Lack of planning contributed to chaos in
Iraq BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY and WARREN P. STROBEL
Knight Ridder NewspapersWASHINGTON - The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense
Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to
prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two
months.
The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they
believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms
and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the
country's leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State
Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House
pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their
scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had
no backup plan.
Today, American forces face instability in Iraq, where they are
losing soldiers almost daily to escalating guerrilla attacks, the cost
of occupation is exploding to almost $4 billion a month and
withdrawal appears untold years away.
"There was no real planning for postwar Iraq," said a former
senior U.S. official who left government recently.
The story of the flawed postwar planning process was gathered in interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior government officials.
One senior defense official told
Knight Ridder that the failure of
Pentagon civilians to set specific
objectives - short-, medium- and long-term - for Iraq's stabilization
and reconstruction after Saddam Hussein's regime fell even left
U.S. military commanders uncertain about how many and what
kinds of troops would be needed after the war.
In contrast, years before World War II ended, American planners
plotted extraordinarily detailed blueprints for administering
postwar Germany and Japan, designing everything from rebuilt
economies to law enforcement and democratic governments.
The disenchanted U.S. officials today think the failure of the
Pentagon civilians to develop such detailed plans contributed to
the chaos in post-Saddam Iraq.
"We could have done so much better," lamented a former senior
Pentagon official, who is still a Defense Department adviser. While
most officials requested anonymity because going public could
force them out of government service, some were willing to talk on
the record.
Ultimately, however, the responsibility for ensuring that
post-Saddam planning anticipated all possible complications lay
with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Bush's national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, current and former officials
said.
The Pentagon planning group, directed by Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official,
included hard-line conservatives who had long advocated using
the American military to overthrow Saddam. Its day-to-day boss
was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice
President Dick Cheney before joining the Pentagon.
The Pentagon group insisted on doing it its way because it had a
visionary strategy that it hoped would transform Iraq into an ally
of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade
and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies. The problem was that
officials at the State Department and CIA thought the vision was
badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply
excluded their rivals from involvement.
Feith, Luti and their advisers wanted to put Ahmad Chalabi - the
controversial Iraqi exile leader of a coalition of opposition groups -
in power in Baghdad. The Pentagon planners were convinced that
Iraqis would warmly welcome the American-led coalition and that
Chalabi, who boasted of having a secret network inside and
outside the regime, and his supporters would replace Saddam and
impose order.
Feith, in a series of responses Friday to written questions, denied
that the Pentagon wanted to put Chalabi in charge.
But Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, who at the time was the
chairman of the Defense Policy Board - an influential group of
outside advisers to the Pentagon - and is close to Feith and Luti,
acknowledged in an interview that installing Chalabi was the plan.
Referring to the Chalabi scenario, Perle said: "The Department of
Defense proposed a plan that would have resulted in a substantial
number of Iraqis available to assist in the immediate postwar
period." Had it been accepted, "we'd be in much better shape
today," he said.
Perle said blame for any planning failures belonged to the State Department and other agencies that opposed the Chalabi route.
A senior administration official,
who requested anonymity, said
the Pentagon officials were
enamored of Chalabi because he
advocated normal diplomatic
relations with Israel. They
believed that would have "taken
off the board" one of the only
remaining major Arab threats to Israeli security.Moreover, Chalabi was key to containing the influence of Iran's
radical Islamic leaders in the region, because he would have
provided bases in Iraq for U.S. troops. That would complete Iran's
encirclement by American military forces around the Persian Gulf
and U.S. friends in Russia and Central Asia, he said.
But the failure to consult more widely on what to do if the Chalabi
scenario failed denied American planners the benefits of a vast
reservoir of expertise gained from peacekeeping and
reconstruction in shattered nations from Bosnia to East Timor.
As one example, the Pentagon planners ignored an
eight-month-long effort led by the State Department to prepare for
the day when Saddam's dictatorship was gone. The "Future of
Iraq" project, which involved dozens of exiled Iraqi professionals
and 17 U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, prepared strategies
for everything from drawing up a new Iraqi judicial code to
restoring the unique ecosystem of Iraq's southern marshes, which
Saddam's regime had drained.
Virtually none of the "Future of Iraq" project's work was used once
Saddam fell.
The first U.S. administrator in Iraq, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner,
wanted the Future of Iraq project director, Tom Warrick, to join his
staff in Baghdad. Warrick had begun packing his bags, but
Pentagon civilians vetoed his appointment, said one current and
one former official.
Meanwhile, postwar planning documents from the State
Department, CIA and elsewhere were "simply disappearing down
the black hole" at the Pentagon, said a former U.S. official with
long Middle East experience who recently returned from Iraq.
Archaeological experts who were worried about protecting Iraq's immense cultural treasures were rebuffed in their requests for meetings before the war. After it, Iraq's museum treasures were looted.
Responsibility for preparing for
post-Saddam Iraq lay with senior officials who supervised the
Office of Special Plans, a highly secretive group of analysts and
consultants in the Pentagon's Near East/South Asia bureau. The
office was physically isolated from the rest of the bureau.
Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who retired from the Near
East bureau on July 1, said she and her colleagues were allowed
little contact with the Office of Special Plans and often were told by
the officials who ran it to ignore the State Department's concerns
and views.
"We almost disemboweled State," Kwiatkowski said.
Senior State Department and White House officials verified her
account and cited many instances where officials from other
agencies were excluded from meetings or decisions.
The Chalabi plan, fiercely opposed by the CIA and the State
Department, ran into major problems.
President Bush, after meeting with Iraqi exiles in January, told
aides that, while he admired the Iraqi exiles, they wouldn't be
rewarded with power in Baghdad. "The future of this country … is
not going to be charted by people who sat out the sonofabitch
(Saddam) in London or Cambridge, Massachusetts," one former
senior White House official quoted Bush as saying.
After that, the White House quashed the Pentagon's plan to
create - before the war started - an Iraqi-government-in-exile that
included Chalabi.
The Chalabi scheme was dealt another major blow in February, a
month before the war started, when U.S. intelligence agencies
monitored him conferring with hard-line Islamic leaders in Tehran,
Iran, a State Department official said. About the same time, an
Iraqi Shiite militia that was based in Iran and known as the Badr
Brigade began moving into northern Iraq, setting off alarm bells in
Washington.
At the State Department, officials drafted a memo, titled "The
Perfect Storm," warning of a confluence of catastrophic
developments that would endanger the goals of the coming U.S.
invasion.
Cheney, once a strong Chalabi backer, ordered the Pentagon to
curb its support for the exiles, the official said.
Yet Chalabi continued to receive Pentagon assistance, including
backing for a 700-man paramilitary unit. The U.S. military flew
Chalabi and his men at the height of the war from the safety of
northern Iraq, which was outside Saddam's control, to an air base
outside the southern city of Nasiriyah in expectation that he would
soon take power.
Chalabi settled into a former hunting club in the fashionable
Mansour section of Baghdad. He was joined by Harold Rhode, a
top Feith aide, said the former U.S. official who recently returned
from Iraq.
But Chalabi lacked popular support - graffiti in Iraq referred to
"Ahmad the Thief" - and anti-American anger was growing over
the looting and anarchy that followed Saddam's ouster.
"It was very clear that there was an expectation that the exiles
would be the core of an Iraqi interim (governing) authority,"
retired U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney said. He was in Iraq in
April to help with postwar reconstruction.
Once Saddam's regime fell, American authorities "quickly grasped"
that Chalabi and his people couldn't take charge, Carney said.
However, the Pentagon had devised no backup plan. Numerous
officials in positions to know said that if Pentagon civilians had a
detailed plan that anticipated what could happen after Saddam
fell, it was invisible to them.
Garner's team didn't even have such basics as working cell phones
and adequate transportation. And Garner was replaced in May -
much earlier than planned - by L. Paul Bremer.
In his e-mail response to questions, Feith denied that officials in
his office were instructed to ignore the concerns of other agencies
and departments. He contended that in planning for Iraq, there
was a "robust interagency process," led by the National Security
Council staff at the White House.
Feith repeated a theme that he struck in a speech Tuesday in
Washington, when he said planners prepared for "a long list of
problems" that never happened, including destruction of oil fields,
Saddam's use of chemical and biological weapons, food shortages,
a collapse of the Iraqi currency and large-scale refugee flows.
"Instead, we are facing some of the problems brought on by our
very success in the war," he said.
Feith rejected criticisms that the Pentagon should have used more
troops to invade Iraq. That might have prevented postwar looting,
he said, but U.S. military commanders would have lost tactical
surprise by waiting for extra troops, and thus "might have had the
other terrible problems that we anticipated."
"War, like life in general, always involves trade-offs," Feith said. "It
is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be
attributed to poor planning."
Other officials, while critical of the Pentagon, say it is unfair to lay
sole blame on civilians such as Feith who are working under
Rumsfeld.
The former senior White House official said Rice and her deputy,
Stephen Hadley, never took the logical - if politically risky - step of
acknowledging that American troops would have to occupy Iraq for
years to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"You let him (Bush) go into this without a serious plan … for the
endgame," the official said. It was "staggeringly negligent on their
part."
Still, the Defense Department was in charge of day-to-day postwar
planning. And the problems were numerous, the current and
former officials said. Key allies with a huge stake in Iraq's future
were often left uninformed of the details of U.S. postwar planning.
For example, the government of Turkey, which borders Iraq to the
north and was being asked by Washington to allow 60,000
American troops to invade Iraq from its soil, peppered the U.S.
government with 51 questions about postwar plans.
The reply came in a cable Feb. 5, more than 10 pages long, from
the State Department. Largely drafted by the Pentagon, it
answered many of Ankara's queries, but on some questions,
including the structure of the postwar government in Iraq, the
cable affirmed that "no decision has been made," a senior
administration official said.
The response was "still in work, still in work … we're still working
on that," Kwiatkowski said. "Basically an empty answer."
(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Renee Schoof and
researcher Tish Wells contributed to this report.)
Mitayo Potosi
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