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State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing
Iraq
By Eric Schmitt and Joel Brinkley
New York Times
Sunday 19 October 2003
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
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