[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 2]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 1563-1573]
[From the U.S. 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.

[[Page 1564]]



           [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 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,

[[Page 1565]]

     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 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

[[Page 1566]]

     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. 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

[[Page 1567]]

     [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 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

[[Page 1568]]

     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, 
     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.

[[Page 1569]]

       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 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

[[Page 1570]]

     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 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

[[Page 1571]]

     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 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

[[Page 1572]]

     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 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

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     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.

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