| IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY Inside Iraq's Green Zone Rajiv Chandrasekaran New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High | |||
| ISBN-13 978-1-4000-4487-0 | ||||
| ISBN 1-4000-4487-1 | 320pp. | HC | $25.95 | |
Here I provide some glimpses into the process of planning Operation Iraqi Freedom. I've distilled down some of the material from the early chapters of Chandresakaran's book into six scenes. I could have provided more; the book has many I might have included. But I hope this selection will suffice to illustrate the reasons why our undertaking in Iraq has gone so badly wrong.
(For those who wish to delve further, there is a multitude of other sources. I list a few at the end of this page.)
Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, is delegated responsibility for planning the post-occupation phase of the war in Iraq. (Planning for the actual invasion began six months earlier.) Feith heads the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which has, for largely ideological reasons, winnowed raw intelligence reports to trump up a plausible case that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction and had been in cahoots with the terrorists that brought down the World Trade Center towers.
Like Cheney and Rumsfeld, Feith is a fan of Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Iraqi leader whom the CIA and the State Department regard as corrupt. Because of this, the planning effort is conducted in utmost secrecy, with next to no input from the CIA or the State Department. If State and CIA are involved, they might raise questions about Chalabi.
The first agency in charge of post-invasion Iraq is the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA)1. Feith conceives this organization and selects Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to head it. Garner is tapped because he had run the military operation that helped protect the Kurds in northern Iraq during Desert Storm, the 1991 battle that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait. Garner is brought aboard on 17 January 2003, just two months before the start of the war that is to topple Saddam Hussein.
Chairing a seminar on postwar Iraq, Garner meets Thomas Warrick and discovers he knows more than anyone in the room about the topic. Warrick should: a State Department employee, he headed the Future of Iraq Project. This was a study group involving mid-level State employees and over 200 Iraqi exiles. It ran for a year and a half and produced a set of planning documents that totalled 2,500 pages. They amounted to the best and most complete planning done in the U.S. government. By 23 February, Warrick is part of Garner's team.
A week later, Rumsfeld directs Garner to remove Warrick, saying only that the orders come from higher up and cannot be questioned. Sometime after that, Garner learns that vice president Cheney is the source, and the reason is that Warrick is not a Chalabi supporter. With Warrick purged, Garner never gets to see any of the Future of Iraq Project reports.
On taking the ORHA position, Garner was given no planning documents. He asked Feith for copies of plans that had been drawn up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the U.S. government. Feith told him that nothing useful existed and he should develop his own plans. (Feith was well aware that such plans existed. As he told others in the Pentagon, Feith hoped that Garner would build his plans around Chalabi's group. Thus the Pentagon would get its way without having to fight the CIA and State.)
Garner also had no assigned staff. He got his first team members by beseeching a few of his Army buddies for assistance. A few reservists were sent his way. Other team members came from USAID, and State insisted on placing a few of its staffers on the ORHA team. The process was haphazard. Midlevel bureaucrats with no relevant experience were placed in charge of the various Iraqi ministries. One man, Stephen Browning, was assigned four ministries. (A week after Baghdad falls, he is given a fifth: The Ministry of Health. Browning is an engineer from the Army Corps of Engineers.)
Two days before Garner is due to leave, Donald Rumsfeld personally tells him he is uncomfortable with several top staffers on the ORHA roster, mainly those from the State Department. He questions their credentials and says he will replace them with better people. Garner's protest that there is no time to make replacements cuts no ice with the Defense Secretary. After Garner leaves his office, Rumsfeld blocks the departure from the U.S. of senior State Department personnel assigned to ORHA on the grounds that they are "too low-profile and bureaucratic." He relents only after Colin Powell threatens to pull every State employee from ORHA, thereby sparking an embarrassing major news story.
U.S. troops had reached Baghdad 5 days before. On this day, they help a crowd of cheering Iraqis pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdaus Square. This event is widely regarded as the symbolic end of Hussein's regime, though he speaks in the open the same day and is not captured until months later.
A few hours after the statue comes down, looters descend in droves on the headquarters of the Ministry of Industry. Finding no soldiers guarding it, they first pick off the most easily handled prizes: computers, telephones, appliances. Furniture and file cabinets are next to go. Finally, scavengers rip out wiring and metal ductwork. The loot is hauled away in cars, pickup trucks, even stolen ten-ton dump trucks. When the ten-story building holds nothing more worth taking, it is set afire.
Watching CNN from their hotel in Kuwait, members of the ORHA look on in dismay. As ministry after ministry is put to the torch, they play a darkly humorous parlor game of guessing whose has been the latest source of a column of smoke. This morose mood is somewhat relieved by the expectation that soldiers are on the way. But they soon discover that, other than the Republican Palace, the only building protected by American troops is the Ministry of Oil. They recall with anger how two weeks earlier they had worked up a list of sites in Baghdad that needed security. The Central Bank and the National Museum headed the list; the Oil Ministry was at the bottom. Much later, they learn that the military has failed to transmit the list to ground commanders in Baghdad. The military never apologizes. Donald Rumsfeld dismisses the debacle with the famous statement that "Freedom's untidy."
Garner boards the plane that will fly him into Baghdad. He has been urgently requesting transport, arguing that opportunistic Iraqis are claiming leadership of Iraq's government and police force. The military denies permission, since the looters make the city unsafe. After eight days of deadlock, he flies to Qatar and tells Gen. Tommy Franks that "Power vacuums are going to be filled with stuff that you and I don't like, and it's going to take a long time to get rid of that." Franks finally relents and orders a transport for him. It is twelve days after U.S. troops have taken control of Saddam Hussein's capital city.
Garner's ORHA team follows three days later. They still have to cool their heels for hours on the tarmac because the C-130 assigned to fly them into Baghdad has been commandeered by a rear-echelon general. When they arrive at Baghdad International Airport, the convoy that was to bring them into the city has left. Finally, they reach the Republican Palace — to find it bereft of lights, furnishings, and flowing water. They were given sleeping bags, but no mosquito netting or other supplies commonly provided to troops in Iraq. And they do not have the satellite phones they were promised.
Ronald Adams, Garner's deputy, contracts a lung infection and is airlifted back to Washington. Working part-time at the Pentagon, he discovers that Feith's OSP has done extensive postwar planning. He calls Garner immediately. "Hey," he exclaims, "did you know there's a whole damn planning section on postwar Iraq here?" Garner says he didn't, and asks what they're doing. "I have no idea," Adams reports. They won't let me see the stuff." It is ten days after Garner arrived in Baghdad.
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work may not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is. – T. E. Lawrence, 20 August 1917 |
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