The Assassins' Gate (19 page)

Major Taylor got the impression that Franks and his planners at Central Command didn't even think of the postwar as their responsibility. “The amount of pressure we would get from Centcom on Phase IV wasn't enough, frankly. The attitude was: ‘Don't worry about that—that's ORHA. ORHA will take care of that.' But what is ORHA?”

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ON JANUARY
20, 2003, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24. He signed it without hearing the strenuous objections of his State Department, and yet it would prove to be one of the fateful decisions of the Iraq War. NSPD 24—drafted at the Office of Special Plans—gave control over postwar Iraq to the Department of Defense, and it established a unit within the Pentagon that would administer Iraq immediately after the fall of the regime. The unit was called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

In the history of American bureaucracy, ORHA was a new kind of organization. It drew its personnel from various agencies of the government, including the Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, and Commerce, and from among private citizens. It was also “expeditionary”—the team would travel to the region, and eventually to Iraq after the war. For an indeterminate period of time it would function as the administration of Iraq but under the operational command of the ground force, ultimately reporting to Rumsfeld.

To lead ORHA, Rumsfeld and Feith chose a retired lieutenant general named Jay Garner. Given the Pentagon's agenda, Garner was a logical choice. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, he had run Operation Provide Comfort, the first humanitarian intervention of the post–Cold War era, which saved thousands of Kurdish lives in the snowy mountains along the Turkish border. Since his retirement, he had also been a successful Crystal City defense contractor, a member of Rumsfeld's commission on missile defense in the late nineties, and a favorite of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, the group that had sponsored the writing of the “Clean Break” strategy paper. So from Defense's point of view Garner had the right experience and was connected to the right people. “He'll be my man in Iraq,” Rumsfeld told Franks.

Garner was from Florida, short and compact, a laid-back, shirtsleeves kind of guy who knew everyone's name and insisted on being called Jay. He led by instinct, preferring what one of his subordinates called “line-of-sight tasking”: An idea would pop into his head and he would give it to the first person he saw. He surrounded himself with a tight group of other retired senior military, some of whom were also his fishing buddies. They called one another “bubba”; others called them the “Space Cowboys,” after the Clint Eastwood movie about a group of astronauts brought out of retirement for one last mission.

If one thought of postwar Iraq as a limited humanitarian operation, as opposed to an open-ended political-military undertaking more vast and complex than anything the United States government had attempted since the end of World War II, Garner had the right stuff. He was not a sophisticated thinker; he knew little about the region beyond his experience with the Kurds. While military and civilian officials were learning from the messy aftermaths of the interventions of the late 1990s, he was earning money in the private sector. It made sense for an agency that had just been granted postwar control over a country in which it had no intention of doing serious political and economic reconstruction to appoint a man like Garner to oversee it.

He had seven weeks to get ready. “That's what it takes to get a computer connection at the Pentagon,” a Defense Department official said.

In early February, ORHA moved into office space on the fourth floor of the Pentagon's B ring. This put it one floor below the Office of Special Plans, yet between these two postwar planning agencies within the Pentagon there was hardly any communications traffic at all. “OSP had as little to do with us as possible,” said Army Colonel Paul Hughes, Garner's chief of planning. “It was a pain in the ass just to get them to open the door up there.” One day, Abe Shulsky and Michael Rubin brought down a PowerPoint slide that sketched in the most general terms Iraq's future governing structures. “That's all the interest they took in ORHA,” Hughes said. When Hughes suggested to Garner that they draft a political-military plan—an exhaustive document of the kind detailed in Clinton's defunct PDD 56, which would have empowered ORHA to establish its assumptions, mission, objectives, priorities, and end state, then submit the whole thing to the other departments for approval—Feith stopped the idea cold. This was way above ORHA's pay grade. There would be no political-military plan, no detailed documents at all. Everything important remained unwritten.

Garner broke his operation down into three “pillars”: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. His experience in northern Iraq led him to focus on the most urgent business, the potential for a humanitarian disaster: displaced populations, starvation, outbreaks of disease, large numbers of prisoners of war, and above all, chemical weapons attacks. The UN was warning of the possibility of half a million deaths. And if any of these nightmares had come to pass, outsiders would perhaps now know all about ORHA's thorough preparations for them.

On February 21 and 22, the hundred or so officials of ORHA gathered at the National Defense University in Washington to go over their plans. In ORHA's military parlance, Garner called it a “rock drill”—a vetting of everything done and known to date. The rock drill struck some participants as ominous.

“I got the sense that the humanitarian stuff was pretty well in place, but the rest of it was flying blind here,” one of them later said. “A lot of it was after hearing from Jay Garner: ‘We don't have any resources to do this and we've got a plan and the plan's going to cost three billion dollars—we have thirty-seven thousand.' Or: ‘Now we're working on building up the civilian administration, that's our job—all we've really thought about is oil.'” The danger of looting was discussed, but the planning officers sent over from Centcom had been instructed not to respond to such “postconflict” issues, in part because the invasion force lacked enough troops to address them. Plans for running the Iraqi ministries were rudimentary—ORHA had almost no information at all. The chief of the civil administration team had changed twice: David Kay, who would later lead the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, replaced the first leader for two days and then quit without telling Garner why. He was replaced, at Douglas Feith's insistence, by Feith's former law partner, Michael Mobbs, who had written the Defense Department's legal policy that exempted prisoners at Guantánamo from the Geneva Conventions and declared certain American citizens to be enemy combatants without constitutional rights. Mobbs, a political appointee, made the decision to award Halliburton, Cheney's old company, a secret, seven-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to restore Iraqi oil fields after clearing it with Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Until Kay quit, oil was supposed to be Mobbs's only responsibility in ORHA. He was a reticent man—everyone thought him nice enough—but he was a Feith guy with absolutely no relevant experience for the task ahead in Baghdad. One officer on Garner's staff concluded that Mobbs couldn't have led a platoon. He joined ORHA just before the rock drill and then immediately afterward flew to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet Chalabi and the rest of the opposition, essentially abandoning his duties before he ever assumed them. In the end, civil administration would turn out to be the pillar that mattered most.

During the rock drill, a professor from the Marine Corps' School of Advanced Warfighting named Gordon W. Rudd, who had been detailed to Garner's team as a historian, noticed a man sitting four rows below him in the auditorium at NDU. The man kept interjecting comments during other people's presentations. “At first he annoyed me,” Rudd said. “Then I realized he was better informed than we were. He had worked the topics, while the guy on stage was a rookie.” The man “seemed frustrated that he had more than anyone else but he wasn't in charge.”

It was Tom Warrick, the prickly coordinator of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, and his frustrations had just begun. Garner was so impressed with him at the rock drill that he asked Warrick on the spot to join ORHA and go to Iraq. About a week later, in early March, after Warrick had moved his files from the State Department over to a desk at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld pulled Garner aside at the end of a meeting in the secretary's office. Shuffling through some papers on his desk, Rumsfeld picked one up, glanced at it, and said, “Jay, do you have two people in your organization named Warrick and O'Sullivan?” Meghan O'Sullivan was a thirty-three-year-old sanctions specialist in the State Department's policy planning office. “I've got to ask you to take them off the team.” When Garner started to object that they were too valuable to lose, Rumsfeld cut him off. “I've gotten this from such a high level I can't turn it down.” Later, Garner learned that the order had come from Cheney, who despised Warrick and disliked some things that O'Sullivan—a protégée of the ideologically moderate Richard Haass, and therefore suspect—had written.

Garner assured Warrick and O'Sullivan that he would get them back onto ORHA. He tried to go through Hadley, Rice's deputy, but Hadley turned him down: “Too hard.” Colin Powell was livid on behalf of the two employees from his department, and he protested to the White House and the Pentagon, confiding to Garner, “I told Rumsfeld, ‘I can take prisoners, too.' What I should have done was taken everybody from the State Department off your team, but that wouldn't have served any purpose. We want you to be successful.” The impasse embodied Powell's dilemma over the entire war, in which he almost always ended up the team player on the losing end. Garner continued to plead with Rumsfeld, and just a few days before deployment to Kuwait, Rumsfeld told him, “Take the female back. Nobody'll know that.” Meghan O'Sullivan was allowed to return to ORHA.

Tom Warrick, who had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any American official, became a casualty of the interagency war and didn't get to Baghdad for a year. The Pentagon held up for weeks the appointments of other senior State Department officials of questionable ideology and long experience in the Middle East—not openly, but simply by failing to clear them. “We underestimated who we were playing with,” said Ambassador Barbara Bodine, an Arabist in the foreign service who joined ORHA in early March. “It took a while to realize they were playing a different game with different rules, and we were set up to lose.” The reports of the Future of Iraq Project were archived. Months later, in Baghdad, I met an Iraqi-American lawyer named Sermid al-Sarraf, who had served on the transitional justice working group. He was carrying a copy of its 250-page report, trying to interest occupation officials. No one seemed to have seen it.

The Pentagon even replaced the State Department's team of Iraqi exiles with its own, absorbing some from the project, excluding others, and recruiting new ones from a group that was invited to hear Wolfowitz speak in Dearborn, Michigan, in late February. Tom Warrick had been cultivating a relationship with the Iraqis in Michigan for at least a year, but he was pointedly not invited to the meeting with Wolfowitz. Warrick warned “his” Iraqis not to work with the Pentagon, helping to seal his own fate. The exiles were assembled under Wolfowitz's supervision as the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council and set up in cubicles spread out across two floors of an office building near the Pentagon, behind tight security. Signs on the cubicles said “Ministry of Defense,” “Ministry of Interior.” They had a little more than a month to organize the civil infrastructure of a transitional government in Baghdad. The group included a number of competent Iraqis, many of whom would go on to work with the occupation. But they were tasked to reinvent the wheel.

Barbara Bodine had originally been asked by Richard Armitage to join ORHA as the head of civil administration. By the time she reached the Pentagon, Feith had already installed Mobbs in that position; barely two weeks before deployment, Bodine was given the open slot of administrator for Baghdad and central Iraq. When she and Wolfowitz sat down with a map of Iraq to determine which provinces would come under the central region, Wolfowitz began musing about redrawing the provincial boundaries altogether. It was as if Iraq were a blank slate, to be remade in the image of its liberators. Wolfowitz was unconsciously slipping into the role that he always insisted the administration didn't want—that of an arrogant colonial power. He could imagine Iraqi suffering, and he could imagine Iraqi potential, but he couldn't imagine Iraqi resentment. Bodine wondered if a man as intelligent as Paul Wolfowitz might not have heard of Sykes-Picot, the secret 1916 agreement that had divided up the Ottoman Empire into British and French zones of control. She suggested that for a Western power to redraw Iraq's lines once again wouldn't be a good idea. “Look at the road network,” she told Wolfowitz. “This is the pattern that has evolved over centuries. This is how the Iraqis see themselves.”

If Wolfowitz was edging toward grandiosity on the eve of war, his boss remained indifferent to the point of negligence. When Bodine briefed Rumsfeld on the administration of Iraq after the fall of the regime, she emphasized the need to pay civil servants immediately in order to head off chaos or resistance. Rumsfeld saw no hurry—the Iraqis could wait a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months. More important was the fact that American taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill. As for the possibility of disorder in the cities, the secretary of defense suggested that this could be used to persuade the countries of old Europe to chip in troops.

By mid-February, it was becoming clear to people paying attention that the administration wasn't remotely prepared for dealing with postwar Iraq. A few of those people were in Congress. On February 11, Feith and his counterpart at State, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Marc Grossman, appeared at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and tried to present a united front. Their testimony reads like a pair of schoolboys trying to fake their way through a teacher's questions about a joint homework project they had been cobbling together and fighting about fifteen minutes before class. “There was no unanimity,” a senior State Department official later said. “Whenever Marc goes to testify it's to show that the State Department can show up. We need someone with staying power and the ability not to conflict too drastically with the fellow on your right.” Grossman was scrambling to make the teacher happy; the fellow on his right was trying to outsmart the teacher. Under exasperated prodding by Senators Joseph Biden of Delaware and Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, Grossman put a two-year figure on a strong American overseer role in Iraq, outlined a three-stage process to Iraqi self-rule, and left most of the details to future briefings that never happened. As for Feith, whose Office of Special Plans had been in charge of postwar planning since the previous September, the uncertainties of war put the whole subject in the realm of the unknowable. His answers took on the gnomic quality of a Zen master's sayings: Iraq will belong to the Iraqis. America has a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. We will stay as long as it takes but not a day longer.