WAYNE WHITE, the State Department Iraq analyst, was one of the government’s most knowledgeable experts on Middle Eastern affairs. He had spent nearly a quarter century working in and studying the region. Having once served as a political officer in Baghdad, he was now the deputy director for Near East and South Asia Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Just a few weeks before the president’s AEI speech, White had begun work on a major paper on the very topic Bush would address: would a U.S. invasion of Iraq actually bring democracy to the region? No one had asked White to take this assignment on. But, he recalled later, “somebody needed to sit down and do some clearheaded thinking about an issue that was emerging.”
White started by gathering polling data from Middle East countries. The numbers reinforced his worst expectations. It showed that the populations of these nations were far more anti-American and anti-Israel than were the governments in charge. The people were much more supportive of militant Islam and much less interested in such niceties as women’s rights than their rulers were. Creating democracy in these countries would be tough—especially in Iraq, given the sectarian divisions that would probably arise there. The classified report he drafted concluded that political, economic, and social problems would likely undermine stability in the region for years and severely limit the prospects for democracy. An invasion of Iraq would not change these fundamentals. Even if democracy somehow did take root in Iraq or elsewhere, White wrote, it was likely that the governments elected would be more antipathetic toward the United States and Israel and closer to militant Islamism. “Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve,” the report read, and elections could actually bolster “anti-American elements.”
White’s findings weren’t revolutionary. Other analysts outside the government had been raising similar points. But White realized this was a touchy matter. He sent a draft of his paper to other INR analysts. None had any objections. Nor did Tom Fingar, the deputy director at INR. Fingar had only one major suggestion. He wanted to change the title of the paper. White had called it “Iraq, the Middle East and Change.” Fingar suggested adding the words “No Dominoes.” The proposed title was a jab at Bush and the neoconservatives and their claim that an invasion of Iraq would create a chain reaction, spreading democracy through the region. (It was merely “serendipitous,” White later said, that the report was ready for dissemination the day after Bush’s AEI speech.) Would White mind the change in title? Fingar asked.
You’re the boss, White told him.
Normally, INR would forward this kind of report—which was supposed to reflect the official view of the State Department—to recipients throughout the government: the National Security Council, the Pentagon leadership, the CIA, the congressional intelligence committees, various Cabinet members. But White asked Fingar to restrict the “No Dominoes” report to officials within the State Department. “It was too hot,” White said. “This would leak.” It was not his aim to pick a fight with the White House.
Fingar said he had never restricted an INR report in such a manner and didn’t want to do so now. INR distributed the report throughout the intelligence community—and sent a copy to the White House.
“Usually,” White recalled, “you’d get a response on a report like this from the seventh floor of State”—where the secretary of state had his office. “In the case of this report, I got nothing.”*37
THE same day “No Dominoes” went out, on February 27, Paul Wolfowitz appeared before the House budget committee, ostensibly to discuss the Pentagon’s annual budget request (which notably didn’t include any estimates to cover the costs of an invasion in Iraq). But Wolfowitz’s main purpose that day was to douse a potential fire.
Two days earlier, while testifying before a Senate panel, General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, had said that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary for a postwar occupying force. That certainly suggested a costly and significant occupation. After running through the latest Pentagon budget numbers, Wolfowitz took a sharp swipe at Shinseki. “The notion that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq,” he said, is “wildly off the mark.” He added, “[I]t is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.”
This was quite a put-down: the civilian leaders of the Pentagon were saying they knew better than the head of the Army about how many troops it would take to manage postinvasion Iraq. The exchange was a continuation of Rumsfeld’s internal fight with the uniformed services over the size of the force needed for an invasion of Iraq. The Army had recommended up to 400,000 troops, partly because it wanted a large force immediately available to handle the postinvasion tasks. Rumsfeld, who had championed a U.S. military that could fight leaner and quicker, initially thought 75,000 or so troops would be sufficient for the invasion. Fighting over the size of the postinvasion force was just another way of fighting over the preinvasion force—a tussle that had been resolved more in Rumsfeld’s favor than the Army’s. About 200,000 troops would be sent to the region for the war.
Wolfowitz’s testimony that day offered a rare glimpse of his own rosy vision of the conflict to come. The Pentagon’s postwar “requirements,” he said, might be low because “there’s been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another.” He disputed the idea that there would be “monstrous” costs.*38 Iraq’s oil revenues, he asserted, could finance the post-war reconstruction. He maintained that the United States could expect other nations to share the financial burden of rebuilding a post-Saddam Iraq. And, he added, “based on what Iraqi-Americans told me in Detroit a week ago”—when he had attended a rally of proinvasion immigrants—“I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators and that will help us to keep requirements down.”*39
These were striking claims expressed with certitude and conviction. But in support of them Wolfowitz didn’t cite any studies or intelligence assessments. He seemed to be basing the Defense Department’s operating assumptions on what he had heard from several hundred Iraqi Americans yearning for an invasion. He was trusting his own instincts more than the views and work of generals and experts under his own command. Within the military and the intelligence community, there were officers and officials (not just Shinseki) who were attempting to sort out the postinvasion needs and challenges. Few of them shared Wolfowitz’s fanciful optimism.
THE president had made a few cursory inquiries about the plans for a post-war Iraq. But the subject wasn’t a focus of sustained, high-level attention. At a National Security Council meeting back in January in the White House Situation Room, Bush had asked General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander in charge of the invasion, about security in Iraq after Saddam’s regime was toppled. Who, he inquired, would maintain law and order? Who would keep the peace?
Franks had reassured the president. Don’t worry, he said, according to a senior NSC official present for the exchange. We’ve got that covered. The U.S. military would keep the peace. Each major Iraqi town and village, Franks explained, would have a “lord mayor”—an appointed U.S. military officer—who would be in charge of maintaining civic order and administering basic services. Lord mayor? The NSC official had no idea what Franks was talking about.
Nearly two months later, at a final prewar planning meeting on March 10, 2003, the subject was raised again—by either Bush or Rice, according to the NSC official. This time, Franks bristled. He had already explained this, Franks said. There would be a lord mayor. Neither the president nor any other senior officials pressed Franks to explain what he meant by his use of this quaint British title.
Pentagon officials actually never planned anything of the kind. Army Colonel Kevin Benson, the Third Army officer assigned by CENTCOM to draft the plans for a Phase IV (postinvasion) Iraq, later said his own documents had never incorporated anything like a lord mayor co
ncept. “I never heard anyone talk of lord mayor,” Benson remarked. “I never heard that term used.”*40
WHEN Colonel Benson saw that Wolfowitz had rudely dismissed Shinseki’s estimate, he thought to himself, What does the deputy secretary know that I don’t? Working out of Camp Doha in Kuwait, Benson had been toiling away on his Phase IV plan with his own staff and planners in Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other services.
After the war began, the conventional view would be that such plans barely existed. That was wrong, Benson said, recalling that “there was an enormous amount of planning done.” The question was, what happened to the plans? He and his team, for example, drew up a plan for Phase IV that envisioned that violence would continue after the initial defeat of Saddam’s standing army. It anticipated there would be substantial security concerns in post-Saddam Iraq. “We took all of this seriously,” Benson said—especially the issue of how many troops would be needed after the invasion. Benson and his team started with this premise: Iraq was about the size of California. “We asked how many troops Gray Davis [then the California governor] had.” They added up all the police officers, sheriff’s deputies, peace officers, corrections officers, and the like in the Golden State and discovered the number was greater than the number of American troops being sent into Iraq—and California was a stable and secure entity. So when Benson saw that Shinseki had testified that a couple hundred thousand troops would be needed after the invasion, he had thought to himself, “That Shinseki is one helluva smart guy.”
But after Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz disputed Shinseki, Benson realized there was a serious gap between his work and the view at the top. He could not see what real-life information Wolfowitz was relying on. “I was assuming that the guys in Washington must know something that I don’t know,” Benson recalled. “I never saw any intelligence that led me to the conclusion that the people in D.C. were making. I never saw intelligence that we would be met with cheering crowds and bands and people throwing flowers at us. I never saw any intelligence that would allow me to conclude it would be a cakewalk.”*41
Benson and his team weren’t the only planners within the Defense Department worrying about Phase IV. In October 2002, Lieutenant General Richard Cody, the Army deputy chief of staff for operations and plans, asked the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to do a study—fast. By the end of January 2003, the Strategic Studies Institute produced a report that noted that “ethnic, tribal and religious schisms could produce civil war or fracture the state after Saddam is deposed,” that Iraq reconstruction would require “a considerable commitment of American resources,” and that the “longer U.S. presence is maintained, the more likely violent resistance will develop.” An occupation, the report said, would last for “an extended period of time,” and the Iraqi population would be more suspicious of than grateful toward the United States.
The study noted that the most likely development would be for political parties to emerge based on ethnic, tribal, and religious identities and free elections among ethnically based political parties could actually “increase divisions rather than mitigate them.” And—worse—armed militias would likely be a problem. Terrorists could be expected to engage in horrific acts, even suicide bombings, to alienate Iraqis from the Americans. An occupier would find it “exceptionally challenging” to supply the population with the basics: electricity, water, food, security. The oil infrastructure of Iraq would not generate the revenues necessary to pay for reconstruction. Sabotage would be a “serious threat.”
The paper listed 135 postinvasion tasks that would have to be accomplished to reestablish an Iraqi state. They included securing the borders, establishing local governments, protecting religious, historical, and cultural sites, establishing a police system, restoring and maintaining power systems, operating hospitals, reorganizing the Iraqi military and security forces, and disarming militias. The paper advised against abolishing the Iraqi Army after the war. “Massive resources need to be focused on this [postoccupation] effort well before the first shot is fired,” the report declared. But the authors knew that the Pentagon hadn’t yet worked out much of this. The Defense Department had only recently established an office to handle the postwar period—the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which was headed by retired General Jay Garner. The paper’s overall conclusion was troubling: “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious.”
The War College’s Strategic Studies Institute sent a draft of the paper to the Army command staff and various field commanders in late January. It also mailed out about a thousand copies, including to members of Congress. “We heard that Central Command really liked it,” recalled a military analyst who helped draft the report. But the authors received no feedback from the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. “At that point, the Bush administration was moving rapidly to war,” the military analyst said. “Nothing would derail them, and their assumption was that it would be a lot easier than we had put it. They felt arguments that it would be hard were actually designed to cause people to rethink whether the war was worth doing in the first place. This was appalling. They were trying to rig the cost-benefit analysis. So they ended up not properly planning for the aftermath of the invasion because that might interfere with getting the war they wanted. Paul Wolfowitz’s whole reason for living was to start that war. They didn’t have to listen to us. Somewhere along the line they had decided they were smarter than the rest of us.”
IT WAS easy for the White House and the civilian leaders of the Pentagon to ignore a report from a small Army think tank. And it wasn’t too difficult to swat aside a single remark from a general. They also disregarded the work of the CIA and the State Department. In January 2003, Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer in charge of the Middle East, produced a high-level report examining the challenges the Bush administration would face in a post-Saddam Iraq.
The paper made the obvious point: turning Iraq into a state even remotely resembling a liberal democracy would be difficult. Iraq’s political culture, Pillar recalled the report as saying, was not “fertile,” and the mission would be “long, difficult and turbulent.” It noted that Iraq didn’t have a tradition of loyal opposition or the transfer of power and that a post-Saddam period would likely be marked by ethnic and religious conflict that could turn violent. The situation might explode—if the United States didn’t maintain a large enough military presence in Iraq to smother the smoldering tensions. Moreover, a debt-ridden Iraq wouldn’t be able to finance reconstruction with oil revenues.
Like the Third Army’s planners and the Army War College analysts, Pillar and the CIA experts foresaw a costly occupation that would be riddled with problems and that could go bad rather easily. It was the exact opposite of the picture the administration wanted to share with the public. Pillar sent the report to Tenet’s office. It was “bleak,” a senior CIA official later said. Still, the report was forwarded to the White House and the Pentagon. Did the report register? Years later, Pillar recalled that he did receive a response from an administration official he wouldn’t identify: “You guys just don’t see the possibilities. You’re too negative.”
The White House and the Pentagon shoved aside the work of the State Department’s Future of Iraq project, as well. In the spring of 2002, Thomas Warrick, a longtime State Department official, had set up seventeen working groups, full of Iraqi exiles (lawyers, engineers, academics, and businesspeople), to consider how to remake a post-Saddam Iraq: how to reorganize the military and police, how to create a new legal system, how to restructure the economy. The $5 million project predicted postinvasion “plunder and looting” and said that it would be necessary to “organize military patrols…in all major cities to prevent lawlessness.” It warned that Iraq’s electrical and water systems would be in need of extensive repairs and reconstruction. It produced thirteen volumes that included wide-ranging recommendations.
The Pent
agon wasn’t interested. One reason was Ahmad Chalabi. His champions at the Defense Department had contemplated forming a government in exile led by Chalabi, which could be put into place quickly following the invasion. The State Department, still suspicious of Chalabi, wasn’t in favor of that. Warrick refused to let the Future of Iraq project become a game plan for a Chalabi coronation, and he made his views known. Years after the invasion, David Phillips, a conflict prevention expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked on the Future of Iraq project, would describe how bitter squabbling between the Pentagon and Warrick had sabotaged the planning effort. After Warrick had the temerity to criticize the Pentagon’s prewar planning, officials in charge of ORHA were ordered to stop working with him, according to Phillips. Rumsfeld rejected a request by General Garner, the ORHA chief, to hire thirty-two State Department experts who had been involved in the project. Some of the experts were “blacklisted” because they didn’t support Chalabi, Phillips wrote in his book Losing Iraq. “They were victims of the ideological rivalry that caused a virtual collapse of interagency process,” Phillips noted. “By February 2003, State and Defense officials were barely on speaking terms.”
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