these discussions, as
it did many disagreements over postwar plans. In our
interview Douglas Feith played this down--maintaining that
press reports had exaggerated the degree of quarreling and
division inside the Administration. These reports, he said,
mainly reflected the experience of lower-level officials, who
were embroiled in one specific policy area and ``might find
themselves pretty much always at odds with their counterparts
from another agency.'' Higher up, where one might be
``fighting with someone on one issue but allied with them on
something else,'' relations were more collegial. Perhaps so.
But there was no concealing the hostility within the Pentagon
between most uniformed leaders, especially in the Army, and
the civilians in OSD.
Donald Rumsfeld viewed Shinseki as a symbol of
uncooperative, old-style thinking, and had in the past gone
out of his way to humiliate him. In the spring of 2002,
fourteen months before the scheduled end of Shinseki's term,
Rumsfeld announced who his successor would be; such an
announcement, which converts the incumbent into a lame duck,
usually comes at the last minute. The action was one of
several calculated insults.
From OSD's point of view, Shinseki and many of his
colleagues were dragging their feet. From the Army's point of
view, OSD was being reckless about the way it was committing
troops and highhanded in disregarding the military's
professional advice. One man who was then working in the
Pentagon told me of walking down a hallway a few months
before the war and seeing Army General John Abizaid standing
outside a door. Abizaid, who after the war succeeded Tommy
Franks as commander of the Central Command, or CENTCOM, was
then the director of the Joint Staff--the highest uniformed
position in the Pentagon apart from the Joint Chiefs. A
planning meeting for Iraq operations was under way. OSD
officials told him he could not take part.
The military-civilian difference finally turned on the
question of which would be harder: winning the war or
maintaining the peace. According to Thomas White and several
others, OSD acted as if the war itself would pose the real
challenge. As White put it, ``The planning assumptions were
that the people would realize they were liberated, they would
be happy that we were there, so it would take a much smaller
force to secure the peace than it did to win the war. The
resistance would principally be the remnants of the Baath
Party, but they would go away fairly rapidly. And,
critically, if we didn't damage the infrastructure in our
military operation, as we didn't, the restart of the country
could be done fairly rapidly.'' The first assumption was
clearly expressed by Cheney three days before the war began,
in an exchange with Tim Russert on Meet the Press:
RUSSERT: ``If your analysis is not correct, and we're not
treated as liberators but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin
to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American
people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle
with significant American casualties?''
CHENEY: ``Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that
way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted
as liberators . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq
is there is no question but what they want to get rid of
Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the
United States when we come to do that.''
Through the 1990s Marine General Anthony Zinni, who
preceded Tommy Franks as CENTCOM commander, had done war-
gaming for a possible invasion of Iraq. His exercises
involved a much larger U.S. force than the one that actually
attacked last year. ``They were very proud that they didn't
have the kind of numbers my plan had called for,'' Zinni told
me, referring to Rumsfeld and Cheney. ``The reason we had
those two extra divisions was the security situation. Revenge
killings, crime, chaos--this was all foreseeable.''
Thomas White agrees. Because of reasoning like Cheney's,
``we went in with the minimum force to accomplish the
military objectives, which was a straightforward task, never
really in question,'' he told me. ``And then we immediately
found ourselves shorthanded in the aftermath. We sat there
and watched people dismantle and run off with the country,
basically.''
THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR
In the beginning of December, Iraq submitted its 12,000-
page declaration to the UN Security Council contending that
it had no remaining WMD stores. Near the end of December,
President Bush authorized the dispatch of more than 200,000
U.S. soldiers to the Persian Gulf.
There had still been few or no estimates of the war's cost
from the Administration--only contentions that projections
like Lawrence Lindsay's were too high. When pressed on this
point, Administration officials repeatedly said that with so
many uncertainties, they could not possibly estimate the
cost. But early in December, just before Lindsay was forced
out, The New York Review of Books published an article by
William Nordhaus titled ``Iraq: The Economic Consequences of
War,'' which included carefully considered estimates.
Nordhaus, an economist at Yale, had served on Jimmy Carter's
Council of Economic Advisers; the article was excerpted from
a much longer economic paper he had prepared. His range of
estimates was enormous, depending on how long the war lasted
and what its impact on the world economy proved to be.
Nordhaus calculated that over the course of a decade the
direct and indirect costs of the war to the United States
could be as low as $121 billion or as high as $1.6 trillion.
This was a more thoroughgoing approach than the congressional
budget committees had taken, but it was similar in its
overall outlook. Nordhaus told me recently that he thinks he
should have increased all his estimates to account for the
``opportunity costs'' of stationing soldiers in Iraq--that
is, if they are assigned to Iraq, they're not available for
deployment somewhere else.
On the last day of December, Mitch Daniels, the director of
the Office of Management and Budget, told The New York Times
that the war might cost $50 billion to $60 billion. He had to
backtrack immediately, his spokesman stressing that ``it is
impossible to know what any military campaign would
ultimately cost.'' The spokesman explained Daniels's mistake
by saying, ``The only cost estimate we know of in this arena
is the Persian Gulf War, and that was a sixty-billion-dollar
event.'' Daniels would leave the Administration, of his own
volition, five months later.
In the immediate run-up to the war the Administration still
insisted that the costs were unforeseeable. ``Fundamentally,
we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there
on the ground,'' Paul Wolfowitz told the House Budget
Committee on February 27, with combat less than three weeks
away. ``This delicate moment--when we are assembling a
coalition, when we are mobilizing people inside Iraq and
throughout the region to help us in the event of war, and
when we are still trying, through the United Nations and by
other means, to achieve a peaceful solution without war--is
not a good time to publish highly suspect numerical estimates
and have them drive our declaratory policy.''
Wolfowitz's stonewalling that day was in keeping with the
policy of all senior Administration officials. Until many
months after combat had begun, they refused to hazard even
the vaguest approximation of what financial costs it might
involve. Shinseki, so often at odds with OSD, contemplated
taking a different course. He was scheduled to testify, with
Thomas White, before the Senate Appropriations Committee on
March 19, which turned out to be the first day of actual
combat. In a routine prep session before the hearing he asked
his assistants what he should say about how much the
operations in Iraq were going to cost. ``Well, it's
impossible to predict,'' a briefer began, reminding him of
the official line.
Shinseki cut him off. ``We don't know everything,'' he
said, and then he went through a list of the many things the
military already did know. ``We know how many troops are
there now, and the projected numbers. We know how much it
costs to feed them every day. We know how much it cost to
send the force there. We know what we have spent already to
prepare the force and how much it would cost to bring them
back. We have estimates of how much fuel and ammunition we
would use per day of operations.'' In short, anyone who
actually wanted to make an estimate had plenty of information
on hand.
At this point Jerry Sinn, a three-star general in charge of
the Army's budget, said
[[Page E148]]
that in fact he had worked up some numbers--and he named a
figure, for the Army's likely costs, in the tens of billions
of dollars. But when Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota,
asked Shinseki at hearings on March 19 how much the war just
beginning would cost, Shinseki was loyally vague (``Any
potential discussion about what an operation in Iraq or any
follow-on probably is undefined at this point'').
When Administration officials stopped being vague, they
started being unrealistic. On March 27, eight days into
combat, members of the House Appropriations Committee asked
Paul Wolfowitz for a figure. He told them that whatever it
was, Iraq's oil supplies would keep it low. ``There's a lot
of money to pay for this,'' he said. ``It doesn't have to be
U.S. taxpayer money. We are dealing with a country that can
really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.''
On April 23 Andrew Natsios, of USAID, told an incredulous Ted
Koppel, on Nightline, that the total cost to America of
reconstructing Iraq would be $1.7 billion. Koppel shot back,
``I mean, when you talk about one-point-seven, you're not
suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is gonna be done for
one-point-seven billion dollars?'' Natsios was clear:
``'Well, in terms of the American taxpayers'' contribution, I
do; this is it for the U.S. The rest of the rebuilding of
Iraq will be done by other countries who have already made
pledges . . . But the American part of this will be one-
point-seven billion dollars. We have no plans for any
further-on funding for this.'' Only in September did
President Bush make his request for a supplemental
appropriation of $87 billion for operations in Iraq.
Planning for the postwar period intensified in December.
The Council on Foreign Relations, working with the Baker
Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University, convened a
working group on ``guiding principles for U.S. post-war
conflict policy in Iraq.'' Leslie Gelb, then the president of
the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the group would
take no position for or against the war. But its report,
which was prepared late in January of last year, said that
``U.S. and coalition military units will need to pivot
quickly from combat to peacekeeping operations in order to
prevent post-conflict Iraq from descending into anarchy.''
The report continued, ``Without an initial and broad-based
commitment to law and order, the logic of score-settling and
revenge-taking will reduce Iraq to chaos.''
The momentum toward war put officials at the United Nations
and other international organizations in a difficult
position. On the one hand, they had to be ready for what
was coming; on the other, it was awkward to be seen
discussing the impending takeover of one of their member
states by another. ``Off-the-record meetings were
happening in every bar in New York,'' one senior UN
official told me in the fall. An American delegation that
included Pentagon representatives went to Rome in December
for a confidential meeting with officials of the UN's
World Food Programme, to discuss possible food needs after
combat in Iraq. As The Wall Street Journal later reported,
the meeting was uncomfortable for both sides: the
Americans had to tell the WFP officials, as one of them
recalled, ``It is looking most probable you are going to
witness one of the largest military engagements since the
Second World War.'' This was hyperbole (Korea? Vietnam?),
but it helped to convince the WFP that relief preparations
should begin.
On December 11 an ice storm hit the Mid-Atlantic states.
For Conrad Crane and his associates at the Army War College,
deep in their crash effort to prepare their report on postwar
Army challenges, this was a blessing. ``The storm worked out
perfectly,'' Crane told me afterward. ``We were all on the
post, there was no place anyone could go, we basically had
the whole place to ourselves.''
By the end of the month the War College team had assembled
a draft of its report, called ``Reconstructing Iraq: Insights
Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-
Conflict Scenario.'' It was not classified, and can be found
through the Army War College's Web site.
The War College report has three sections. The first is a
review of twentieth-century occupations--from the major
efforts in Japan and Germany to the smaller and more recent
ones in Haiti, Panama, and the Balkans. The purpose of the
review is to identify common situations that occupiers might
face in Iraq. The discussion of Germany, for instance,
includes a detailed account of how U.S. occupiers ``de-
Nazified'' the country without totally dismantling its
bureaucracy or excluding everyone who had held a position of
responsibility. (The main tool was a Fragebogen, or
questionnaire, about each person's past activities, which
groups of anti-Nazi Germans and Allied investigators reviewed
and based decisions on.)
The second section of the report is an assessment of the
specific problems likely to arise in Iraq, given its ethnic
and regional tensions and the impact of decades of Baathist
rule. Most Iraqis would welcome the end of Saddam Hussein's
tyranny, it said. Nonetheless, ``Long-term gratitude is
unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the
occupation continues. A force initially viewed as liberators
can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an
unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time.
Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United
States must implement the bulk of the occupation itself
rather than turn these duties over to a postwar international
force.''
If these views about the risk of disorder and the short
welcome that Americans would enjoy sound familiar, that is
because every organization that looked seriously into the
situation sounded the same note.
The last and most distinctive part of the War College
report is its ``Mission Matrix''--a 135-item checklist of
what tasks would have to be done right after the war and by
whom. About a quarter of these were ``critical tasks'' for
which the military would have to be prepared long before it
reached Baghdad: securing the borders so that foreign
terrorists would not slip in (as they in fact did), locating
and destroying WMD supplies, protecting religious sites,
performing police and security functions, and so on. The
matrix was intended to lay out a phased shift of
responsibilities, over months or years, from a mainly U.S.
occupation force to international organizations and,
finally, to sovereign Iraqis. By the end of December
copies of the War College report were being circulated
throughout the Army.
According to the standard military model, warfare unfolds
through four phases: ``deterrence and engagement,'' ``seize
the initiative,'' ``decisive operations,'' and ``post-
conflict.'' Reality is never divided quite that neatly, of
course, but the War College report stressed that Phase IV
``post-conflict'' planning absolutely had to start as early
as possible, well before Phase III ``decisive operations''--
the war itself. But neither the Army nor the other services
moved very far past Phase III thinking. ``All the A-Team guys
wanted to be in on Phase III, and the B-team guys were put on
Phase IV,'' one man involved in Phase IV told me. Frederick
Barton, of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, who was involved in postwar efforts in Haiti,
Rwanda, and elsewhere, put it differently. ``If you went to
the Pentagon before the war, all the concentration was on the
war,'' he said. ``If you went there during the war, all the
concentration was on the war. And if you went there after the
war, they'd say, `That's Jerry Bremer's job.' '' Still, the
War College report confirmed what the Army leadership already
suspected: that its real challenges would begin when it took
control of Baghdad.
two months before the war
On January 27, 2003, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans
Blix, reported that ``Iraq appears not to have come to a
genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that
was demanded of it.'' Twenty-four hours later, in his State
of the Union address, President Bush said that the United
States was still hoping for UN endorsement of an action
against Iraq--but would not be limited by the absence of one.
Increasingly the question in Washington about war was
When? Those arguing for delay said that it would make
everything easier. Perhaps Saddam Hussein would die. Perhaps
he would flee or be overthrown. Perhaps the UN inspectors
would find his weapons, or determine conclusively that they
no longer existed. Perhaps the United States would have time
to assemble, if not a broad alliance for the battle itself,
at least support for reconstruction and occupation, so that
U.S. soldiers and taxpayers would not be left with the entire
job. Even if the responsibility were to be wholly America's,
each passing month would mean more time to plan the peace as
thoroughly as the war: to train civil-affairs units (which
specialize in peacekeeping rather than combat), and to hire
Arabic-speakers. Indeed, several months into the U.S.
occupation a confidential Army ``lessons learned'' study said
that the ``lack of competent interpreters'' throughout Iraq
had ``impeded operations.'' Most of the ``military
linguists'' who were operating in Iraq, the study said,
``basically [had] the ability to tell the difference between
a burro and a burrito.''
Those arguing against delay said that the mere passage of
time wouldn't do any good and would bring various risks. The
world had already waited twelve years since the Gulf War for
Saddam Hussein to disarm. Congress had already voted to
endorse the war. The Security Council had already shown its
resolve. The troops were already on their way. Each passing
day, in this view, was a day in which Saddam Hussein might
deploy his weapons of terror.
Early in January the National Intelligence Council, at the
CIA, ran a two-day exercise on postwar problems. Pentagon
representatives were still forbidden by OSD to attend. The
exercise covered issues similar to those addressed in the
Future of Iraq and Army War College reports--and, indeed, to
those considered by the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee: political reconstruction,
public order, border control, humanitarian problems, finding
and securing WMD.
On January 15 the humanitarian groups that had been meeting
at USAID asked for a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld or Paul
Wolfowitz. They never got one. At an earlier meeting,
according to a participant, they had been told, ``The
President has already spent an hour on the humanitarian
issues.'' The most senior Pentagon official to meet with them
was Joseph Collins, a deputy assistant secretary of defense.
The representatives of the NGOs were generally the most
senior and experienced figures from each organization; the
government representatives were not of the same stature.
``Without naming names, the people we met were not real
decision-makers,'' Joel Charny says.
On January 24 a group of archaeologists and scholars went
to the Pentagon to brief
[[Page E149]]
Collins and other officials about the most important historic
sites in Iraq, so that they could be spared in bombing.
Thanks to precision targeting, the sites would indeed survive
combat. Many, of course, were pillaged almost immediately
afterward.
On January 30 the International Rescue Committee, which had
been participating in the weekly Iraq Working Group sessions,
publicly warned that a breakdown of law and order was likely
unless the victorious U.S. forces acted immediately, with
martial law if necessary, to prevent it. A week later
Refugees International issued a similar warning.
At the end of January, Sam Gardiner entered the picture.
Gardiner is a retired Air Force colonel who taught for years
at the National War College in Washington. His specialty is
war gaming, and through the 1990s he was involved once or
twice a year in major simulations involving an attack on
Baghdad. In the late 1990s Gardiner had been a visiting
scholar at the Swedish National Defense University, where he
studied the effects of the bombing of Serbia's electrical
grid. The big discovery was how long it took to get the
system up and running again, after even a precise and limited
attack. ``Decapitation'' attacks on a regime, like the one
planned for Iraq, routinely begin with disabling the
electrical grid. Gardiner warned that this Phase III step
could cause big Phase IV problems.
Late in 2002 Gardiner had put together what he called a
``net assessment'' of how Iraq would look after a successful
U.S. attack. His intended audience, in government, would
recognize the designation as droll. ``Net assessment'' is a
familiar term for a CIA-style intelligence analysis, but
Gardiner also meant it to reflect the unusual origin of his
data: none of it was classified, and all of it came from the
Internet. Through the power of search engines Gardiner was
able to assemble what in other days would have seemed like a
secret inside look at Iraq's infrastructure. He found
electricity diagrams for the pumps used at Iraq's main water
stations; he listed replacement parts for the most vulnerable
elements of the electrical grid. He produced a scheme showing
the elements of the system that would be easiest to attack
but then quickest to repair. As it happened, damage to the
electrical grid was a major postwar problem. Despite the
precision of the bombing campaign, by mid-April wartime
damage and immediate postwar looting had reduced Baghdad's
power supply to one fifth its pre-war level, according to an
internal Pentagon study. In mid-July the grid would be back
to only half its pre-war level, working on a three-hours-on,
three-hours-off schedule.
On January 19 Gardiner presented his net assessment, with
information about Iraq's water, sewage, and public-health
systems as well as its electrical grid, at an unclassified
forum held by the RAND Corporation, in Washington. Two days
later he presented it privately to Zalmay Khalilzad.
Khalilzad was a former RAND analyst who had joined the Bush
Administration's National Security Council and before the war
was named the President's ``special envoy and ambassador-at-
large for Free Iraqis.'' (He has recently become the U.S.
ambassador to Afghanistan.) Gardiner told me recently that
Khalilzad was sobered by what he heard, and gave Gardiner a
list of other people in the government who should certainly
be shown the assessment. In the next few weeks Gardiner
presented his findings to Bear McConnell, the USAID
official in charge of foreign disaster relief, and Michael
Dunn, an Air Force general who had once been Gardiner's
student and worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as
acting director for strategic plans and policy. A
scheduled briefing with Joseph Collins, who was becoming
the Pentagon's point man for postwar planning, was
canceled at the last minute, after a description of
Gardiner's report appeared in Inside the Pentagon, an
influential newsletter.
The closer the nation came to war, the more the
Administration seemed to view people like Gardiner as virtual
Frenchmen--that is, softies who would always find some excuse
to oppose the war. In one sense they were right. ``It became
clear that what I was really arguing was that we had to delay
the war,'' Gardiner told me. ``I was saying, 'We aren't
ready, and in just six or eight weeks there is no way to get
ready for everything we need to do.''' (The first bombs fell
on Baghdad eight weeks after Gardiner's meeting with
Khalilzad.) ``Everyone was very interested and very polite
and said I should talk to other people,'' Gardiner said.
``But they had that `Stalingrad stare'--people who had been
doing stuff under pressure for too long and hadn't had enough
sleep. You want to shake them and say, 'Are you really with
me?'''
At the regular meeting of the Iraq Working Group on January
29, the NGO representatives discussed a recent piece of vital
news. The Administration had chosen a leader for all postwar
efforts in Iraq: Jay M. Garner, a retired three-star Army
general who A cartoon by Sage Stossel. had worked
successfully with the Kurds at the end of the Gulf War. The
NGO representatives had no fault to find with the choice of
Garner, but they were concerned, because his organization
would be a subunit of the Pentagon rather than an independent
operation or part of a civilian agency. ``We had been pushing
constantly to have reconstruction authority based in the
State Department,'' Joel Charny told me. He and his
colleagues were told by Wendy Chamberlin, a former ambassador
to Pakistan who had become USAID's assistant administrator
for the area including Iraq, that the NGOs should view
Garner's appointment as a victory. After all, Garner was a
civilian, and his office would draw representatives from
across the government. ``We said,'C'mon, Wendy, his office is
in the Pentagon!''' Charny says. Jim Bishop, a former U.S.
ambassador who now works for InterAction, pointed out that
the NGOs, like the U.S. government, were still hoping that
other governments might help to fund humanitarian efforts.
Bishop asked rhetorically, ``Who from the international
community is going to fund reconstruction run through the
Pentagon?''
Garner assembled a team and immediately went to work. What
happened to him in the next two months is the best-chronicled
part of the postwar fiasco. He started from scratch, trying
to familiarize himself with what the rest of the government
had already done. On February 21 he convened a two-day
meeting of diplomats, soldiers, academics, and development
experts, who gathered at the National Defense University to
discuss postwar plans. ``The messiah could not have organized
a sufficient relief and reconstruction or humanitarian effort
in that short a time,'' a former CIA analyst named Judith
Yaphe said after attending the meeting, according to Mark
Fineman, Doyle McManus, and Robin Wright, of the Los Angeles
Times. (Fineman died of a heart attack last fall, while
reporting from Baghdad.) Garner was also affected by tension
between OSD and the rest of the government. Garner had heard
about the Future of Iraq project, although Rumsfeld had told
him not to waste his time reading it. Nonetheless, he decided
to bring its director, Thomas Warrick, onto his planning
team. Garner, who clearly does not intend to be the fall guy
for postwar problems in Baghdad, told me last fall that
Rumsfeld had asked him to kick Warrick off his staff. In an
interview with the BBC last November, Garner confirmed
details of the firing that had earlier been published in
Newsweek. According to Garner, Rumsfeld asked him, ``Jay,
have you got a guy named Warrick on your team?'' ``I said,
`Yes, I do.' He said, `Well, I've got to ask you to remove
him.' I said, `I don't want to remove him; he's too
valuable.' But he said, `This came to me from such a high
level that I can't overturn it, and I've just got to ask
you to remove Mr. Warrick.' '' Newsweek's conclusion was
that the man giving the instructions was Vice President
Cheney.
This is the place to note that in several months of
interviews I never once heard someone say ``We took this step
because the President indicated . . .'' or ``The President
really wanted . . .'' Instead I heard ``Rumsfeld wanted,''
``Powell thought,'' ``The Vice President pushed,'' ``Bremer
asked,'' and so on. One need only compare this with any
discussion of foreign policy in Reagan's or Clinton's
Administration--or Nixon's, or Kennedy's, or Johnson's, or
most others--to sense how unusual is the absence of the
President as prime mover. The other conspicuously absent
figure was Condoleezza Rice, even after she was supposedly
put in charge of coordinating Administration policy on Iraq,
last October. It is possible that the President's confidants
are so discreet that they have kept all his decisions and
instructions secret. But that would run counter to the
fundamental nature of bureaucratic Washington, where people
cite a President's authority whenever they possibly can
(``The President feels strongly about this, so . . .'').
To me, the more likely inference is that Bush took a strong
overall position--fighting terrorism is this generation's
challenge--and then was exposed to only a narrow range of
options worked out by the contending forces within his
Administration. If this interpretation proves to be right,
and if Bush did in fact wish to know more, then blame will
fall on those whose responsibility it was to present him with
the widest range of choices: Cheney and Rice.
ONE MONTH BEFORE THE WAR
On February 14 Hans Blix reaffirmed to the United Nations
his view that Iraq had decided to cooperate with inspectors.
The division separating the United States and Britain from
France, Germany, and Russia became stark. On February 15
antiwar demonstrators massed in major cities around the
world: a million in Madrid, more than a million in Rome, and
a million or more in London, the largest demonstration in
Britain's history.
On February 21 Tony Blair joined George Bush at Camp David,
to underscore their joint determination to remove the threat
from Iraq.
THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE WAR
As the war drew near, the dispute about how to conduct it
became public. On February 25 the Senate Armed Services
Committee summoned all four Chiefs of Staff to answer
questions about the war--and its aftermath. The crucial
exchange began with a question from the ranking Democrat,
Carl Levin. He asked Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff,
how many soldiers would be required not to defeat Iraq but to
occupy it. Well aware that he was at odds with his civilian
superiors at the Pentagon, Shinseki at first deflected the
question. ``In specific numbers,'' he said, ``I would have to
rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements. But I think
. . .'' and he trailed off.
``How about a range?'' Levin asked. Shinseki replied--and
recapitulated the argument he had made to Rumsfeld.
``I would say that what's been mobilized to this point,
something on the order of several
[[Page E150]]
hundred thousand soldiers, are probably, you know, a figure
that would be required.
``We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece
of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of
ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so, it
takes significant ground force presence to maintain safe and
secure environment to ensure that the people are fed, that
water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go
along with administering a situation like this.''
Two days later Paul Wolfowitz appeared before the House
Budget Committee. He began working through his prepared
statement about the Pentagon's budget request and then asked
permission to ``digress for a moment'' and respond to recent
commentary, ``some of it quite outlandish, about what our
postwar requirements might be in Iraq.'' Everyone knew he
meant Shinseki's remarks.
``I am reluctant to try to predict anything about what the
cost of a possible conflict in Iraq would be,'' Wolfowitz
said, ``or what the possible cost of reconstructing and
stabilizing that country afterwards might be.'' This was more
than reluctance--it was the Administration's consistent
policy before the war. ``But some of the higher-end
predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the
notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops
to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the
mark.''
This was as direct a rebuke of a military leader by his
civilian superior as the United States had seen in fifty
years. Wolfowitz offered a variety of incidental reasons why
his views were so different from those he alluded to: ``I
would expect that even countries like France will have a
strong interest in assisting Iraq's reconstruction,'' and
``We can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as
liberators . . . [but] I am reasonably certain that they will
greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep
requirements down.'' His fundamental point was this: ``It's
hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide
stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct
the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's
security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.''
None of the government working groups that had seriously
looked into the question had simply ``imagined'' that
occupying Iraq would be more difficult than defeating it.
They had presented years' worth of experience suggesting that
this would be the central reality of the undertaking.
Wolfowitz either didn't notice this evidence or chose to
disbelieve it. What David Halberstam said of Robert McNamara
in The Best and the Brightest is true of those at OSD as
well: they were brilliant, and they were fools.
Two WEEKS BEFORE THE WAR
At the beginning of March, Andrew Natsios won a little-
noticed but crucial battle. Because the United States had not
yet officially decided whether to go to war, Natsios had not
been able to persuade the Office of Management and Budget to
set aside the money that USAID would need for immediate
postwar efforts in Iraq. The battle was the more intense
because Natsios, unlike his counterparts at the State
Department, was both privately and publicly supportive of the
case for war. Just before combat he was able to arrange an
emergency $200 million grant from USAID to the World Food
Programme. This money could be used to buy food immediately
for Iraqi relief operations--and it helped to ensure that
there were no postwar food shortages.
one week before the war
On March 13 humanitarian organizations had gathered at
USAID headquarters for what was effectively the last meeting
of the Iraq Working Group. Wendy Chamberlin, the senior USAID
official present, discussed the impending war in terms that
several participants noted, wrote down, and later mentioned
to me. ``It's going to be very quick,'' she said, referring
to the actual war. ``We're going to meet their immediate
needs. We're going to turn it over to the Iraqis. And we're
going to be out within the year.''
On March 17 the United States, Britain, and Spain announced
that they would abandon their attempt to get a second
Security Council vote in favor of the war, and President Bush
gave Saddam Hussein an ultimatum: leave the country within
forty-eight hours or suffer the consequences. On March 19 the
first bombs fell on Baghdad.
afterward
On April 9 U.S. forces took Baghdad. On April 14 the
Pentagon announced that most of the fighting was over. On May
1 President Bush declared that combat operations were at an
end. By then looting had gone on in Baghdad for several
weeks. ``When the United States entered Baghdad on April 9,
it entered a city largely undamaged by a carefully executed
military campaign,'' Peter Galbraith, a former U.S.
ambassador to Croatia, told a congressional committee in
June. ``However, in the three weeks following the U.S.
takeover, unchecked looting effectively gutted every
important public institution in the city--with the notable
exception of the oil ministry.'' On April 11, when asked why
U.S. soldiers were not stopping the looting, Donald Rumsfeld
said, ``Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make
mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also
free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's
what's going to happen here.''
This was a moment, as when he tore up the TPFDD, that
Rumsfeld crossed a line. His embrace of ``uncertainty''
became a reckless evasion of responsibility. He had only
disdain for ``predictions,'' yes, and no one could have
forecast every circumstance of postwar Baghdad. But virtually
everyone who had thought about the issue had warned about the
risk of looting. U.S. soldiers could have prevented it--and
would have, if so instructed.
The looting spread, destroying the infrastructure that had
survived the war and creating the expectation of future
chaos. ``There is this kind of magic moment, which you can't
imagine until you see it,'' an American civilian who was in
Baghdad during the looting told me. ``People are used to
someone being in charge, and when they realize no one is, the
fabric rips.''
On May 6 the Administration announced that Bremer would be
the new U.S. administrator in Iraq. Two weeks into that job
Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and other parts of the
Baathist security structure.
If the failure to stop the looting was a major sin of
omission, sending the Iraqi soldiers home was, in the view of
nearly everyone except those who made the decision, a
catastrophic error of commission. There were two arguments
for taking this step. First, the army had ``already disbanded
itself,'' as Douglas Feith put it to me--soldiers had melted
away, with their weapons. Second, the army had been an
integral part of the Sunni-dominated Baathist security
structure. Leaving it intact would be the wrong symbol for
the new Iraq--especially for the Shiites, whom the army had
oppressed.
``These actions are part of a robust campaign to show the
Iraqi people that the Saddam regime is gone, and will never
return,'' a statement from Bremer's office said.
The case against wholesale dissolution of the army, rather
than a selective purge at the top, was that it created an
instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still
had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to
go each day. Manpower that could have helped on security
patrols became part of the security threat. Studies from the
Army War College, the Future of Iraq project, and the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, to name a few, had
all considered exactly this problem and suggested ways of
removing the noxious leadership while retaining the ordinary
troops. They had all warned strongly against disbanding the
Iraqi army. The Army War College, for example, said in its
report, ``To tear apart the Army in the war's aftermath could
lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity
within the society.''
``This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at
the last minute,'' Walter Slocombe--who held Feith's job,
undersecretary of defense for policy, during the Clinton
Administration, and who is now a security adviser on Bremer's
team--told Peter Slevin, of The Washington Post, last
November. He said that he had discussed the plan with
Wolfowitz at least once and with Feith several times,
including the day before the order was given. ``The critical
point,'' he told Slevin, ``was that nobody argued that we
shouldn't do this.'' No one, that is, the Administration
listened to.
Here is the hardest question: How could the Administration
have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe
indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with
operational experience in modern military occupations? Saying
that the Administration considered this a truly urgent ``war
of necessity'' doesn't explain the indifference. Even if it
feared that Iraq might give terrorists fearsome weapons at
any moment, it could still have thought more carefully about
the day after the war. World War II was a war of absolute
necessity, and the United States still found time for
detailed occupation planning.
The President must have known that however bright the
scenarios, the reality of Iraq eighteen months after the war
would affect his re-election. The political risk was enormous
and obvious. Administration officials must have believed not
only that the war was necessary but also that a successful
occupation would not require any more forethought than they
gave it.
It will be years before we fully understand how intelligent
people convinced themselves of this. My guess is that three
factors will be important parts of the explanation.
One is the panache of Donald Rumsfeld. He was near the
zenith of his influence as the war was planned. His emphasis
on the vagaries of life was all the more appealing within his
circle because of his jauntiness and verve. But he was not
careful about remembering his practical obligations.
Precisely because he could not foresee all hazards, he should
have been more zealous about avoiding the ones that were
evident--the big and obvious ones the rest of the government
tried to point out to him.
A second is the triumphalism of the Administration. In the
twenty-five years since Ronald Reagan's rise, political
conservatives have changed position in a way they have not
fully recognized. Reagan's arrival marked the end of a half
century of Democrat-dominated government in Washington. Yes,
there has been one Democratic President since Reagan, and
eventually there will be others. But as a rule the
Republicans are now in command. Older Republicans--those who
came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, those who are now in
power in the Administration--have not fully adjusted to this
reality. They still feel like embattled insurgents, as if the
liberals were in the driver's seat. They
[[Page E151]]
recognize their electoral strength but feel that in the
battle of ideology their main task is to puncture fatuous
liberal ideas.
The consequence is that Republicans are less used to
exposing their own ideas to challenges than they should be.
Today's liberals know there is a challenge to every aspect of
their world view. All they have to do is turn on the radio.
Today's conservatives are more likely to think that any
contrary ideas are leftovers from the tired 1960s, much as
liberals of the Kennedy era thought that conservatives were
in thrall to Herbert Hoover. In addition, the conservatives'
understanding of modem history makes them think that their
instincts are likely to be right and that their critics will
be proved wrong. Europeans scorned Ronald Reagan, and the
United Nations feared him, but in the end the Soviet Union
was gone. So for reasons of personal, political, and
intellectual history, it is understandable that members of
this Administration could proceed down one path in defiance
of mounting evidence of its perils. The Democrats had similar
destructive self-confidence in the 1960s, when they did their
most grandiose Great Society thinking.
The third factor is the nature of the President himself.
Leadership is always a balance between making large choices
and being aware of details. George W. Bush has an obvious
preference for large choices. This gave him his chance for
greatness after the September 11 attacks. But his lack of
curiosity about significant details may be his fatal
weakness. When the decisions of the past eighteen months are
assessed and judged, the Administration will be found wanting
for its carelessness. Because of warnings it chose to ignore,
it squandered American prestige, fortune, and lives.
____________________