In a recent interview with Newsweek, Condi said she would like to know who said:
…that controlling Iraq would require winning over local, provincial and tribal authorities, Rice said, “I would like to go back and find out who gave that [advice] … Arab states can be very centralized. This is actually a fairly new model of local and provincial responsibility. I don’t think it was self-evident that this was the case.” Rice said that the U.S. occupation began to grapple with this reality in earnest in 2005, when the State Department began pushing to send so-called provincial reconstruction teams outside of Baghdad. She said the creation of a democratic central government and “the transition to administrative law, I think, is going to be judged very well” over time. But, she added, “I think we didn’t identify a lot of the kind of provincial and local leaders that might have been able to deliver services as well as politics on a more localized level early on.”
Liar or ignoramus? You decide. It took about five seconds to find an answer to her question on Google, since I recalled that the State Department had worked on some plans for Iraq.
The Bush administration kept the effort to overthrow Saddam and the effort to plan for his aftermath separate. The plan that became the Future of Iraq Project began as an effort to bring these groups together to plan for the aftermath. Initially, the aim was to keep the US government minimally involved. The Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank ran the initial meetings.
But the internal battling among the groups was too much for the Institute. Responsibility fell to the State Department. A small group of people had the lead.
It was contentious. Perhaps that’s a clue?
Here’s how the groups worked. Each had ten to twenty Iraqis and two to five international experts. We designed the groups to be heterogeneous. Each was moderated by State Department officials. There were observers there from other government agencies, including the Office of the Vice-President. Often these were senior experts. They took an advisory position. Contrary to some reporting, officials from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense participated. However, they came less and less in early 2003 as the Defense Department began its own planning.
While State ran the groups, the goal was to give the Iraqis as much power as possible, in part by creating subgroups. In many cases the planning was very detailed, for instance, on the electricity system.
Planning began in October 2001 in State and at the National Security Council. The meetings began in spring 2002 at the Middle East Institute and quickly came to State.
Most of the groups met and produced plans. The groups focused on technical matters—water, agriculture, and the environment, oil and gas, public health, and even the legal group—had more success than those focused on more political matters. The Foreign Policy group never met due to politics. The Cultural Heritage group never met because of timing.
The Democratic Principles group only met once. It concluded that Iraq must be treated more like Japan or Germany than Afghanistan. That meant not a long military occupation, but a long-term commitment of US resources, and a truly democratic government.
The Defense Policy working group meet twice and reached broad-based consensus positions. It was agreed that retraining the military was essential. It was assumed by all that the military would not be disbanded. No one favored that. The consensus was that while it was essential to vet and dismiss some officers, the military was needed to preserve security. There was disagreement on how centralized the military should be, with the Kurds pushing for less centralization. Some younger former officers wanted retraining in human rights and the rule of law, while older former soldiers resisted this.
How can she claim ignorance of this with a straight face, in November of 2007? Yet she does, and she gets away with it. And people continue to die.
