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Tuesday, November 04, 2003

"Blueprint for a Mess"

The blogosphere has been buzzing since Sunday about David Rieff's piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, "Blueprint for a Mess," which tells the story of planning for the Iraq war and its aftermath.

One of its heroes is Thomas Warrick, an officer in the State Department, who fought hard for a postwar Iraq that would be democratic and inclusive of all ethnic, religious, and political groups by involving them in the planning. The CIA believed that setting up a democratic Iraq would be difficult or impossible. The neocons in the White House took the opposite view, that it would happen like magic when Dick Cheney's boy Ahmed Chalabi was installed in power. Warrick's group at State charted a sensible middle way--build Iraqi democracy by giving everybody a stake in it. (Which is what democracy is, after all.)

Warrick's group also predicted the possibility of postwar chaos unless the war's aftermath was carefully planned for. Warrick's work impressed Jay Garner, the retired general first appointed to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq (and another American official who looks like a hero now that the whole thing has gone to shit). Garner asked that Warrick be assigned to his team. The Defense Department refused to allow it, and Donald Rumsfeld told Garner to ignore Warrick's entire 13-volume report--which forced Garner and his team to start postwar planning from scratch, on the fly.

Although administration officials promised Congress that postwar planning was taking place in a coordinated manner, it was haphazard at best and at worst, nonexistent. Rieff reports that the Third Infantry Division, which helped secure the Baghdad airport, was given no guidance or orders from superiors on what to do in what the Pentagon calls "Phase IV" of the Iraq operation, the stability and support phase after combat--a fact the division made clear (and criticized) in its own after-action report. Such paralysis kept American troops from being able to do anything about the looting of Iraq in the days after the fall of Saddam.

Rieff also reports that Garner was fired by the Bush administration and replaced by Paul Bremer, the current proconsul in Iraq. (The administration spun the move as a planned one, but it was news to Garner and his staff when it happened.) Garner had refused to disband the Iraqi army, preferring instead to root out the officers and soldiers most complicit in Saddam's crimes but to keep the rest intact to be used as laborers on reconstruction projects, thus giving them badly needed jobs in a country whose economy was destroyed. But that didn't fly with the neocons, who wanted all elements of Saddam's Baath Party purged from Iraqi society, period. So it was Bremer, reportedly on orders from the White House, who disbanded the 450,000-strong Iraqi army. One U.S. official told Rieff, "That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq."

Rieff's report is a vital document for understanding where we are in Iraq at the moment and how we got there. It didn't have to be this way. But it will stay this way as long as leading administration officials continue to cover their eyes and stopper their ears whenever the truth comes buzzing around their heads--just as Rieff demonstrates they did before the war, and have done since it began.

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