The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 4 n Wednesday evening (U.S. time), March 19, 2003, the United States began “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by bombing a building in which Saddam Hussein was thought to be hid- ing. The dictator’s regime crumbled almost instantly (though it took nearly nine months to capture him), and the initial euphoria over the ease of his overthrow led President Bush to declare an end to “major hostilities” on May 1. Lamentably, it has become all too clear that military victory was just the beginning of the struggle in Iraq, notwithstanding the Bush administration’s assurances. As we go to print in early February, American deaths have already exceeded 500 and continue to inch up almost daily, and we have pumped many billions of dol- lars into the effort. Most worrying of all, the overall security situation remains unsettled just as the Coalition Provisional Authority prepares to turn over power to the Iraqi Transitional Administration on July 1 — the date Embassy Baghdad is scheduled to open its doors. Our coverage actually begins with this month’s Speaking Out column, “U.S. Diplomacy and Other Sacrifices” (p. 13), by John Brady Kiesling, who likely needs no introduction to most FSJ readers. In this column, he discusses the factors that underlay his February 2003 deci- sion to resign from the Foreign Service in protest of the Bush administration’s drive to war. (Two other FSOs who did the same, John Brown and Ann Wright, contributed Speaking Out columns of their own to our September 2003 issue, which you can read by going to www.afsa.org.) Among many provocative observations Kiesling makes, perhaps this one merits espe- cially close attention: “I am not qualified to say when and how the State Department lost the bureaucratic struggle for the president’s ear. We lost, and we chose to be good losers.” That bureaucratic struggle is at the heart of an article that originally appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine last November, the bulk of which we reprint in this issue: “Blueprint for a Mess” (p. 22). Journalist David Rieff con- cludes that “The lack of security and order on the ground today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate after- math of the war.” Rieff documents just how perceptive and well-informed State’s analysts were about what was likely to follow U.S. intervention. The Future of Iraq Project drew on a wide range of F O C U S O N I R A Q O I RAQ , O NE Y EAR L ATER : E DITOR ’ S I NTRODUCTION B Y S TEVEN A LAN H ONLEY