The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

of intelligence on Iraq. “We didn’t think it was wise to create a brand-new office and label it an office of Iraq policy,” Feith told the BBC in July. … Chalabi provided the Office of Special Plans with information from defectors ostensibly from Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs — defectors who claimed to be able to establish that the Iraqi dictator was actively developing weapons of mass destruction. Through such efforts, Chalabi grew even closer to those planning the war and what would follow. To the war planners, the Iraqi National Congress became not simply an Iraqi exile group of which Chalabi was a leader, but a kind of government-in-waiting with Chalabi at its head. The Pentagon’s plan for postwar Iraq seems to have hinged, until the war itself, on the idea that Chalabi could be dropped into Baghdad and, once there, effect a smooth transition to a new administration. … Shutting Out State In the spring of 2002, as support for a war to oust Saddam Hussein took root within the Bush administra- tion, the State Department began to gather information and draw up its own set of plans for postwar Iraq under the leadership of Thomas Warrick, a longtime State Department official who was then special adviser to the department’s Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. This effort involved a great number of Iraqi exiles from across the political spectrum, from monarchists to communists and including the Iraqi National Congress. Warrick’s Future of Iraq Project, as it was called, was an effort to consider almost every question likely to con- front a post-Hussein Iraq: the rebuilding of infrastruc- ture, the shape Iraqi democracy might take, the carrying out of transitional justice and the spurring of economic development. … There were a number of key policy disagreements between State and Defense. The first was over Chalabi. While the Pentagon said that a “government in exile” should be established, presumably led by Chalabi, to be quickly installed in Baghdad following the war, other Iraqis, including the elder statesman of the exile leaders, Adnan Pachachi, insisted that any government installed by United States fiat would be illegitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi people. And the State Department, still concerned that Chalabi had siphoned off money meant for the Iraqi resistance and that he lacked public support, opposed the idea of a shadow government. The State Department managed to win this particular battle, and no government in exile was set up. There was also a broader disagreement about whether and how quickly Iraq could become a full-fledged democracy. The State Department itself was of two minds on this question. One prewar State Department report, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists, asserted that “liberal democracy would be diffi- cult to achieve” in Iraq and that “electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.” The CIA agreed with this assessment; in March 2003, the agency issued a report that was widely reported to conclude that prospects for democracy in a post-Hussein Iraq were bleak. In con- trast, the neoconservatives within the Bush administra- tion, above all within the Department of Defense, con- sistently asserted that the CIA and the State Department were wrong and that there was no reason to suppose that Iraq could not become a full-fledged democracy, and rel- atively quickly and smoothly. But Warrick, who has refused to be interviewed since the end of the war, was, according to participants in the project, steadfastly committed to Iraqi democracy. Feisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-American lawyer who also served on the project’s democratic principles group, credits Warrick with making the Future of Iraq Project a genuinely democratic and inclusive venture. Warrick, he says, “was fanatically devoted to the idea that no one should be allowed to dominate the Future of Iraq Project and that all voices should be heard — including moderate Islamist voices. It was a remarkable accomplishment.” In fact, Istrabadi rejects the view that the State Department was a holdout against Iraqi democracy. “From Colin Powell on down,” he says, “I’ve spent hun- dreds of hours with State Department people, and I’ve never heard one say democracy was not viable in Iraq. Not one.” Although Istrabadi is an admirer of Wolfowitz, he says that the rivalry between State and Defense was so intense that the Future of Iraq Project became anathema to the Pentagon simply because it was a State Department pro- ject. “At the Defense Department,” he recalls, ’’we were seen as part of ‘them.’” … The Future of Iraq Project did draw up detailed reports, which were eventually released to Congress last month and made available to reporters for The New York Times. … F O C U S 24 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