The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

But the Defense Department, which came to oversee postwar plan- ning, would pay little heed to the work of the Future of Iraq Project. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer who was later given the job of leading the reconstruction of Iraq, says he was instructed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to ignore the Future of Iraq Project. Garner has said that he asked for Warrick to be added to his staff and that he was turned down by his supe- riors. Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst and a leading expert on Iraqi history, says that Warrick was “blacklisted” by the Pentagon. “He did not support their vision,” she told me. And what was this vision? Yaphe’s answer is unhesitant: “Ahmad Chalabi.” But it went further than that: “The Pentagon didn’t want to touch anything connected to the Department of State.” None of the senior American officials involved in the Future of Iraq Project were taken on board by the Pentagon’s planners. … Too Little Planning, Too Late The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance was established in the Defense Department, under General Garner’s supervision, on Jan. 20, 2003, just eight weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Because the Pentagon had insisted on essentially throwing out the work and the personnel of the Future of Iraq Project, Garner and his planners had to start more or less from scratch. Timothy Carney [a former ambas- sador to Haiti and Sudan], who served in ORHA under Garner, explains that ORHA lacked critical personnel once it arrived in Baghdad. “There were scarcely any Arabists in ORHA in the beginning” at a senior level, Carney says. “Some of us had served in the Arab world, but we were not experts, or fluent Arabic-speakers.” According to Carney, Defense officials “said that Arabists weren’t welcome because they didn’t think Iraq could be democratic.” Because of the battle between Defense and State, ORHA, which Douglas Feith called the “U.S. govern- ment nerve center” for postwar planning, lacked not only information and personnel but also time. … Although ORHA simply didn’t have the time, resources or expertise in early 2003 to formulate a coher- ent postwar plan, Feith and others in the Defense Department were telling a different story to Congress. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, shortly before the begin- ning of the war, Feith reassured the assembled senators that ORHA was “staffed by officials detailed from departments and agencies through- out the government.” Given the freeze-out of the State Department officials from the Future of Iraq Project, this description hardly encompassed the reality of what was actually tak- ing place bureaucratically. Much of the postwar planning that did get done before the invasion focused on humanitarian efforts — Garner’s area of expertise. … Garner told me that while he had expected Iraqis to loot the symbols of the old regime, like Hussein’s palaces, he had been utterly unprepared for the systematic loot- ing and destruction of practically every public building in Baghdad. In fairness to Garner, many of the Iraqis I spoke with during my trips were also caught by surprise. … One reason for the looting in Baghdad was that there were so many intact buildings to loot. In contrast to their strategy in the first Gulf War, American war planners had been careful not to attack Iraqi infrastructure. This was partly because of their understanding of the laws of war and partly because of their desire to get Iraq back up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible. They seem to have imagined that once Hussein fell, things would go back to normal fairly quickly. But on the ground, the looting and the violence went on and on, and for the most part American forces largely did nothing. Or rather, they did only one thing — station troops to protect the Iraqi Oil Ministry. This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry — not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry — proba- bly did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil. “It is not that they could not protect everything, as they say,” a leader in the Hawza, the Shiite F O C U S 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 25 The memory of this looting is like a bone in Iraq’s collective throat and has given rise to conspiracy theories about American motives and actions.