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Banned
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roachboy, all of this is interrelated and....at it's core, is the OSP:
Quote:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0712-05.htm
Published on Saturday, July 12, 2003 by Knight-Ridder
Pentagon Civilians' Lack of Planning Contributed to Chaos in Iraq
by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
....The Pentagon group insisted on doing it its way because it had a visionary strategy that it hoped would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies. The problem was that officials at the State Department and CIA thought the vision was badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply excluded their rivals from involvement.
Feith, Luti and their advisers wanted to put Ahmad Chalabi - the controversial Iraqi exile leader of a coalition of opposition groups - in power in Baghdad. The Pentagon planners were convinced that Iraqis would warmly welcome the American-led coalition and that Chalabi, who boasted of having a secret network inside and outside the regime, and his supporters would replace Saddam and impose order.
Feith, in a series of responses Friday to written questions, denied that the Pentagon wanted to put Chalabi in charge.
But Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, who at the time was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board - an influential group of outside advisers to the Pentagon - and is close to Feith and Luti, acknowledged in an interview that installing Chalabi was the plan.
Referring to the Chalabi scenario, Perle said: "The Department of Defense proposed a plan that would have resulted in a substantial number of Iraqis available to assist in the immediate postwar period." Had it been accepted, "we'd be in much better shape today," he said.
Perle said blame for any planning failures belonged to the State Department and other agencies that opposed the Chalabi route.
A senior administration official, who requested anonymity, said the Pentagon officials were enamored of Chalabi because he advocated normal diplomatic relations with Israel. They believed that would have "taken off the board" one of the only remaining major Arab threats to Israeli security.
Moreover, Chalabi was key to containing the influence of Iran's radical Islamic leaders in the region, because he would have provided bases in Iraq for U.S. troops. That would complete Iran's encirclement by American military forces around the Persian Gulf and U.S. friends in Russia and Central Asia, he said.
But the failure to consult more widely on what to do if the Chalabi scenario failed denied American planners the benefits of a vast reservoir of expertise gained from peacekeeping and reconstruction in shattered nations from Bosnia to East Timor.
As one example, the Pentagon planners ignored an eight-month-long effort led by the State Department to prepare for the day when Saddam's dictatorship was gone. The "Future of Iraq" project, which involved dozens of exiled Iraqi professionals and 17 U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, prepared strategies for everything from drawing up a new Iraqi judicial code to restoring the unique ecosystem of Iraq's southern marshes, which Saddam's regime had drained.
Virtually none of the "Future of Iraq" project's work was used once Saddam fell.
The first U.S. administrator in Iraq, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, wanted the Future of Iraq project director, Tom Warrick, to join his staff in Baghdad. Warrick had begun packing his bags, but Pentagon civilians vetoed his appointment, said one current and one former official.
Meanwhile, postwar planning documents from the State Department, CIA and elsewhere were "simply disappearing down the black hole" at the Pentagon, said a former U.S. official with long Middle East experience who recently returned from Iraq.....
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<center><img src="http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/intelligence_540x1105.gif"></center>
Quote:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefi...3/hagel_1.html
...The media have avoided any deeper analysis of the root of the Plame scandal. Libby played only one part in the outing. The White House hasn't been directly confronted for its role in orchestrating the campaign to expose Plame.
The corporate media has quickly morphed the "CIA Leak" coverage away from the awkward details raised in the trial that implicate higher-ups. The standard for proving criminal conduct is high, and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation showed the limits of prosecuting leaks. Still, many ethical barriers were crossed in the revealing of Valerie Plame's secret identity.
It wasn't by coincidence that the flow of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) tall tales and fanciful Al-Qaeda connections made its way into the media; they'd been directed there by the war's crafters and the people in the media to whom they routinely fed information. A group including Scooter Libby worked to promote the war as part of the White House Iraq Group. Reporter Judith Miller exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq on the front pages of The New York Times. The same reporter would go on to serve jail time in order to keep Fitzgerald and the grand jury from finding out the identity of the source who outed Plame to her.
The corporate media continue to talk about presidential candidacies for an election 18 months away. They're tired of celebrity doting, but will certainly return to issues other than how and why Plame was outed or, more importantly, by whom.
The media ignore the difference between "faulty intelligence" and outright lies which were planted to serve a narrow political agenda: to wage war on Iraq and obtain a second term in the White House.
What's in a title?
The corporate media have put the Plame story in a box, sealed it, and let it join the steady flow down the black hole. The story of Libby's conviction is barely 24 hours old before it's sandwiched by coverage of a huge lottery payout to a New Jersey resident and ActiveOn commercials.
Sometimes the media dance gets to be too much. I stopped watching CNN's coverage when the scrolling text described Plame as a "CIA analyst" in a gross distortion of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife's job description. Plame, in fact, directed a unit that was actively fighting the proliferation of WMD. Her unit worked through the front company of Brewster Jennings & Associates.
Plame's unit had rejected neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the Iraqi National Congress and a convicted embezzler, who provided a stream of lies, or "faulty intelligence" as the media likes to put it. The media (through some of the same channels used to expose Plame) fanned pieces of information fed to the White House through Chalabi.
Plame's counterproliferation unit had discredited Chalabi as an intelligence asset. The State Department, which had assigned a team to do post-invasion planning on Iraq, similarly learned to ignore Chalabi.
Meanwhile, the neocons in the Pentagon and White House eagerly swallowed Chalabi's claims. Chalabi had said that the Americans would be welcomed with open arms [1]. The State Department and CIA disregarded Chalabi's assertions based on the grounds the source was biased.
The Pentagon, however, welcomed Chalabi's cheery predictions. Neocon advocates for war were eager for any intelligence that built a case against Hussein for WMD. It had been funding Chalabi's exile group, the Iraq National Congress [2]. His identity cloaked, quoted as an anonymous defector, Chalabi helped make the case for war, which scored political points with the neocon agenda within the administration.
The Pentagon, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, had become highly politicized. The intelligence-gathering responsibilities had shifted from traditional intelligence rivals at the CIA and State and closer to the defense secretary and Pentagon.
To the war-hungry neocons, the CIA was seen as weak, underestimating the threat and thus undermining the imperative for preemption. It's no wonder the CIA lost favor, as its higher standards had made it unable to appease the administration's demand for friendly intelligence. Intelligence that failed to make a "slam-dunk" case for war with Iraq simply wasn't acceptable. More rational voices were drowned by the shrill calls of the chickenhawks for war.
The enabling strategies came from a national security apparatus masterminded by Dick Cheney. After 9/11, the military and executive were closer than ever before; tentacles of the executive burrowed deep within the military decision-making apparatus and command structure, constricting the flow of information.
Under Bush, the chain of command underpinning the intelligence gathering process has been politicized and shifted from the CIA and State to the Pentagon. Dissent from subordinate intelligence gathering organs was suppressed alongside any nonconforming intelligence from rival agencies.
Still, the neocons were not content to rely on the Pentagon for its intelligence to promote the Iraq War. Neocons assigned two primary objectives for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a shadowy, pro-war contingent of mostly Republican consultants operating within the Pentagon. The OSP was tasked with gathering news and information that referred to WMD in Iraq, or implicated the country in terrorism. It's been accused of cherry-picking intelligence that supported the war. [3]
The vice president, with Libby in tow, held meetings at Langley, where Cheney's been accused of arm-twisting the CIA.
Plame's name reportedly came up in the course of those meetings. Cheney appears unable to have been able to entirely shut down intelligence that contravened the case for war. Instead, by intimidating the CIA, he'd been able to staunch the flow of countervailing information, which included reports like Wilson's, which undermined the credibility of the lies ("false intelligence") that the White House Iraq Group peddled.
The intelligence that Plame's unit gathered eventually collided with spin churned out by neocon operatives at the Office of Special Plans, which had been assigned to build the case for war by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG).
Were Plame's unit not brought down, they threatened to contradict the findings of the OSP and implicate the administration for planting false intelligence. Thus Plame -- and more importantly her husband -- presented a political threat to the administration, especially once Wilson's op-ed in The New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," affirmed the former ambassador's intent to make the issue public. (Wilson has allegedly sought redress through private channels and was rebuffed.)
At some point the White House mandate shifted to an effort to contain criticism of its case for war. Key to its defense was the idea that "false intelligence" had made its way into the decision-making tree. In fact, we now know the intelligence was known to have been unsubstantiated, from sources like Chalabi and "Curveball," a defector with no credibility [2].
The packaging of the case for war required making taking shortcuts that could, in turn, become problems for the administration if the liberties it had taken with the intelligence gathering process were revealed. Wilson dared to attack the case for war, an important political objective for the White House. The only issue is how far the White House went to stem criticism of the intelligence it has used to make its case for war.
More to it?
Perhaps there's more to the "CIA Leak" than discrediting Joe Wilson. There's certainly far more to the scandal than the guilty verdict for a mid-level operative in the White House's core cadre.
Plame's group is rumored to have prevented a real life clandestine deal that may have brought live WMD to Iraq from Turkey. The White House would have been eager to discover WMD after the invasion. With an election a year away, the political consequences of an unraveling of false intelligence could have been costly. In this respect, Joe Wilson presented a clear and present danger to the administration's re-election.
If there had been an effort to smuggle WMD into Iraq -- and the motive was certainly there -- it may have been interdicted through Plame's counterproliferation group. A scheme to smuggle WMD into Iraq would backfire if it were exposed, causing tremendous damage.
Maybe Wilson's report on Niger's yellowcake was a Trojan Horse planted by the CIA as payback to the White House. Based on Wilson's report, the CIA must have known at the time that Iraq had not acquired yellowcake uranium from Niger, and that its oversight responsibility had been subverted or been intentionally ignored.
The CIA may have even gone so far as to keep Cheney in the dark on Wilson's findings. This might explain why Cheney was so eager to hear that Wilson had gone on a junket, not a real trip to verify claims that Iraq had bought yellowcake in Niger.
The CIA is responsible for overseeing the accuracy of content in the president's State of the Union Address, so the inclusion of the 16 words broke established protocol. The leadership at CIA had known about Wilson's report and the lack of a Niger connection. The infamous 16 words were added subsequently. By not intervening in the 16 words--something Tenet was clearly pressured to do -- the CIA let the administration birth a clear falsehood, one which Wilson would dutifully expose.
An abridgement of the CIA's role in confirming the validity of intelligence circumvented the normal system of check and balances on the State of the Union. If Bush's claims were inaccurate, the system for confirming them had been mismanaged, demonstrating, at a minimum, gross negligence or quite possibly a conspiracy to produce and spread fake intelligence.
Eager to make its case, the White House had been suppressing any intelligence that was contradictory to that manufactured by the OSP and spread by the WHIG, which included many of the same people who are suspected of leaking Plame's identity to reporters: Cheney, Libby, Armitage, and Rove.
Wilson's report on Niger uranium was only one flash point where truth and the administration's positions failed to meet. Jailed on a contempt charge for refusing to disclose the source who told her about Plame, reporter Judith Miller wrote numerous articles based on questionable intelligence. One of her primary sources may have been Libby; if not why had she tried so hard to keep Libby's role out of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's reach?
Many questions remain unanswered concerning the White House's role in building the case for war, the shortcuts it took, and perhaps even the outright lies it told to get its war in Iraq.
Plame exposure
Plame's outing sent the message that the administration was willing to go to extreme lengths, even betrayal, to protect the intelligence on which it had made its case for war.
Plame's secret identity was pumped into the symbiotic relationship between the press and the White House, where secret channels turn secrets into gossip. Libby, Armitage, Rove, and other White House operatives were able to spread information about Plame. By leaking simultaneously, through multiple reporters, all but Libby have managed to avoid any legal consequences, which is no great challenge considering the difficulty of prosecuting leaks.
It's worth remembering that Libby has faced no charges related directly to revealing Plame's identity, and he may even be pardoned despite his recent conviction.
The media were quick to discuss the probability of a pardon. The coverage I saw raised no debate on the fairness of Libby walking free, or the injustice done Plame, her livelihood, or our national security, instead, time was given over to discussion of whether one participant in her outing would escape punishment through a late-term Bush pardon, such as Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
Under the notion of a "unitary executive," the powers of the executive are unlimited. One example of this exercise of absolute power is the use of signing statements by the president. President Bush claims that he is able to take any action, on whatever grounds necessary, in order to protect the American people from terrorism.
The exercise of absolute power -- called in its many forms tyranny -- tends to lead most tyrants to magnify their own authority to mammoth proportions. The sense of superiority leads to overestimating the power of the regime. In time, aggression is constrained by geopolitical and military limitations, like those faced by the US in the bogus "War on Terror."
The result of the Libby trial fails to demonstrate that any legal limits have been established in the Bush presidency's presumption of preeminent authority. The White House hasn't been held accountable for its role in revealing the identity of a covert agent, which is illegal under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. 421 et seq.)
It will come down to Congress to hold the White House accountable. A full inquiry into the Plame leak scandal must be arranged promptly. To weaken Republican aspirations for the presidency in 2008, Democrats have plenty of political ammunition. The Plame betrayal presents one more bullet, alongside the prominent failures in Katrina and Iraq.
If our political systems still functions, Congress must confront the White House for its fabricated justifications for war.
Footnotes:
<b>1. "Post-war planning non-existent" By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott; Knight Ridder Newspapers; Oct.17, 2004; " . . . officials, advisers and consultants in and around the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office bet on Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who assured them that Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators."</b>
2. Excerpt, NBC News' Meet the Press, May 16, 2004
Russert: You mentioned Mr. Ahmad Chalabi. He was the person responsible for the agent Curveball, that I talked about with Secretary Powell, who gave discredited information. Mr. Chalabi is still on the payroll of the United States government for three . . .
Biden: Almost 400 a month.
Russert: Four hundred thousand dollars . . .
Biden: A month."
3. "The New Pentagon Papers" by Karen Kwiatkowski; Salon.com March 3, 2004
Other Sources:
"The spies who pushed for war" by Julian Borger
"What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA" David Corn
"Plame Games Expose WMD 'Intelligence Failure' Scam" by Ahmed Amr
"Wolfowitz Committee Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims" by Jason Leopold
Postwar Planning: "Pentagon Civilians' Lack of Planning Contributed to Chaos in Iraq" by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0712-05.htm
"Selective Intelligence" by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker May 6, 2003; "The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon's pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House."
John B. Peebles writes for his blog, jbpeebles.blogspot.com/, where he follows global, political and economic issues.
Posted by: che | March 12, 2007 12:04 PM
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Quote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...752591,00.html
Rebel groups reject CIA overtures down on the farm
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday July 10, 2002
The Guardian
Deep in the bowels of the US state department, not far from the cafeteria, there is a small office identified only by a handwritten sign on the door reading: The Future of Iraq Project.
Such is the ramshackle reality lying beneath the Bush administration's pronouncements on regime change in Baghdad. There is little doubt that the Pentagon is devising invasion plans in deadly earnest, but the parallel effort to build a political alternative has been half-hearted to say the least. In fact it is in retreat on several fronts.
The secret side of this "unconventional war" has not been going any more convincingly. Recent administration leaks have confirmed that there was a presidential directive to the CIA in February, ordering the agency to topple Saddam Hussein, with extreme prejudice if neces sary. But here again, the reality seems to be falling far short of the hype.
Already stretched and humiliated in the hunt for al-Qaida, CIA agents have been approaching would-be allies among the Iraqi opposition who have little reason to trust them, having been let down by Washington twice before.
Morale is so poor in the CIA that, in recent testimony to Congress, its director, George Tenet, admitted the agency had no more than a 15% prospect of carrying out its presidential order.
The CIA was taught a sobering lesson on its lowly standing among Iraqi rebel groups on its own home ground in April.
The agency runs a boot camp near Williamsburg in Virginia for its paramilitary units, which played an important role in Afghanistan. It is officially called Camp Perry, but inside the CIA it known simply as The Farm. Alongside the training camp it has a "black" area which serves as a venue for the secret side of US diplomacy. Foreign leaders, rebels or agents can be flown in without the complications of visas and customs, for meetings that officially never happen.
In late April, The Farm was the site of delicate talks with Kurdish leaders, aimed at persuading them to cooperate in the effort to topple President Saddam. The guests of honour were Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), and Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - the only opposition with significant troop numbers and territory under their control.
The KDP and PUK confirm the meeting took place but officially insist it took place in Germany. Privately Kurdish opposition officials confirm they flew to Virginia.
A US intelligence source also told the Guardian that the encounter took place at The Farm and that the US was represented by CIA officials and General Wayne Downing, the president's military adviser on counter-terrorism and the author of a 1998 plan to unseat Saddam relying heavily on local opposition and US air power.
"The idea was to see what the Kurds would be prepared to do in a war on Baghdad," the US source said.
Specifically, the Kurds were asked to agree to the establishment of CIA stations at their headquarters in Irbil and Suleimaniyah, but they demurred. According to one account, Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani asked for more money than the CIA was prepared to offer.
However, according to a Kurdish source, the meeting failed for a more fundamental reason: lack of trust. The Kurds had been encouraged to rise up against Saddam twice, in 1991 and 1995, and both times Washington had abandoned them to the Iraqi army. In 1995, the CIA pulled the plug on the insurrection 48 hours before it was due to begin.
"We wanted to know if that was going to happen again. If Saddam struck at us, would we be protected?" the Kurdish opposition activist said.
At one point, the Kurds reportedly asked whether the US officials at The Farm really represented the entire administration, and so Ryan Crocker, a state department official who had visited Kurdistan a few months earlier, was hastily called in from Washington. No senior Pentagon officials attended.
It was hardly a convincing demonstration of US resolve, and the American representatives were unable to provide the assurances the Kurds were seeking.
Denounced
Last week, Mr Barzani denounced the secret war, telling the Guardian: "We cannot stop the US [from taking covert action], but we would like there to be transparency and clarity, and for there to be no covers or curtains to hide behind."
The White House announced Gen Downing's resignation after less than a year as counter-terrorism adviser. But a spokesman denied that his departure had anything to do with the fact that he lost his battle to persuade the administration to support a guerrilla campaign by Iraqi rebel groups against Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the understaffed and underfunded Future of Iraq Project has been spending more effort struggling with other government departments than plotting Saddam's downfall. Two US-sponsored meetings aimed at bringing members of the Iraqi opposition together have been put off indefinitely. One was to have been a seminar in Washington for Iraqi ex-officers in exile. It was to have taken place under the auspices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the backing of the Pentagon and members of Congress who view the INC, a London-based umbrella organisation, as the rightful vanguard of the opposition.
However, the state department, convinced that the INC is corrupt and unreliable, dragged its feet on issuing visas to the Iraqi generals in Europe, who were themselves sceptical about the role of the INC and its leading figure, Ahmed Chalabi. Ultimately Congress grew impatient and suspended the funding.
The state department has simultaneously been trying to organise another Iraqi opposition conference in Europe, to talk about life after Saddam. Mr Chalabi lobbied against the meeting among his friends at the defence department and in Congress, and the conference has consequently been put on hold.
The state department has also cut off funds to the INC's intelligence gathering effort, which smuggled defectors and information about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq.
The shambles of the political struggle might suggest that the Bush administration is not serious about getting rid of the Iraqi dictator. But Many analysts believe that the lack of effort invested in building political alliances simply reflects the fact that the Bush administration does not attach much importance to them.
"My theory is that the US government is going to want to do this on its own, on the basis that if you work with the Kurds and the Shi'ites you're going to end up with three Iraqs rather than one," said John Pike, who runs a Washington security thinktank, GlobalSecurity.org.
In a forthcoming paper for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, a strategic analyst, argues: "The US has shown in the past that it can execute military operations without any clear plan for conflict termination and nation building.
"The American military culture seems to feel its responsibility ends with strategy and grand strategy is the province of politicians and God."
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
After the War
Reconstruction Planners Worry, Wait and Reevaluate
By Susan B. Glasser and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 2, 2003; Page A01
....... But with military commanders warning of a longer and more difficult war, Garner's team also has been reevaluating its strategy. Plans to send a large number of U.S. civilians into Iraq are being postponed, given concerns about security even in areas of southern Iraq nominally under U.S. control.
"We all thought we were going to be in there by now," said one official familiar with the Garner group's work. "Instead of throwing things together in a week, we've had a lot more time to think about it."
The additional time has fueled additional worries. Instead of being welcomed as a liberation force, some in the group fear, a U.S.-led transitional government will be greeted with deep suspicion, perhaps even resistance. The group is devoting meetings to discussion of "what is going to happen when the hostilities end," according to the official.
In Washington, meanwhile, disagreement over control of the program surfaced as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vetoed the State Department's selection of eight current and former diplomats to join Garner's team. Some officials here complain that the Pentagon is seeking to dominate every aspect of Iraq's postwar reconstruction.
Garner's mandate is to provide humanitarian assistance, reconstruct damaged infrastructure and set the country on the road to a representative self-government before authority is fully handed over to Iraqis. Not since the period after World War II has the United States embarked on such an ambitious transformation project -- seizing control of a large country to refashion its political system and rebuild its economy.
Garner constantly lectures his staff, several officials said, on the limited nature of their mission, telling them they must be prepared to "work their way out of a job" within 90 days. On his first visit to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr today, Garner made that point publicly.
"We're here to do the job of liberating them, of providing them with a form of government that represents the freely elected will of the people. We'll do it as fast as we can, and once we've done it, we'll turn everything over to them. We'll begin turning things over right away, and we'll make this a better place for everybody," he said.
But some officials doubt that three months is a realistic period in which to put the country on its feet. "This is a very short-term project -- 90 days. Basically we can get people back to work, we can get kids back to school, we can make some high-profile infrastructure fixes," said one official. "What comes after that 90 days, we don't know."
Many of the most difficult policy issues that would face this government-in-waiting are unresolved. The group is discussing how much power the interim Iraqi government would have compared with U.S. overseers, how to root out apparatchiks from Hussein's ruling Baath Party while keeping government functioning, and how to drastically restructure and reduce the size of the Iraqi army while providing for future national security.
Some of those involved in the discussions say they believe the United States would retain power over important government functions even after the formation of an Iraqi authority. Others privately concede the task could stretch on for many more months.
"Some of us came out here thinking it would be a three- or four-month operation," one member of Garner's team said. "Now it's clear that we're going to be here, and eventually in Baghdad, for a lot longer than we expected."
One participant in a recent planning session questioned whether the group fully recognizes the complexity and chaos that officials are likely to encounter in a postwar Iraq.
"The presentation was full of charts and reporting lines and discussions about whether there should be a dotted line or a straight line," he said. "It was like a Boston Consulting Group presentation to IBM. It was so different than what the situation really is in Iraq. That is going to be a big, big shock to them."
Garner's team is made up almost exclusively of Americans, many of them former or current officials. Aides come from the Pentagon, the State Department and other departments and agencies, including Treasury, Justice, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The only non-Americans are a handful of British and Australian diplomats, and a small group of Iraqi exiles. The United Nations is expected to "play some part in the equation," an official said, but U.S. officials have made clear it will be a subordinate role.
Three officials have been named to administer areas of Iraq: Bruce Moore, a retired general, in the north; Barbara Bodine, the former U.S. ambassador to Yemen who served in Baghdad in the 1980s, for the central region, including Baghdad; and Buck Walters, another retired general, in the south. Three other Garner deputies are in charge of broad areas -- humanitarian assistance coordinated by George Ward, a former U.S. Marine and ambassador to Namibia; reconstruction by Lewis Lucke, a veteran of USAID; and civil administration by Michael Mobbs, a Reagan-era arms negotiator and Pentagon legal adviser.
Differences between the Pentagon and State Department over the team's composition have affected officials who were on their way to the region. It is not known whether the dispute will further slow the group's work.
Here at the beach, Garner's transitional government-in-waiting has begun to shape that agenda with military precision -- day-by-day timetables for restarting key government functions, checklists for taking over ministries. The official mantra is secrecy. "It'll get rolled out when it gets rolled out," one official said.
Yet the process of reinventing Iraq is also happening in plain view of the press corps gathered at the same hotel. As scenes of destruction in Iraq blare on television sets, Garner's postwar planners tote Filofaxes along with their military-issue gas masks. British Gurkhas, tapped to provide security for the team, walked across the sand one recent morning in civilian clothes. Each morning at 7:30, the military officers in the group gather near a swimming pool to get their marching orders for the day.
Participants are developing plans for taking over Iraq's 23 government ministries, with a key U.S. adviser supervising work along with Iraqi exiles. Experts from Treasury are deciding how best to scrap the Iraqi currency -- featuring likenesses of Hussein -- and replace it, at least temporarily, with the U.S. dollar. At another hotel up the road, a group of Iraqi exiles working with Garner has formed the "indigenous media group" to reinvent Iraqi television, radio and newspapers.
Although Garner's team is assembling a list of Iraqi exiles with expertise in specific areas of governance -- finance, agriculture, health and so forth -- U.S. officials acknowledge that they have little idea of what they will find in each ministry.
"When they are reopened, who will show up for work?" one participant said. "How do we find the technocrats?"
Lack of on-the-ground knowledge is a key impediment for Garner's group. A handful of State Department officials involved in the process have had experience in Iraq, but none after 1990, when the United States severed diplomatic relations with Hussein's government.
The experiment may get its first test in southern Iraq, in areas near Kuwait already under U.S. and British control. Sources familiar with the discussions here said it is possible that Garner's group may move into southern Iraq even as the fight rages farther north.
British Maj. Gen. Albert Whitley, serving as a deputy to the U.S. commander of land forces in Iraq, said military planners envision a "gradual transfer" of responsibility to Garner for humanitarian assistance once they can "provide a secure environment" in which civilian aid groups can operate.
There is much more uncertainty about how to restart a functioning government without the all-pervasive Baath Party, and Whitley, who is in charge of postwar planning for the land forces here, made clear that many of those decisions would fall to the Garner team. For example, British forces are currently detaining dozens of local Baath Party officials and paramilitary forces with the expectation that they will be subject eventually to "some judicial process," Whitley said. "But who that judge and jury will be, I don't know," he added.
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/in...rint&position=
State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq
by Eric Schmitt and Joel Brinkley
Sunday, October 19, 2003
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials.
Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.
Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.
Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos.
"The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting," the report warned, urging American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key government facilities."
Despite the scope of the project, the military office initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it until a major government drill for the postwar mission was held in Washington in late February, less than a month before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office's deputy director.
The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.
George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."
But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be interviewed for this article.
The Defense Department, which had the lead role for planning postwar operations and reconstruction in Iraq, denied that it had shunned the State Department planning effort.
"It is flatly wrong to say this work was ignored," said the Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita. "It was good work. It was taken into account. It had some influence on people's thinking and it was a valuable contribution."
The broad outlines of the work, called the Future of Iraq Project, have been widely known, but new details emerged this week after the State Department sent Congress the project's 13 volumes of reports and supporting documents, which several House and Senate committees had requested weeks ago.
The documents are unclassified but labeled "official use only," and were not intended for public distribution, officials said. But Congressional officials from both parties allowed The New York Times to review the volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages, revealing previously unknown details behind the planning.
Administration officials say there was postwar planning at several government agencies, but much of the work at any one agency was largely disconnected from that at others.
In the end, the American military and civilian officials who first entered Iraq prepared for several possible problems: numerous fires in the oil fields, a massive humanitarian crisis, widespread revenge attacks against former leaders of Mr. Hussein's government and threats from Iraq's neighbors. In fact, none of those problems occurred to any great degree.
Officials acknowledge that the United States was not well prepared for what did occur: chiefly widespread looting and related security threats, even though the State Department study predicted them.
Senior said the Pentagon squandered a chance to anticipate more of the postwar pitfalls by not fully incorporating the State Department information.
"Had we done more work and more of a commitment at the front end, there would be drastically different results now," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, Marc Grossman, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said the working groups were "not to have an academic discussion but to consider thoughts and plans for what can be done immediately."
But some senior Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that while some of the project's work was well done, much of it was superficial and too academic to be practical.
"It was mostly ignored," said one senior defense official. "State has good ideas and a feel for the political landscape, but they're bad at implementing anything. Defense, on the other hand, is excellent at logistical stuff, but has blinders when it comes to policy. We needed to blend these two together."
A review of the work shows a wide range of quality and industriousness. For example, the transitional justice working group, made up of Iraqi judges, law professors and legal experts, has met four times and drafted more than 600 pages of proposed reforms in the Iraqi criminal code, civil code, nationality laws and military procedure. Other working groups, however, met only once and produced slim reports or none at all.
"There was a wealth of information in the working group if someone had just collated and used it," said Nasreen Barwari, who served on the economy working group and is now the Iraqi minister of public works. "What they did seems to have been a one-sided opinion."
Many of the working groups offered long-term recommendations as well as short-term fixes to potential problems.
The group studying defense policy and institutions expected problems if the Iraqi Army was disbanded quickly — a step L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American civil administrator in Iraq, took. The working group recommended that jobs be found for demobilized troops to avoid having them turn against allied forces as some are believed to have done.
After special security organizations that ensured Mr. Hussein's grip on power were abolished, the working group recommended halving the 400,000-member military over time and reorganizing Iraqi special forces to become peacekeeping troops, as well as counterdrug and counterterrorism forces. Under the plan, military intelligence units would help American troops root out terrorists infiltrating postwar Iraq.
"The Iraqi armed forces and the army should be rebuilt according to the tenets and programs of democratic life," one working group member recommended.
The democratic principles working group wrestled with myriad complicated issues from reinvigorating a dormant political system to forming special tribunals for trying war criminals to laying out principles of a new Iraqi bill of rights.
It declared the thorny question of the relationship between that secular state and Islamic religion one "only the people of Iraq can decide," and avoided a recommendation on it.
Members of this working group were divided over whether to back a provisional government made up of Iraqi exiles or adopt the model that ultimately was adopted, the Iraqi Governing Council, made up of members from a broad range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. The group presented both options.
The transparency and anticorruption working group warned that "actions regarding anticorruption must start immediately; it cannot wait until the legal, legislative and executive systems are reformed."
The economy and infrastructure working group warned of the deep investments needed to repair Iraq's water, electrical and sewage systems. The free media working group noted the potential to use Iraq's television and radio capabilities to promote the goals of a post-Hussein Iraq, an aim many critics say the occupation has fumbled so far.
Encouraging Iraqis to emerge from three decades of dictatorship and embrace a vibrant civil society including labor unions, artist guilds and professional associations, could be more difficult than anticipated, the civil society capacity buildup working group cautioned: "The people's main concern has become basic survival and not building their civil society."
The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated before the war, but they are getting a closer look now. Many of the Iraqi ministers are graduates of the working groups, and have brought that experience with them. Since last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad have received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's 13-volume work. "It's our bible coming out here," said one senior official in Baghdad.
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