http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031124fa_fact1_b
A rather long snippet:
"In the summer of 2002, when the Administration began leaning toward an invasion of Iraq, Haass asked Erdmann to analyze twentieth-century postwar reconstructions. In fifteen single-spaced classified pagesâepic length for a State Department memoâErdmann applied the ideas in his dissertation to a series of case studies from the two world wars through more recent conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo. One of Erdmannâs fundamental conclusions was that long-term success depended on international support. In the short run, he explained to me one evening, âthe foundation of everything is security,â which partly depended on having sufficient numbers of troops. âYou donât have to look too far to see that isnât the case here. And I donât fault the people who are here. Thereâs no way any fault should be put on the kids in the 3rd I.D. or the brigade commanders. The question is, why werenât more people put in? That was the concern of my projectâwere we prepared to do what it took in the postwar phase?â
Last fall, Secretary of State Colin Powell circulated Erdmannâs memo to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. âMaybe it wasnât read,â Erdmann said.
Erdmannâs view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Departmentâs Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coÃrdinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the countryâs physical and human infrastructureâand suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.
The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeldâs battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didnât coÃrdinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feithâs team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeldâs aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. âYou got the impression in this exercise that we didnât harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,â Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. âWith the Department of Defense the first issue was âWeâve got to control this thingââso everyone else was suspect.â White was fired in April. Feithâs team, he said, âhad the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.â
-- Doug _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
