War planning successful, but officials failed in follow-up plan
Note: Pieces of this info have been inserted on this thread in the last few days, but this one is more complete with names, etc. Interesting take on the events....If we do have an investigation on this, hopefully some of the little fiefs in the fiefdoms will have to talk about their rationale....or lack of one....and lack of coordinating within all departments, on a "horizontal" level, not just vertical.
By Mark Fineman, Robin Wright and Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times
seattletimes.nwsource.com
WASHINGTON — Secretly, they gathered in an auditorium in the nation's snowbound capital — uniformed generals, assistant Cabinet secretaries, war-college professors with top security clearance, and senior planners from the Pentagon, the U.S. Central Command and dozens of other federal agencies.
The date was Feb. 21. More than 100,000 U.S. and British forces were poised at Iraq's doorstep. Their battle plan was rehearsed and ready. In less than 30 days, the first American tanks would cross the sand berm into Iraq from Kuwait, launching the tip of the spear of what would be a swift and brilliant battlefield victory.
Yet this two-day gathering at the Pentagon's National Defense University was the first time all of these planners had gathered under one roof to address an equally vital matter: how to win the peace in Iraq once the war was over.
Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who led the meeting and would soon attempt to lead the peace, called it a rock drill: "It's a military term — you know, you turn over all the rocks."
When they did, Garner acknowledged in a recent interview, the group uncovered "tons of problems," including gaps in planning, coordination and anticipation of such mission-threatening problems as looting and civil unrest.
Nearly five months later, the price for those gaps is still being paid.
Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, U.S. and British troops have struggled to bring order from chaos. Water, electricity and security are in short supply, fueling resentment among many Iraqis.
A guerrillalike resistance has taken shape against the occupation; U.S. casualties mount almost daily in an operation that is costing nearly $4 billion a month and stalling the withdrawal of American forces.
The Bush administration planned well and won the war with minimal allied casualties. Now, according to interviews with dozens of administration officials, military leaders and independent analysts, missteps in the planning for the subsequent peace could threaten the lives of soldiers and drain U.S. resources indefinitely and cloud the victory itself.
The tale of what went wrong is one of agency infighting, ignored warnings and faulty assumptions.
An ambitious, yearlong State Department planning effort predicted many of the postwar troubles and advised how to resolve them. But the man who oversaw that effort was kept out of Iraq by the Pentagon, and most of his plans were shelved.
Meanwhile, Douglas Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon, also began postwar planning, in September of last year. But he didn't seek out an overseer to run the country until January of this year.
The man he picked, Jay Garner, had run the U.S. operation to protect ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Based on that experience, Garner acknowledged, he badly underestimated the looting and lawlessness that would follow once Saddam Hussein's army was defeated. By the time he got to Baghdad, Garner said, 17 of 21 Iraqi ministries had "evaporated."
"Being a Monday morning quarterback," Garner says now, the underestimation was a mistake. "But if I had known that then, what would I have done about it?"
The postwar planning by the State and Defense departments, along with that of other agencies, was done in what bureaucrats call "vertical stovepipes."
Each agency worked independently for months, with little coordination.
Even within the Pentagon there were barriers: The Joint Chiefs of Staff on the second floor worked closely with the State Department planners, while Feith's Special Plans Office on the third floor went its own way, working with a team from the Central Command under Army Gen. Tommy Franks.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's civilian aides decided that they didn't need or want much help, officials in both departments say.
Central Command officials confirmed that their postwar-planning group — dubbed Task Force Four, for the fourth phase of the war plan — took a back seat to the combat planners.
What postwar planning did occur at the Central Command and the Pentagon was on disasters that never occurred: oil fires, masses of refugees, chemical and biological warfare, lethal epidemics, starvation.
The Pentagon planners also made two key assumptions that proved faulty. One was that American and British authorities would inherit a fully functioning modern state, with government ministries, police forces and public utilities in working order — a "plug and play" occupation. The second was that the resistance would end quickly.
Some top Pentagon officials acknowledged that they have been surprised at how difficult it has been to establish order.
"The so-called forces of law and order (in Baghdad) just kind of collapsed," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. "There's not a single plan that would have dealt with that. ... This is a country that was ruled by a gang of terrorist criminals, and they're still around. They're threatening Iraqis and killing Americans."
The military's sprint to Baghdad initially vindicated Rumsfeld's prime directive to transform the U.S. armed forces into a lighter, more mobile force. It shortened the war, probably prevented many of the disasters the Pentagon had been planning for and saved lives during the takeover of Iraq.
One senior Central Command official said the still-classified battle plan called for as many as 125 days of combat. Baghdad fell in just 20.
But the quick victory also created what Franks called "catastrophic success." It left large areas of the country and millions of Iraqis under no more than nominal allied control, with a force considerably smaller than some experts inside and outside the military had warned would be needed to stabilize and occupy the country.
Could those difficulties have been foreseen? Many outside the Pentagon say yes.
Planting seeds
The seeds for planning a postwar Iraq were sown on April 9, 2002, when Afghanistan was still on center stage and an invasion of Iraq was just talk. That was the first meeting of the Future of Iraq project, the brainchild of Thomas Warrick, a veteran civil servant in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
Warrick, who declined to comment for this report, quietly recruited about 240 Iraqi exiles, in Europe and the United States, with professional experience in such fields as criminal justice, health, economics and oil. They drafted blueprints for everything from securing the streets to reforming the Iraqi currency.
"We emphasized the security issue from the beginning," said Ali Al-Attar, an Iraqi-American physician from northern Virginia. "We were expecting that the Baathists were going to sabotage our work."
Reforming and restructuring Saddam's armed forces was another top priority of the Future of Iraq project. Iraq's army and other military commands employed nearly 500,000 people, most of them men with large families to feed. Only a few were closely tied to Saddam's Baath party.
Mohammed Faour, a former major in Iraq's special forces, chaired the project's defense working group, which produced a volume of studies laying out a quick reformation of the army. They concluded that the soldiers could be retrained to protect and repair government buildings, airports, bridges, dams and other key infrastructure.
Yet instead of putting the soldiers to work, U.S. occupation authorities abruptly disbanded the armed forces as part of a de-Baathification campaign, sending hundreds of thousands of former soldiers into the streets in angry protest. "Nobody listened to us," Faour recalled sadly. "We were just put aside."
It didn't help that the State Department project was something of a backdoor operation from the start.
Military officials "had their own list of people they wanted involved and didn't want to take recommendations from us," a State Department official said.
In October 2002, while Warrick's group worked on its blueprints and the administration pushed its diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, a new Pentagon office headed by Feith was created partly to oversee postwar planning.
It operated in secret so as not to "undercut our diplomatic efforts," Feith told reporters last month.
— But that veil of secrecy also insulated the defense secretary's postwar planners from other agencies' assessments on Iraq that didn't easily mesh with their fast-moving, light-force battle plans.
Looking back, senior officials from State and other departments charge bitterly that Feith and other Pentagon aides based most of their assessments on information provided by exiled Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, who predicted that with the removal of Saddam, the regime would suddenly collapse by "decapitation," leaving the government's institutions in place, and who expected that postwar Iraq would be a country of U.S.-flag-waving citizens.
Feith vehemently denies that Pentagon planners fell victim to overoptimistic Chalabi predictions. Such charges, he said, are based on "the notion that we're a bunch of simple-minded saps and unsophisticated jerks."
U.S. intelligence officials, long skeptical of Chalabi, say they warned repeatedly that the postwar period would be tough.
"Specifically, the (intelligence community) warned prior to the conflict that Iraqis would probably resort to obstruction, resistance and armed opposition if they perceived attempts to keep them dependent on the United States and the West," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told the Los Angeles Times.
As fall turned to winter and U.S. troops began arriving in the Persian Gulf by the tens of thousands, a veritable library of warnings and proposed remedies was piling up within the administration, focusing on the very items that would ultimately paralyze much of the postwar effort: a lack of security, electricity, water and other basic needs.
Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and longtime professor at military-war colleges, prepared an elaborate document spotlighting the fragility of Iraq's electricity and water systems after decades of neglect. "This is a catastrophe waiting to happen," several senior Defense Department officials said Gardiner told them at the time.
At the State Department, Future of Iraq participants also predicted widespread power outages that would almost surely short-circuit reconstruction. They recommended shipping in "minipower stations" to supplement Iraq's antiquated, overloaded and damaged electrical grid.
The group also foresaw the collapse of telecommunications. It proposed rolling out cellular "networks in a box" capable of linking several thousand users in metropolitan areas within the first weeks of occupation.
For months, the Central Command separately had sent progress reports on the war planning to the Pentagon, and for months a list of postwar issues showed up at the bottom of the memo as unresolved "open items," officials said. But Feith and his aides assured Rumsfeld that they had the planning process under control.
Bush gave Rumsfeld overall authority for the postwar plan, to maintain what he called "a unity of concept and a unity of leadership," Feith said. Despite some misgivings, State Department officials said, Secretary of State Colin Powell agreed.
"Since so many of the responsibilities were military security responsibilities, the only person who could really do that was the secretary of defense," Feith said.
If the Pentagon was to run postwar operations in Iraq, Feith needed both a mechanism and a man.
The mechanism would be the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA, which Bush would create Jan. 20 by presidential decree. The man would be Jay Garner.
In the aftermath of the 1991 war, then-Maj. Gen. Garner had distinguished himself pacifying northern Iraq. He had opened the way for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds to peacefully return home.
Garner recalled the "vertical stovepipe" he inherited:
"Defense had done a lot of planning. State had done a lot of planning. USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) had done an awful lot of planning. Agriculture had done planning. Treasury had done an awful lot of planning. Justice Department had done an awful lot of planning.
"Each one of them did their own planning, and they did it — this isn't a criticism of them, it's just the way you start things — they did it with the perspective of their agency."
For example, the Central Command had drawn up detailed lists of targets the military should avoid in order to facilitate reconstruction. But it did so initially with no input from other agencies that had a more precise understanding of the vulnerabilities of Iraq's obsolescent infrastructure.
"What needed to happen was the horizontal integration of these plans. And there had been no mechanism to horizontally integrate them until Secretary Rumsfeld thought of putting ORHA together," Garner said.
By all accounts, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith closely managed ORHA from the start, and were directly involved in choosing many of its top civilian officials.
The Defense Department blocked Warrick, creator of the Future of Iraq project, from joining ORHA. One reason, State Department officials said, was that he wanted a wide range of Iraqis to be included in a new government. Pentagon leaders were pushing exile leader Chalabi.
After a month spent recruiting a team that included five former generals and eight current or retired ambassadors, Garner convened his first interagency meeting, the so-called rock drill, in February.
In attendance were assistant secretaries from Defense, State and other departments. U.S. and British generals from Task Force Four flew in from Kuwait. U.N. diplomacy dominated the headlines that weekend. At Garner's meeting, the painful truth about postwar Iraq was uncoiling.
Said a senior Defense Department official: "Rebuilding local governance, immediate replacement of the security apparatus — these things were never adequately discussed." The attitude was, "We'll go with what we've got and take care of the rest when we get there."
On the crucial issue of security, a senior official on Garner's team said, "The civilians and the military never got on the same page."
When the rock drill broke up on Saturday, Feb. 22, war was just 26 days away. But two intervening events would add greatly to the postwar burden — a result of costly miscalculations on how long-standing U.S. allies would respond.
On March 1, Turkey upended Washington's battle plan by denying the use of Turkish land as a staging area for a northern front. That allowed an escape route for Saddam sympathizers to their traditional strongholds north of Baghdad, where the resistance since the war has been the worst.
And on March 5, France, Russia and Germany pledged to oppose a U.N. resolution supporting the war, thwarting the administration's diplomatic plans.
Until then, U.S. strategy was still based on winning U.N. endorsement to act against Iraq — so the international community would play a larger role both during and after the war.
Only days before the assault began, the United States realized it would have only a few allies to help it run postwar Iraq.
Garner and a small staff arrived in Baghdad on April 21, followed in the next few days by 300 more in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans.
Garner said he was shocked by what they found.
In the days after the Army's capture of the palatial icons of Saddam's rule, and while Garner and his team were idling in Kuwait, the only crowds in Baghdad were the swarms of Iraqis who dissected almost every government-ministry building desk by desk, wire by wire and pipe by pipe. "Our planning process was that we needed to immediately (restore) the ministries, because that's the only way that you get government services back and get the country functioning again," Garner said. "But what happens is when we get there, they're not there anymore."
Mirror images across Baghdad and much of Iraq formed a klepto-kaleidoscope: Mobs of men and boys ran up and down the stairwells of ministries, hauling off desks, chairs, copiers, fax machines, telephones and carpets. GIs stood next to their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and watched them strip the buildings clean.
Troop commanders said they had never been told by their superiors that safeguarding the ministries was a top priority.
Few would expect forces to fight with one hand while stopping looters with the other. But critics say that wouldn't have been necessary if there were more troops to begin with.
Applying the same peacekeepers-to-population ratio that was used successfully in Kosovo, 500,000 troops would be needed in Iraq, said James Dobbins, the Bush administration special envoy to Afghanistan and the Clinton administration special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
There are currently about 148,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq.
"While the U.S. could take Iraq with three divisions, it couldn't hold it with three divisions," said Dobbins, now director of international security and defense policy at Rand Corp.
Feith said his planners did anticipate disorder and looting — but decided that other risks, such as oil field fires, refugee flows or famine, were more dangerous.
Garner has many defenders in the administration who say his mission was almost impossible, given the planning process that preceded him.
With restoration of Iraq's basic services seemingly stalled, and deadly attacks on U.S. forces rising, something had to give. It turned out to be Garner.
Though his replacement didn't come much earlier than Feith initially told him it would, the expectation was that Garner would have the Iraqi ministries up and running by that time.
Garner left Baghdad on June 1, three weeks after L. Paul Bremer arrived. On June 16, Wolfowitz formally dissolved the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.
As Bremer now struggles to normalize Iraq amid rising violence and the destabilizing likelihood that Saddam Hussein is still alive, Rumsfeld and other administration officials have taken to pointing out the chaos that has followed similar events in other countries, including the American Revolution.
Critics say that is all the more reason to be ready for the worst.
Despite initial problems, Feith said, progress is being made, with order returning to most of the country and a new Iraqi governing council in place.
Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.
Also contributing to this report were Los Angeles Times staff writers Richard T. Cooper, Warren Vieth, Sonni Efron, Greg Miller, Alissa J. Rubin, Esther Schrader, John Hendren, Tony Perry, David Zucchino and Laura King, and Times researchers Christopher Chandler and Robin Cochran.
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company |
