It is simply inexplicable that the U.S. Government doesn’t already have a plan in place for the Iraqi occupation. Why is this being done on the fly? Didn’t anybody in the administration have the job of putting a scheme together before we launched the invasion? (And, isn’t Wolfowitz stretched just a little bit thin?)
I am hard pressed to name even one thing this administration has done without screwing it up. Gawd help us. If the occupation goes as badly as the planning for it, I pity eveyone involved. This is an embarrassment.
KUWAIT, April 2 — Along a promenade of beachside villas, several hundred American government officials — from well-worn former generals to fresh young aid workers — are working at their laptops, inventing flow charts and examining maps of Iraq in what has become Potomac on the Persian Gulf.
This is the nucleus of the Bush administration’s new Iraqi government. One of the faraway masters, in the minds of many here, is someone known fondly, or not so fondly — depending on one’s political orientation — as Wolfowitz of Arabia.
The reference, of course, is to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, who has dispatched some of his protégés here to prepare key Baghdad ministries for American management.
Mr. Wolfowitz is also passing judgment on others assigned here, making the transitory Potomac here as divisive and political as the permanent one at home, some participants say.
[…]
The overall boss of this Iraqi government-in-waiting, an operation that has been endowed with the Washington-speak title “Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance,” is retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner…
Arrayed below General Garner is a group of former army officers, former and present American ambassadors, aid bureaucrats who give themselves away by their many-pocketed khaki jackets, a smattering of State Department officials, several British officials and a cluster known as the “true believers.”[…]
Fairly predictably, State Department officials say, the Pentagon deemed the most senior State Department appointees as unsuitable for the enterprise, even though one of them, Timothy Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan, was invited to come here by Mr. Wolfowitz.
[…]
The politics of the Potomac aside, some of the officials acknowledge they have been handed complex jobs, the real complexity of which will not be known until they know how the war ends.
If there is a surrender by the Iraqi forces and Saddam Hussein is toppled, their jobs will be easier, they say. There could be a messier ending: perhaps some kind of festering war, with outbursts of urban fighting, that would make the Americans’ jobs much more precarious.
Another complexity is the role of the Iraqi exile groups that the Bush administration has been courting.
The State Department and the Pentagon hold profound differences on this question, and advocates in the administration say, a definition of the role of the exiles still awaits a decision by President Bush and his senior foreign policy advisers.
Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, has made it clear that he would not be satisfied with just an advisory position. The State Department has made clear it would prefer a diminished role for Mr. Chalabi. In recent days Mr. Chalabi has said through spokesmen that he wants the formation of a provisional government in which he would be a leading figure. In this he has backing in the Pentagon.
“The decision on the new political class in Iraq is very hot. It has yet to be made in Washington,” said one member of the Garner team here.
[…]
Many of the officials here rushed to Kuwait City in the belief they would be sent almost immediately to Baghdad. Now that the war has gone longer than they were led to expect, there is a lot of cooling of heels, and time for reading. Few of these people are Iraqi experts. But some have come armed with books and articles on the history of Iraq. The chapters on the mistakes of British rule are well underlined.
Well, gosh. What would be happening if we had already won the war under the rosy scenario? It sounds like they have absolutely no idea what they are going to do, yet.
There is no excuse for not planning this adequately before this war. They had months to work out plans for every contingency and have a team in place ready to go. Instead, they are infighting between State and Defense on this, as with everything else in Bush foreign policy.
When does this become the big story? The Pentagon and the State Department have been at each other’s throats since the beginning of Bush’s term. All the ups and downs of the past year with diplomacy and the UN and the alienation of our allies and the erratic and inconsistent lead-up to this war have been the result of the two factions of the Bush foreign policy team fighting for dominance.
Our vaunted Commander in Chief obviously cannot manage his way out of a paper bag. He has no control over his people and is drawn back and forth depending on who he talks to on a given day. His administration is incoherent because he is incoherent.
This occupation is going to be a trainwreck.