Blind Ambition

On Jan. 20, 2003, the U.N. Security Council was in the final throes of a dispute about whether to force Saddam Hussein to comply with its resolutions regarding Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 24. It established the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and gave the Defense Department responsibility for rebuilding and administering Iraq in the event of a U.S.-led invasion. Bush's order created an entirely new and untested bureaucracy to manage a, perhaps the, key strategic initiative of his administration-establishing a stable and democratic Iraq. Exactly two months later, U.S. and coalition troops launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Now, a year and a half after the directive was signed, the United States and its coalition partners have handed administrative authority for the country to an interim government, composed largely of Iraqi expatriates who returned after the invasion forced Hussein's Baathist Party regime from power. But Iraq's future appears in many ways less certain than it did in May 2003, when Bush declared an end to major combat. Attacks on the country's vulnerable infrastructure undoubtedly will continue, though coalition forces will support security and reconstruction programs. Insurgents control portions of cities and transportation routes. Iraqi leaders, police and security officials working with coalition forces increasingly are the targets of assassination. Many Iraqis worry that the United States soon will cut its losses and pull out, leaving the country to descend into civil war-a concern that has reduced support for the coalition, officials say.

It didn't have to be this way. Bureaucratic snafus and poor judgment on the part of key Pentagon officials planning the invasion and postwar administration led directly to the precarious situation today, according to people involved in executing the mission. With Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld determined to transform the military into a leaner, faster force, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz determined to transform Iraq into a democratic state, military officials were forced to take greater risks with fewer troops for higher stakes. By deploying too few ground troops to impose postwar order-a problem foreseen by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki but publicly dismissed by Wolfowitz-the Pentagon created enormous problems for reconstruction. What's more, too few resources were devoted too slowly to rebuilding. Action in Iraq was hamstrung by Pentagon officials who insisted on making key decisions from Washington, sometimes with little input from those in Baghdad.

"It's pretty clear that the transition itself isn't going to solve the security problem," says James Dobbins, President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan in 2001. Dobbins, who supervised postwar relief and reconstruction in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo during the Clinton administration, believes that putting the Pentagon in charge of reconstruction was a mistake. "Rather than use the structures that had done our nation-building for the last decade, we created a completely new structure," Dobbins says. "We transferred responsibilities from State and the Agency for International Development to the Department of Defense for things the Department of Defense had never been responsible for. That imposed another very substantial burden in terms of creating a whole new bureaucracy to do things for which there already existed bureaucracies."

A Mess Foretold

By any measure, two months is not a long time to prepare for the massive aid effort that was required after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. By comparison, the United States began planning for the administration of Germany following World War II years before entering the war. In many ways, rebuilding Iraq, with its cultural and ethnic divisions, neglected infrastructure and brutally repressive history, is more complex and more challenging.

Col. Paul Hughes understood those challenges well. In November 2002, Hughes ran a workshop, "Iraq: Looking Beyond Saddam's Rule," for the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington. More than 70 specialists from government, academia and nongovernmental organizations used their expertise in the Middle East and nation-building to make dozens of recommendations for addressing the security, humanitarian, economic and political aftermath of an invasion of Iraq. They anticipated many of today's problems.

Hughes is a longtime strategist with years of experience on the Army staff and with the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He served in the first Gulf War and was not entirely surprised when he received a call on Jan. 24, four days after Bush created ORHA, from its new director, retired Army Gen. Jay Garner. Before he retired, Garner had managed the successful relief mission for Iraqi Kurds in 1991, following the first Gulf war. In mid-January, Rumsfeld had asked Garner to run ORHA. Garner agreed, and took a leave of absence from defense contractor SY Coleman, where he was president. Hughes didn't know Garner, but Garner had heard about the workshop and wanted Hughes to lead ORHA's Office of Strategic Policy.

"First, we needed a vision, and Gen. Garner provided that," Hughes says. The vision was to get to Baghdad as soon as the smoke cleared from combat, and take over the day-to-day civil administration of the city. "That's predicated on the understanding that . . . as Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq," Hughes says. Saddam operated a centralized government, using ministries in Baghdad to reward and punish towns and tribes by bestowing or withholding health care, education and economic benefits. "We wanted to take over the ministries, remove the senior Baathists. We intended to keep everybody else in place as much as we could, and have them continue functioning under the guidance of what we called senior ministry advisers," Hughes says. The advisers would be assisted by technocrats, who were Iraqi expatriates organized by Wolfowitz through the Iraqi Reconstruction Development Council.

"It sounded great on paper, but trying to pull this team together was a lot more difficult," Hughes recalls. ORHA relied on experts from coalition partners and U.S. government agencies to staff the advisory teams. Departments had to absorb the costs of providing senior people, in many cases ambassadors and Senior Executive Service members. Garner, in an interview in February, said he worried that he would get a C-level team, given the burden on agencies. "I couldn't have been further from the truth. I got A+++ people," he said.

Those senior officials and the staff they brought provided the bulk of ORHA. The plan was to rely on contractors and reconstituted Iraqi security forces to do much of the heavy lifting of reconstruction. The only executive branch agency that did not provide requested support to ORHA for the advisory teams by the time ORHA deployed to the Middle East was Defense. Eventually, that support would come, but the absence of a Defense advisory team to work with the Iraqi Ministry of Defense would have far-reaching consequences.

'You Don't Screw It Up'

Before the smoke cleared in Baghdad, problems were evident to ORHA. The military, stretched thin and still engaged in combat operations, didn't have enough forces to support ORHA in getting to Baghdad and setting up shop quickly. In addition, the unchecked looting that began before combat had even ended went far beyond anything anyone in the Pentagon or ORHA had anticipated. "The looting didn't surprise us," Garner says. He had dealt with looting in the north in 1991, when Kurds, facing winter in the mountains without power, looted buildings, removing anything they could burn for fuel-doorjambs, window frames, furniture. But what went on in Baghdad was different, Garner says: "They stole everything. They stripped the wiring out of walls, they took the plumbing and they torched the buildings." By the time Garner and his advisory teams got to Baghdad, 17 of 20 ministry buildings ORHA had planned to use had been destroyed.

Also laid waste were civilian communications. "Literally, there was no way we could communicate on the civilian side, other than with Thuraya [satellite] telephones," of which the Iraqis had few, says Garner. ORHA issued 1,000 phones to Iraqis while trying to establish cellular communications. "The problem with a Thuraya telephone is number one, you've got to be outside [to use it]. The person you're calling has to be outside." With temperatures around 100 degrees, calls had to be made and received at prearranged times-tough to manage without another means of communication.

What's more, with ministry buildings destroyed, Iraqis didn't return to work. "We spent the first weeks walking there with 20 teams, literally walking around the streets of Baghdad asking, 'Do you know anybody who's in the Ministry of Health?' " Garner recalls. After several days, ORHA put together the nucleus of Iraqi ministries and set up shop at the Baghdad Convention Center. It was a far cry from what planners had envisioned, and precious ground was lost daily as ordinary Iraqis were left in the dark, literally and figuratively.

Because the Defense Department had failed to send a team with ORHA, the responsibility of working with the Iraqi Defense Ministry fell to Hughes. He had two contractors supporting him: Washington-based RONCO Consulting Corp. was defining a plan for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), a complex process of reforming a derelict military for a democratic society. Alexandria, Va.-based Military Professionals Resources Inc. did work related to Iraqi security services.

ORHA officials intended to form captured Iraqi troops into units to clear rubble off the streets, repair bridges and other work in support of the reconstruction, and then cycle those units through the DDR process. "It takes an enormous amount of work to do DDR correctly, and it's an expensive proposition," says Hughes. "You don't screw it up. If you screw it up at the beginning of the DDR process, then the process loses credibility and nobody believes in it, so they don't [participate].

"RONCO did a hell of a fine job [planning the DDR process]," Hughes says, but he could not get anyone to make a decision to execute the plan. "Others back in D.C. were deluding themselves into the thought that the Iraqi army self-demobilized. They did not self-demobilize. They left their positions and did what we told them to do through our leaflet drops: 'Go home, Saddam is not worth dying for,' etc."

In early May, a battalion commander from the Army's 101st Airborne Division tracked down Hughes to ask him to talk to a group of former Iraqi military leaders who had formed an ad hoc committee to work with coalition authorities. "Normally, I would have given that to the Ministry of Defense advisory team, but there wasn't one," Hughes says. So he met with the officers, who wanted to receive the emergency payments that coalition authorities had then begun making to employees from other ministries to tide them over until they could resume working. The money came from seized Iraqi assets. The officers, aware that Baghdad would eventually fall to coalition forces, had been planning for some time how they would make their own transition to the side of the victors. At great personal peril, they had made lists of Defense Ministry employees and had confiscated documents from the ministry to turn over to coalition forces.

"This wasn't a negotiation," says Hughes. "This was me telling them: 'This is what you're going to do.' I wanted lists of names. I wanted locations, addresses, inventory lists. I wanted to know about POWs, Iraqis that we were looking for. I had agency people working with me on this whole thing. It turned out to be a substantial effort, and we were making a great deal of progress." After every meeting, Hughes reported to Walter Slocomb, who was back at the Pentagon and charged with supporting ORHA. Hughes felt Slocomb's presence was badly needed in Baghdad, but he and his team would not arrive for weeks. In exchange for information, the coalition was preparing to make the emergency payments. Hughes worked out the nuts and bolts with ORHA's legal staff. Then in late May, he returned home briefly to see his daughter graduate from college.

During that short leave, he picked up a copy of The Washington Post and discovered that Ambassador Paul Bremer, who just days earlier had replaced Garner in leading reconstruction, had abolished the Iraqi military and decided not to make payments to former troops. Hughes flew to Kuwait and got in a convoy heading to Baghdad, in the meantime meeting with the first member of Slocomb's team to arrive in theater. "Myself and an AID official who had just a ton of experience doing DDR pulled [Slocomb's aide] aside and said basically, 'You are really screwing this up if you don't get back to your boss and tell him this needs to happen,'" Hughes remembers. Eventually, Slocomb agreed to make the payments, but the coalition had lost credibility and precious time.

"One of the cardinal sins in combat is to lose contact with the enemy. We had no knowledge about what they were doing. And these are trained soldiers. Some of them were not trained very well, but nonetheless, they all had access to arms and people who would lead them," Hughes says. He, Garner and many others believe that disbanding the military before it could be fully accounted for, and key parts of it rehabilitated, was a tactical miscalculation with strategic consequences. The subsequent insurgency has been supported in part by disaffected former Iraqi troops.

'Kids' in the Green Zone

Hughes spent months in Iraq, working first with ORHA and then with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which subsumed and replaced ORHA in June 2003. Now back at the National Defense University, Hughes was involved in planning for the U.S. mission in Iraq. While he is guardedly optimistic about Iraq's future, he remains frustrated by what he and others perceive as the many missed opportunities for putting Iraq on more stable footing.

"ORHA had a great deal of responsibility and very few resources and literally no field authority to make decisions. It was 'Mother, may I?' back to DoD every day," Hughes says. With the transition to the CPA, reconstruction received an influx of personnel and funds, but also new layers of bureaucracy. Many of the new arrivals at the increasingly heavily fortified CPA headquarters in Baghdad, known as the Green Zone, were very young, with little or no experience. Some ORHA officials referred to them as the Young Republicans, because many were understood to have been hired because of their involvement in conservative causes.

Says one retired military officer who spent much of the past year in Iraq as a CPA contractor helping develop Iraqi security forces, "Nobody [in the U.S. administration] was held accountable for decisions they made. While a lot more good things are happening there than most people [outside Iraq] realize, much of it is in spite of our being there." He grew weary of having to seek approval from "the kids" in the finance office to expend much-needed resources for functions he considered vital.

The retired officer, who spoke off the record because he still is working in Iraq, was raised in the Middle East and has extensive experience in the region. He traveled throughout Iraq "in a beat-up car with a driver who looked like a founding member of al Qaeda." What he found most disturbing was an alarming lack of experience among some of those working at CPA headquarters. "You had people, some in senior positions, making life and death decisions about a country in which they lived only nominally. If you're in the Green Zone, you're not in the real Iraq. At some point it dawned on me that some of these people had never been out of the Green Zone, except to travel in an armored convoy from the airport. They had good intentions, but they had no idea what they were doing or the consequences of their decisions, or, in some cases, their failure to make decisions."

The deteriorating security situation in Iraq has created a Catch-22 for reconstruction officials: As security worsens, reconstruction is hampered, and more Iraqis grow disaffected and inclined to support the insurgency, further worsening security. Since November, there have been more than 130 attacks on Iraq's oil facilities alone. CPA officials report that insurgents have caused billions of dollars in damage and lost revenue, and that attacks on electrical infrastructure have resulted in losses of power nationwide averaging four hours per day.

If democracy sometimes seems messy to Americans (recall the 2000 presidential election), who have had centuries of practice, then it should not be surprising that building a democracy from scratch in Iraq, a decaying nation for decades under a brutal despot, is proving to be chaotic.

At a May 30 press briefing in Baghdad, an Iraqi reporter asked CPA spokesman Maj. Gen. Mark Kimmitt what assurance he could offer the Iraqi people regarding the country's future and its transition to democracy. "We can set the foundation for Iraq to move forward, but it will be the people of Iraq that really take this country forward as a free and sovereign country. . . . The future will be what the future is. We have no crystal balls."