The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

expertise, both within the Foreign Service and elsewhere, to correctly predict most develop- ments of the past year. In particular, the pan- elists urged beefed-up security to counter the wave of criminal activity in the period immediate- ly following the over- throw of the Ba’thist regime. They also warned of the inherent difficulty of establishing democ- racy in a deeply riven society with no experience of power-sharing. The Coalition Provisional Authority has been grappling with these and many other thorny issues, first under Gen. Jay Garner and then Amb. Jerry Bremer. Amb. Hume Horan, who worked at the CPA (along with many other ded- icated personnel from State and elsewhere) for six months last year, gives us his assessment of the post-Hussein era in “Restoring A Shattered Mosaic” (p. 29). He is considerably more opti- mistic about the country’s prospects than many commentators, though he is careful to acknowl- edge the many obstacles that lie ahead. One of the Bush administration’s justifica- tions for going to war has been the conviction that Iraq’s democratization would serve as a model for its neighbors and the larger Arab world. But the Carnegie Endowment’s Marina Ottaway offers a decidedly cautionary answer to the question, “Can the United States Export Democracy to Iraq?” (p. 38). The administration’s main rationale for attacking Iraq, however, was its supposed pos- session of weapons of mass destruction and intent to use them against American interests. However, no Iraqi WMD stockpiles have yet turned up, and David Kay, who resigned on Jan. 23 from his position as head of the U.S. effort to find the weapons, has testified to Congress that “We were almost all wrong.” President Bush has now backed an inde- pendent review of the intelligence regarding Iraq’s alleged WMD, though just how it will be conducted remains to be worked out. For an insider’s perspective on what the intel- ligence community was reporting about the situ- ation in Iraq prior to the war, we offer Greg Thielmann’s “From Intelligence Analyst to ‘Citizen Watchdog’” (p. 44). Thielmann, a 25- year Foreign Service veteran, was acting director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research when he retired in September 2002. He paints a damning picture of how the adminstration exploited “the fear of a nation still traumatized by 9/11 with unjustified specula- tions that Iraq could have nuclear weapons with- in months, and ominous warnings that the first smoking gun could be in the form of a mush- room cloud — assertions that had no basis in the sober assessments of intelligence professionals.” Many critics of the current administration’s handling of Iraq, both within State and else- where, have cited the damage done to U.S. rela- tions with allies and, indeed, much of the world. Egyptian journalist Khaled Abdulkareem gives us a view of what that has meant in the Middle East in “Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Arab Reaction” (p. 50). Ultimately, no matter how one assesses the administration’s record in Iraq over the past year, it will soon be largely up to State, USAID, and the other foreign affairs agencies to make U.S. policy there work. That will be no easy task, but fortunately, the many Foreign Service profes- sionals who have volunteered for duty in Iraq have already been demonstrating the requisite dedication and creativity. We are therefore pleased to conclude our coverage with some of their stories in “On the Ground” (p. 54). M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 David Rieff documents just how perceptive and well- informed State’s analysts were about what would follow U.S. intervention in Iraq. Steven Alan Honley is the editor of the Foreign Service Journal. An FSO from 1985 to 1997, he served in Mexico City, Wellington and Washington, D.C. Adam Niklewicz