By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Saddam Hussein And Kuwait

As we have seen in our just published four part series “A Concise History from Cold War to WWIII,” by January 2003, the Bush Administration had eliminated any serious threat from Iraqi WMD. It had the strong support of the United Nations and international community for its tough nonproliferation policy and was coming off a major success in coercive diplomacy with regard to Iraq. A strategist might then have used this international support and the credibility that came from a demonstrated willingness to use force to face down North Korea, which had just announced its withdrawal from the NPT. Bush, however, did not think strategically about WMD. He had already decided on war with Iraq and therefore let North Korea proceed with the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

President Bush simply asserted that Iraq was integral to the war on terror. He had no basis for his claim before the war, but he turned out to be prematurely correct. As a result of the American invasion, Sunni fundamentalist terrorists have flooded into Iraq. The Sunni Arab center of Iraq has become that Afghanistan was during the Taliban-an inaccessible region dominated by shadowy figures that now host foreign terrorists linked to al-Qaeda. By staging spectacular attacks, the terrorists have given al-Qaeda new strength and have helped generate thousands of new recruits. The foreign terrorists have done real damage to the prospect for a successful outcome in Iraq. In 2003, they blew up the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN. representative in Iraq and a diplomat so accomplished that he was at the top of everyone's list to be the next UN. Secretary general, and driving the United Nations out of Iraq. This deprived the inexperienced, and sometimes amateurish, American occupation authorities of a wealth of relevant expertise and experience.

From the 2003 killing of Shiite cleric Bakr aI-Hakim to the destruction of the Askariya shrine in 2006, foreign terrorists have helped spark civil war. By creating a climate of fear, they have cost the United States billions in additional security costs beyond what was budgeted for reconstruction, and greatly diminished the effectiveness of these expenditures. If the Americans withdraw while Iraq is still unstable, al-Qaeda can not only claim victory but will have, in Iraq's Sunni heartland, a secure territorial base to replace the one lost in Afghanistan in 2001.

In fairness to the Bush Administration, not all of this was foreseeable before the war. What was clear, however, was that Iraq was not a factor in the war on terror. It was predictable, and predicted, that the war would result in the collapse of Iraqi institutions, and that, unless the US. provided security, the result would be chaos. Chaos, as the Administration knew well, is the swamp in which terrorists breed. But the Administration made no plans to provide security in post-Saddam Iraq.

Democracy provided the third rationale for war. By itself, a democratic Iraq was a desirable objective but hardly one that could justify a major war. The war's architects assumed that democracy in Iraq would produce a domino effect that would bring down authoritarian regimes in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. If a democratic Iraq were to trigger a democratic revolution in the Middle East, this could justify the sacrifice and expense entailed in the Iraq War. A democratic Arab world might become an ally in the war on terror rather than a principal breeding ground for terrorists. A democratic Iran might be persuaded to give up its nuclear program, but even if it didn't, a proWestern nuclear Iran would pose much less of a security threat than nuclear weapons in the hands of anti-American clerics. Finally, in a pro- Western democratic Middle East, one could imagine-and many of the war's architects did imagine-a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab countries.

For the Iraq War to fit into a larger Middle East democracy strategy, three conditions would have had to be met in sequence: first, Iraq would have to democratize successfully; second, democracy in Iraq would have to trigger democratic change in other Middle Eastern countries; and third, democratic governments in the Middle East would have to behave in a way that is more in the U.S. interest than their autocratic predecessors were. The Bush Administration simply assumed that each of the steps would occur. It did no planning that might have increased the chances of a successful democratic transition in Iraq, nor did it examine the underlying conditions in Iraq to see if it was even possible to build the united democratic state that other Middle East countries would wish to emulate. Because all Administration thinking about Iraq was based on the most optimistic scenarios, the Administration never considered the possible impact of failure in Iraq. How would other Arab countries view American-led democracybuilding in Iraq that resulted in sectarian civil war, the secession of part of the country, and a de facto Iranian takeover of much of the rest?

Even if Iraq had become the pro-Western democracy that the Administration desired, there was no empirical basis for believing it would have had a positive spillover effect. Of course, this was an untestable proposition. What one can say is that elections held in the Middle East since the Iraq War have not produced the results hoped for by the Bush Administration. In Iran, voters replaced moderate re formist President Mohammad Khatami in 2005 with archconservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has publicly doubted that the Holocaust took place, advocated Israel's destruction, and pushed forward aggressively with Iran's nuclear program. In Palestine, parliamentary elections produced an upset victory for the radical Islamic movement Hamas, which denies the right of Israel to exist and is responsible for suicide bombings and assassinations in Israel itself. A year after the Axis o£Evil speech, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans: the author Kanan Makiya; Hatem Mukhlis, a doctor; and Rend Rahim, who later became postwar Iraq's first representative to the United States. As the three described what they thought would be the political situation after Saddam's fall, they talked about Sunnis and Shiites. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms. The three spent part of the meeting explaining that there are two major sects in Islam.

So two months before he ordered U.S. troops into the country, the president of the United States did not appear to know about the division among Iraqis that has defined the country's history and politics. He would not have understood why non-Arab Iran might gain a foothold in post -Saddam Iraq. He could not have anticipated U.S. troops being caught in the middle of a civil war between two religious sects that he did not know existed. And underscores how little the American leadership thought before the war about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems the United States would face after it overthrew Sad dam Hussein. Even in 2006, with civil war well under way in Iraq, the president and his top advisors speak of an Iraqi people, as if there were a single people akin to the French or even the American people. that Iraq was a blank slate on which the United States could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society.

The arrogance that Iraq was a blank slate on which the United States could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society, came in the form of a belief that this could be accomplished with minimal effort and planning by the United States and that it was not important to know something about Iraq. Indeed, in the staffing of postwar governance in Iraq, the Administration placed a premium on those who had ideologically correct views of the kind of conservative (in an American sense) democracy that the U.S. wanted for Iraq, they excluded foreign service officers who knew the country and the Arab world.

Ahmad Chalabi was born to an affluent Shiite family in Baghdad in 1945. He grew up in a colonial-style bungalow with thick walls and an Olympic-size swimming pool situated among several acres of date palms. In 1958, when Iraqi Army officers overthrew the monarchy, the Chalabi family left Baghdad and Ahmad did not return for another forty-five years. After taking a degree in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earning a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he taught at the American University in Beirut and then turned his hand to business and banking. He made a lot of money. In the 1980s, Chalabi headed the Petra Bank in Jordan, and when it collapsed he was charged with fraud by the Jordanian authorities and sentenced in absentia to a lengthy jail term.

Intelligent and with an excellent memory, in the 1980s, Chalabi figured out that the road to Baghdad went through Washington. Some of the people he befriended-Paul Wolfowitz, former Reagan Administration official Richard Perle, congressional staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney-would go on to have prominent roles in the second Bush Administration. Chalabi did not make the common mistake of cultivating only the big names then in power. He understood that some of the most important players especially for the long term-were congressional staff, an out of office foreign policy specialist, and a beat reporter.

Chalabi worked to unite an Iraqi opposition that included the Iranian-based Shiite religious parties, the rival Kurdish nationalist parties, Syrian-based Ba'athist dissidents, Sunni fundamentalists, several royal pretenders, and the Iraqi Communist Party. In spite of this diversity and many personal and family feuds among the various leaders, Chalabi was able to bring a large part of the Chalabi worked to unite an Iraqi opposition that included the Iranian-based Shiite religious parties, the rival Kurdish nationalist parties, Syrian-based Ba'athist dissidents, Sunni fundamentalists, several royal pretenders, and the Iraqi Communist Party. In spite of this diversity and many personal and family feuds among the various leaders, Chalabi was able to bring a large part of the opposition together on a common anti-Saddam program. Unlike many other Arabs, he recognized the importance of the Kurds to the opposition, controlling as they did territory and armed forces. In 1992, at an opposition congress held in the hilltop Kurdish town of Salah add in, Chalabi got Arab Iraqis to support the Kurdish demand for federalism. Although lampooned as a "Mayfair revolutionary," he spent several years in Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1990s trying to foment an uprising against Saddam Hussein. Even his Iraqi critics praise his personal courage.

Chalabi presented Saddam Hussein in the worst possible light (not hard to do) and made an Iraqi regime-change scenario sound rosy. He understood that many journalists are less cautious about the facts when they can get a scoop. He figured out who took shortcuts and fed them tidbits that were, to put it kindly, less than fully substantiated. He promoted rolling regime change, arguing that if the United States enlarged the northern safe area-and created a southern safe area-this would have a domino effect leading to Saddam's collapse. As war approached in 2003, Chalabi was insisting to the Americans that their troops would be greeted as liberators.

Chalabi was not entirely wrong. Some Iraqis did cheer the American troops as they moved toward the capital (I was given flowers in Baghdad five days after Saddam's fall). Chalabi never supported an American occupation of Iraq, which he correctly thought would generate increasing resistance. He thought power should quickly be turned over to an Iraqi interim government, and he pushed unsuccessfully for the Pentagon to train an Iraqi exile (and Kurdish) army that would fight alongside the Americans. He wanted a major role in an interim Iraqi government, but that does not mean his ideas were wrong.

Ahmad Chalabi's role in the events leading to the American invasion ofIraq cannot, in my view, be overstated. If it were not for him, the United States military likely would not be in Iraq today. This does not make him a con man, as his critics allege. Through a twenty-year cultivation of America's foreign policy elite, Chalabi made a convincing case for a democratic Iraq and Arab democracy. He certainly spun his information and analysis in a manner maximally favorable to the case for war. On some matters, he may have lied.

Ahmad Chalabi owed no duty to the United States. He was an Iraqi seeking the liberation of his country. He did not have an army, and so he needed to persuade the U.S. to lend him one. As he told the Sunday Telegraph a year after the war: "We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. The tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before [the war] is not important.”

Thousands of exiles have come to Washington seeking U.S. support for their causes back home. Rarely do they get more than coffee and sympathy. Chalabi got the U.S. military and hundreds of billions of dol lars in U.S. expenditures on building a new Iraq. Any fault lies not with Chalabi but with the U.S. government officials who uncritically accepted what he was saying.

Vice President Cheney was one. As he told NBC's Tim Russert on the eve of the war: "I have talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House ... The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome us as liberators." As Cheney's comments suggest, Chalabi was not the only Iraqi political figure to spin the Americans. As war approached, the Kurdish party leaders and the Shiite clerics also put forward a political line that they thought the Bush Administration wanted to hear. In meetings in the White House and State Department, the Kurds joined Arab Iraqi opposition leaders in stressing their commitment to a unified and democratic Iraq. They made much the same point to the print media and in countless appearances on outlets like CNN and BBC. But their true feelings were not hard to discern if one listened. The Bush Administration's favorite Iraqi was not Ahmad Chalabi but Barham Salih, a British-educated Kurdish leader who served for a decade as the PUK's representative in Washington before returning to Suleimania to be one of Kurdistan's two prime ministers." In the lead-up to the war, Barham appeared regularly on American television offering extravagant praise for President Bush and his effort to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. To the BBC, he described his Iraqiness this way: "As long as we Kurds are condemned to live in Iraq, I want to be a full citizen of my country!' It was hardly a compellingly patriotic statement from the man the Bush Administration chose to be Iraq's deputy prime minister in 2004.

With regard to Iraq's Shiites, the war's architects assumed to be true what they wished were true. Because Iraq was home to Najaf and Karbala, Shiite Islam's two holiest places, liberated Iraq would replace Iran as the center of the Shiite world. Iraq's Shiites would be pro-Western and democratic and this would be of enormous strategic importance since it would undermine the clerical regime in Iran.

Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz articulated this view shortly after the fall of Baghdad: We've understood very clearly that Iraq, especially the Shia population of Iraq, is both a source of danger and opportunity to the Iranians. I think it's more danger than it is opportunity. But the danger itself is incentive for them to try to intervene because the last thing they want to see, which I think is a real possibility, is an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western ... There's going to be a huge struggle for the soul of Iraqi Shiism, there's no question about it.

The evidence to the contrary was substantial. Iran had supported all Iraq's major Shiite parties for more than two decades. These parties had an avowed political agenda of creating an Islamic state, as reflected in the name of the largest, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Iran had supported the Shiites in 1991 while the first Bush Administration was passively complicit in the murders of tens of thousands. And it was improbable that Iraq's 14 million Shiites emerging from centuries of brutal repression were somehow going to challenge an increasingly confident Iranian Shiite state of 68 million. The relationship between mentor and mentored was clear but the Administration did not wish to be bothered with inconvenient facts.

The extent to which wishful thinking substituted for knowledge can be seen in the testimony Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith gave to the House International Relations Committee on May 15, 2003. He told the committee, "Some Iranian influence groups have called for a theocracy on the Tehran model. But it appears that popular support for clerical rule is narrow, even among the Shia population. The Shiite tradition does not favor clerical rule-the Khomeini'ites in Iran were innovators in this regard ... The Iranian model's appeal in Iraq is further reduced by the cultural divide between Persians and Arabs."

But when pressed by Democratic Congressman William Delahunt of Massachusetts as to whether there was data "to support your thesis," Feith became vague. "I do not have off the top of my head whether there's polling data on that." There was no data to support Feith's proposition because it wasn't true. When elections were held in Iraq in 2005, Iraq's Shiites voted overwhelmingly-by margins in excess of 80 percent-for pro-Iranian religious parties that would like to create an Islamic state in Iraq. In Iraq's Shiite southern governorates, a theocracy already exists.

The Bush Administration’s most catastrophic assumption about postwar Iraq was that it would be easy. Not only would U.S. forces be welcomed as liberators but, once Saddam and his top lieutenants fled, Iraqi bureaucrats and police would show up for work the next day, reporting to their new American masters. Security would not be a problem and there would be no need for U.S. troops to assume police duties. Iraq's oil would pay for the country's administration and reconstruction so the postwar would not be a drain on the U.S. treasury.

Contrary views were not just rejected, they were banned. General Tommy Franks, the Central Command combatant commander, who had overall responsibility for fighting the Iraq War, was barred by Pentagon higher-ups from consulting his predecessor, General Anthony Zinni. Zinni had done substantial planning for the post -combat operations in Iraq, the so-called Phase IV Operations. Zinni's plan, which included having U.S. troops provide security, was cast aside as too pessimistic, presumably because it would require more troops than Rumsfeld wanted to send. When Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq (by which he meant 300,000 to 400,000), Wolfowitz delivered a very public rebuke, asserting that Shinseki was "wildly off the mark:' and that he could not imagine it taking more troops to occupy Iraq than it took to conquer it The Administration prepared so little for postwar Iraq that it had no idea of what it didn't know. On February 11,2003, Feith, the man responsible for postwar planning in the Pentagon, promised a skeptical Senate Foreign Relations Committee that everything was under control: "I do want to assure the committee that when we talk about all of the key functions that are going to need to be performed in postwar Iraq, we have thought about them across the range from worst case to very good case." In fact, the Bush Administration did not consider the most likely postwar scenario: that all authority would vanish with the regime. In July 2003, Wolfowitz admitted to Reuters that the Pentagon had not anticipated the collapse of order in Baghdad following Saddam's fall. He should not have been surprised. This is exactly what happened in 1991 in the parts of Iraq where the regime lost control during the uprising.

Pentagon war plans involved a two-front campaign. The main American force would move north from Kuwait, skirting the southern Iraqi cities and pushing on to Baghdad. At the same time, the Army's 4th Infantry Division would move south from Turkey toward the capital. Turkey's government reluctantly agreed to the plan but demanded as a quid pro quo that Turkish troops be allowed to enter northern Iraq, ostensibly to stop refugees from fleeing all the way to Turkey. Turkey's demands obviously had nothing to do with refugees, since the territory in question was already under Kurdish control, and it was unthinkable that the Iraqi Army would counterattack north against the u.s. Army. Turkey wanted to be in northern Iraq so as to force the Kurds back under Baghdad's control in the postwar settlement. The Bush Administration was quite happy to accommodate its NATO ally in return for the 4th Infantry Division's transit rights.

The problem however, was that the Kurds were not going to play dead while Turkey destroyed their freedom. They certainly were not fooled by Turkey's newfound concern for refugees. Barzani, whose peshmerga controlled the part of Kurdistan adjacent to Turkey, told me explicitly that his forces would fight an invading Turkish force.

In February 2003, Bush's Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad summoned Kurdish leaders to Ankara, and told them that, in spite of their objections, the United States agreed to Turkish troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. Khalilzad brushed off the angry protests. In the single-minded pursuit of their war plan, the Pentagon neoconservatives were willing to risk a war between their two allies, Turkey and the Kurds. Fortunately, the Turkish Parliament failed, by four votes, to allow U.S. troops to cross the country.

By now as we know, the United States already has paid a steep price for the Administration's failure to plan for the postwar. The early mistakes, set back the prospects for success and contributed to the present quagmire. Amazingly, the Administration learned little from those early mistakes. The staffing of CPA was even less planned and less professional than that of ORHA. And, in spite of all experience to the contrary, the Americans in Iraq and in Washington continued to embrace all the preconceptions they had before the war began.

The most durable preconception was that there was a single Iraq. In August 2004, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security advisor, spoke at Washington's United States Institute of Peace in what was billed as a major address. At the end, Qubad Talabani, Jalal Talabani's son and the PUK representative in Washington, raised his hand. Explaining that he was speaking on behalf of the Kurdish people, he thanked Rice for "a leading role in liberating our country" and then asked why Kurdistan was being shortchanged in the allocation of U.S. reconstruction assistance, noting "this is sending the wrong message to your allies in Iraq ... the Kurds who are spearheading the democratic movement in Iraq."

Rice replied that she couldn't discuss the specifics of aid going to the north, but then offered the following assessment: But what has been impressive to me so far is that Iraqis-whether Kurds or Shia or Sunni or the many other ethnic groups in Iraqhave demonstrated that they really want to live as one in a unified Iraq. And I think particularly the Kurds have shown a propensity to want to bridge differences that were historic differences in many ways that were fueled by Saddam Hussein and his regime.

Was this her understanding of interethnic relations in Iraq nearly sixteen months after the United States took over the country? I asked her how she reconciled this supposed Kurdish commitment to Iraq with the fact that 1.7 million Kurds-SO percent of Kurdistan's adults-had recently signed a petition asking for a vote on independence.

Rice noted, "Such referenda on independence have taken place in lots of places, including, for instance, Canada to our north." She added, "And so what I have found interesting and I think important is the degree to which the leaders of the Shia and Kurdish and Sunni communities have continually expressed their desire to have a unified Iraq."

It was not as if the ground truth in Kurdistan was hard to discover. Even a casual visitor to Erbil, Kurdistan's capital, notices the Kurdistan flag that flies everywhere, and that the Iraqi flag does not fly at all. (It is banned.) Crossing from Turkey into Kurdistan, the visitor's papers are processed by officials of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the Iraqi visa requirement does not apply. Kurdistan has its own army and does not allow the new Iraqi Army on its territory. Nor do the Kurds hide their views of Iraq. They hate the country and are not shy about saying so. Understanding this does not require sophisticated analysis. All Rice needed to do was imagine how an American would feel about a country that had gassed you, destroyed your home, and executed hundreds of thousands of your kinsmen-and which you never wanted to be a part of in the first place .

Modern Iraq was built on an unpromising foundation. The Kurds did not want to be part of it at all, while Arabs were divided between the minority but dominant Sunnis, and the majority Shiites. There are, of course, successful multiethnic and multireligious states, including the United States. They work best when the ethnic communities are all mixed together, as in the United States or, as in India, where no one community dominates the state. In Iraq, each of the three main constituent communities-Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites-had a geographic space that was historically associated, more or less, with the three Ottoman valiyets from which Iraq was created.(Exceptions were the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala that were part of the Sunni Baghdad valiyet and Arab Mosul in the Kurdish Mosul valiyet.)

Iraq was one of four multiethnic and/or multireligious states that were assembled at the end of the First World War. The others tried to resolve the nationality problem by giving each group a territory where its language and culture would be dominant. They also included some elements of power sharing at the center. Iraq's dominant Sunni Arabs neither respected the others' desire to run their own affairs nor were prepared to share power.

Between the two world wars, power sharing between Czechs and Slovaks made democratic Czechoslovakia the success story in Eastern Europe. After 1948, Josip Broz Tito's elaborate construct of six republics and two autonomous regions not only held Yugoslavia together, but enabled the country to resist Stalin and thrive as a pro- Western communist state. Tito's Yugoslavia even developed a "Yugoslav" identity among some of its constituent peoples (the Serbs and Bosnian Muslims) and it survived a full decade after its founder's demise on May 4,1980. The third multiethnic European state to emerge from World War I was the fifteen-republic Soviet Union, a state that endured the loss of some 20 million people in World War II and then competed with the United States for global domination for nearly a half century. On the different 'kinds' State formations see our article yesterday:

The Bush Administration's failure to take postwar planning seriously was reflected in its casual-almost lackadaisical-approach to the staffing of the u.s. occupation administration that would follow Saddam's overthrow. Although the Administration had been planning the war for more than a year, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, to whom Bush had assigned responsibility for postwar Iraq in preference to Colin Powell's State Department, only established an office for postwar administration on January 20,2003. Called the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), it was tasked both with the humanitarian consequences of the war and the postwar administration of Iraq. Rumsfeld chose retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner to lead it. For a few months in the summer of 1991, Garner had run Operation Provide Comfort, the humanitarian relief effort for the Iraqi Kurds, and this made him a minor hero in Kurdistan. He had no other Middle East experience and no background in post -conflict nation-building. He did, however, have good connections with the neoconservatives whose views on Iraq he was thought to share.

Garner had less than two months to assemble an entire postwar administration. At the same time, he was distracted from this task by the necessity of preparing for a range of possible humanitarian disasters, and to assemble a staff for that purpose as well.

Plus although he was supposed. to be Iraq's postwar ruler, Jay Garner remained in Kuwait until April 21, twelve days after American troops took over Baghdad. General Tommy Franks refused him clearance and Garner had not insisted. By the time he arrived, Baghdad was chaotic, his authority in Iraq sapped, and his credibility diminished with his Washington masters.

On April 22, Garner and some members of his team flew to Dukan, a Kurdistan resort on an artificial lake on the Lesser Zab River, to meet with Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Garner wanted the Kurdish leaders to help form an interim Iraqi government that would assume responsibility for the country in a matter of weeks. The nucleus for such a government existed. In December 2002, the Iraqi opposition had met at the Metropol Hilton in London to discuss Iraq's future. The opposition parties had chosen a seven-man Iraqi Leadership Council (ILC) to speak for them. It was made up of the two Kurdish leaders, Talabani and Barzani; leaders from the two leading Shiite religious parties, Abdul Aziz aI-Hakim of SCIRI and Ibrahim Jaafari of Dawa; secular Arab leaders Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and Ayad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord; and Naseer Chaderchi, a Sunni Arab lawyer who headed the secular National Democratic Party. The ILC represented well Iraq's Shiites and Kurds but not the Sunni Arabs who were mostly opposed to regime change. (Chaderchi had no significant support.)

At that London conference in 2002, the intention was to form an al ternative Iraqi government that could take over quickly after the regime fell. (Although described in the press as a government-in-exile, it was not so technically since it would be based initially in Kurdistan.) Following instructions from the State Department, the president's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, had strongly opposed the formation of an alternative government. In light of that, Chalabi pushed the opposition leaders to agree on principles and modalities for a government. Khalilzad thwarted that effort as well.

So, as Garner set out to form a government, in April 2003, he was faced with the consequences of the earlier State Department opposition to an interim government. Even though the Iraqi political parties had come together to oppose Saddam, they were not united. The Shiites wanted an Islamic state, the Kurds wanted to preserve the de facto independence of Kurdistan, and the Arab secularists wanted a strong central government that they would dominate. Agreeing on a common program and allocating positions in a government would take time. And, as Chalabi had well understood in London, this was more easily accomplished when regime change was a theoretical prospect than when the parties were dividing up the spoils in Baghdad.

On April 23, the day after the Dukan meeting, Garner and his team helicoptered to Erbil for a lunch with Barzani, which I attended. Postconflict environments are rife with rumor and misunderstanding, making communication and public information essential. Handling these functions for Garner was Margaret Tutwiler, an assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the first Bush Administration and, since 2001, U.S. ambassador to Morocco. She had never heard of the Anfal and undiplomatically said so in front of her hosts, who knew that the Anfal had taken place when she was the State Department's chief spokesperson. Garner left retired Major General Bruce Moore to take charge of the north. Talabani hosted a dinner the next night for Moore, who spent part of the evening bad-mouthing Tutwiler and Barbara Bodine, the hard-charging diplomat responsible for the Baghdad region. Moore was incredulous when I suggested that the Kurds were not going to give up the peshmerga. "But that's not what Talabani told Garner;' he replied.

As we know by now Garner's mission soon was in deep trouble, and he lost his post. Although President Bush had decided on war with Iraq not long after September 11, he never addressed the big issues of how postwar Iraq would be governed. Would the United States run a prolonged occupation as it had done in Germany and Japan? Would there be a provisional government and how would it be chosen? Would there be elections? When? How would Iraq's constitution be written and what would be in it? What was the U.S. position on federalism for the Kurds, or the Shiite desire for an Islamic state? What would be done about the Iraqi military and the Ba'ath Party? Those issues, the subject of ferocious internal battles within the Administration, would now be settled by a man who had been working on Iraq for all of two weeks.

Then on May 12,2003, L.Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad. On May 16, he informed the Iraqi Leadership Council that there would be no interim government and no early handover of power. This came exactly eleven days after Jay Garner-speaking for the United States-had announced that the core of an interim government would be in place by May 15. The same day, Bremer issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1. It banned persons serving in the top four levels of the Ba'ath Party from holding government employment, now and in the future. On May 23, Bremer signed CPA Order Number 2. It dissolved Iraq's army, its air force, its navy, its secret police, its intelligence services, the Republican Guards, the Ba' ath Party militia, and the Ministry of Defense.

For eighty years, Sunni Arabs were the guardians of Iraqi unity, keeping the country together by force. The American invasion ended Sunni Arab rule. Now, in a few strokes of a pen, Bremer completed Iraq's revolution by destroying the pillars on which Sunni Arabs had relied to rule Iraq-the military, the security services, and the Ba'ath Party. Although he did not know it, Bremer had sealed Iraq's fate as a unitary nation. All the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Then, at 10 A.M. on June 28 20004, shortly before the handover to an Iraqi Governement, the CPA had scheduled a joint press conference with Bremer and Iraq's new prime minister, Ayad Allawi. When they arrived, the reporters were ushered into Allawi's office to watch as Bremer handed a letter to Iraq's chief justice formally transferring sovereignty. "I admitted," he writes, "disappointment that we had not been able to establish a secure environment!' He told Allawi, "The insurgents have proven better organized and more difficult to penetrate than we had expected." There was an open line to President Bush and his team, who were then in Ankara for a NATO summit, but as Bremer, the best-protected man in Iraq, writes, "when the correspondents arrived at the former Governing Council building, our staff collected everybody's cell phones, so that they could not report the event in real time, or immediately after, to allow me to leave Iraq first." And thus, what had started with neoconservative fantasies of cheering Iraqis greeting American liberators with flowers and candy, ended with a secret ceremony and a decoy plane.

 

The Iraq Situation P.2: Kurdistan

The Iraq Situation P.3: The Break Up Of Iraq?

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