Monday, May 19, 2003

Looting Is Derailing Detailed U.S. Plan to Restore Iraq
Long before President Bush ordered the attack against Iraq, the White House and the Pentagon drew up a plan for rebuilding and running the country after the war that was nearly as meticulous as the battle plan.

But over the past two to three weeks, the wheels have threatened to come off their vehicle for establishing the peace.

The looting, lawlessness and violence that planners thought would mar only the first few weeks has proved more widespread and enduring than Mr. Bush and his aides expected and is threatening to undermine the American plan.

Five weeks after Baghdad fell, Mr. Bush finds himself exactly where he did not want to be: forced to impose control with a larger number of troops and to delay the start of efforts to turn power over to Iraqis.

The message that reached the White House from two recent meetings with potential Iraqi leaders, officials say, was that it would be foolish to start experimenting with democracy without making people feel secure enough to go back to work or school, and without giving them back at least the basic services they received during Saddam Hussein's brutal rule.

Senior administration officials said they had foreseen some problems, but not all. "You couldn't know how it would end," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a telephone conversation on Friday that he initiated. "When it did end, you take it as you found it and get at it, knowing the single most important thing is security."

Another senior administration official said the White House was surprised to learn how badly broken Iraq's prewar infrastructure was. "From the outside it looked like Baghdad was a city that works," the official said. "It isn't."

Mr. Bush's aides cautioned reporters before the war that even the best plans would have to be rewritten on the ground.

Those plans called for quickly returning Baghdad police officers to duty to maintain a semblance of order, and having Iraqi soldiers build roads and clear rubble. They envisioned cheering crowds and a swift restoration of electricity and other utilities. The quick establishment of a civilian Iraqi interim authority, officials said, would help demonstrate to a suspicious Arab world that America would not act as an occupier, as in Japan and Germany.

"We will in fact be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick Cheney said on March 16, three days before the war started.

But many of Baghdad's 10,000 police officers are just now trickling back. The Iraqi soldiers disappeared. No one in Washington anticipated the degree to which the chaos would undermine that central goal of presenting the United States as a liberator, senior officials said.

In fact, that instinct may have worsened the problem, senior officials said in interviews. Inside the White House, officials feared that if the looters were shot — the fastest way to send the message that the United States was intent on restoring order — the pictures on Al Jazeera would reinforce the worst images of America in the Arab world.

Within the administration, the backbiting has intensified. Some say Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general initially charged with the physical and political rebuilding of Iraq, moved too slowly.

The sense that General Garner's team got off to a slow start was reinforced when he and a small team of aides finally arrived in Baghdad in late April to discover that they had no functioning e-mail, no way for outsiders to reach them by telephone, no cars and drivers to get them around the city and no interpreters. Aides say those problems have since eased.

Moreover, General Garner clashed with his top administrator for Baghdad, Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen who has since left. "They were two very strong personalities, and they never came together as a team," said one senior official here.

But even critics of General Garner, who was replaced on May 7 by a career diplomat, L. Paul Bremer III, say he has been a victim of fierce infighting between the Pentagon and State Department over running postwar operations, and of a security environment he does not control.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/19/international/worldspecial/19POLI.html

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