Of course had Bush LISTENED to someone that KNOWS about foriegn affairs instead of the cadre of warmongering zealots he has dictating to him.....we wouldn't be in this mess.....
State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq
October 19, 2003
By ERIC SCHMITT and JOEL BRINKLEY
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - A yearlong State Department study
predicted many of the problems that have plagued the
American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal
State Department documents and interviews with
administration and Congressional officials.
Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project
assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business
people and other experts into 17 working groups to study
topics ranging from creating a new justice system to
reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.
Their findings included a much more dire assessment of
Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many
Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so
brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might
react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding
civil society.
Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5
million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until
recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings
into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as
occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily
prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the
aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused
in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and
it recommended force to prevent the chaos.
"The period immediately after regime change might offer
these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of
killing, plunder and looting," the report warned, urging
American officials to "organize military patrols by
coalition forces in all major cities to prevent
lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key
government facilities."
Despite the scope of the project, the military office
initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it
until a major government drill for the postwar mission was
held in Washington in late February, less than a month
before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office's
deputy director.
The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State
Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a
retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's
reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to
join their team.
George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the
reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge
because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."
But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's
appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved,
State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be
interviewed for this article.
The Defense Department, which had the lead role for
planning postwar operations and reconstruction in Iraq,
denied that it had shunned the State Department planning
effort.
"It is flatly wrong to say this work was ignored," said the
Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita. "It was good work. It was
taken into account. It had some influence on people's
thinking and it was a valuable contribution."
The broad outlines of the work, called the Future of Iraq
Project, have been widely known, but new details emerged
this week after the State Department sent Congress the
project's 13 volumes of reports and supporting documents,
which several House and Senate committees had requested
weeks ago.
The documents are unclassified but labeled "official use
only," and were not intended for public distribution,
officials said. But Congressional officials from both
parties allowed The New York Times to review the volumes,
totaling more than 2,000 pages, revealing previously
unknown details behind the planning.
Administration officials say there was postwar planning at
several government agencies, but much of the work at any
one agency was largely disconnected from that at others.
In the end, the American military and civilian officials
who first entered Iraq prepared for several possible
problems: numerous fires in the oil fields, a massive
humanitarian crisis, widespread revenge attacks against
former leaders of Mr. Hussein's government and threats from
Iraq's neighbors. In fact, none of those problems occurred
to any great degree.
Officials acknowledge that the United States was not well
prepared for what did occur: chiefly widespread looting and
related security threats, even though the State Department
study predicted them.
Senior said the Pentagon squandered a chance to anticipate
more of the postwar pitfalls by not fully incorporating the
State Department information.
"Had we done more work and more of a commitment at the
front end, there would be drastically different results
now," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the
senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on
Feb. 11, Marc Grossman, the under secretary of state for
political affairs, said the working groups were "not to
have an academic discussion but to consider thoughts and
plans for what can be done immediately."
But some senior Pentagon officials, speaking on the
condition of anonymity, said that while some of the
project's work was well done, much of it was superficial
and too academic to be practical.
"It was mostly ignored," said one senior defense official.
"State has good ideas and a feel for the political
landscape, but they're bad at implementing anything.
Defense, on the other hand, is excellent at logistical
stuff, but has blinders when it comes to policy. We needed
to blend these two together."
A review of the work shows a wide range of quality and
industriousness. For example, the transitional justice
working group, made up of Iraqi judges, law professors and
legal experts, has met four times and drafted more than 600
pages of proposed reforms in the Iraqi criminal code, civil
code, nationality laws and military procedure. Other
working groups, however, met only once and produced slim
reports or none at all.
"There was a wealth of information in the working group if
someone had just collated and used it," said Nasreen
Barwari, who served on the economy working group and is now
the Iraqi minister of public works. "What they did seems to
have been a one-sided opinion."
Many of the working groups offered long-term
recommendations as well as short-term fixes to potential
problems.
The group studying defense policy and institutions expected
problems if the Iraqi Army was disbanded quickly - a step
L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American civil administrator
in Iraq, took. The working group recommended that jobs be
found for demobilized troops to avoid having them turn
against allied forces as some are believed to have done.
After special security organizations that ensured Mr.
Hussein's grip on power were abolished, the working group
recommended halving the 400,000-member military over time
and reorganizing Iraqi special forces to become
peacekeeping troops, as well as counterdrug and
counterterrorism forces. Under the plan, military
intelligence units would help American troops root out
terrorists infiltrating postwar Iraq.
"The Iraqi armed forces and the army should be rebuilt
according to the tenets and programs of democratic life,"
one working group member recommended.
The democratic principles working group wrestled with
myriad complicated issues from reinvigorating a dormant
political system to forming special tribunals for trying
war criminals to laying out principles of a new Iraqi bill
of rights.
It declared the thorny question of the relationship between
that secular state and Islamic religion one "only the
people of Iraq can decide," and avoided a recommendation on
it.
Members of this working group were divided over whether to
back a provisional government made up of Iraqi exiles or
adopt the model that ultimately was adopted, the Iraqi
Governing Council, made up of members from a broad range of
ethnic and religious backgrounds. The group presented both
options.
The transparency and anticorruption working group warned
that "actions regarding anticorruption must start
immediately; it cannot wait until the legal, legislative
and executive systems are reformed."
The economy and infrastructure working group warned of the
deep investments needed to repair Iraq's water, electrical
and sewage systems. The free media working group noted the
potential to use Iraq's television and radio capabilities
to promote the goals of a post-Hussein Iraq, an aim many
critics say the occupation has fumbled so far.
Encouraging Iraqis to emerge from three decades of
dictatorship and embrace a vibrant civil society including
labor unions, artist guilds and professional associations,
could be more difficult than anticipated, the civil society
capacity buildup working group cautioned: "The people's
main concern has become basic survival and not building
their civil society."
The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated
before the war, but they are getting a closer look now.
Many of the Iraqi ministers are graduates of the working
groups, and have brought that experience with them. Since
last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad
have received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's
13-volume work. "It's our bible coming out here," said one
senior official in Baghdad.
nytimes.com
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