FRONTLINE: the lost year in iraq

On Tuesday (the 17th) FRONTLINE aired their latest investigative documentary. The doc (titled "The Lost Year in Iraq") detailed the first year of the US Occupation of Iraq. The details are not pretty. The doc shows a clueless and unprepared effort by the Dept of Defense and the CPA. One of the things that I found startling was that Rumsfeld and his buddies Wolfowitz and Feith thought they would be able to pull most soldiers out within the year (2003). To think that the Iraqi people will treat the soldiers as liberators is one thing, but to think that Iraq will transition to a stable and robust democracy (and no longer need US soldiers) in about a year is beyond ludicrous. Another startling matter is how the Bush Admin (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc on down) replaced qualified experts in the CPA (the US Govt Agency in charge of the occupation and getting Iraq back on its feet) with inexperienced, unqualified political loyalists. The following quotes illustrate the point:

(These quotes are taken from the doc's website's extended interviews section.)

My favorite example of this was, on Garner's team, there's a guy named Skip Burkle, who's an assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID]. Skip is described by his colleagues as one of the foremost experts in post-conflict public health around the world. It was his job to rehabilitate Iraq's health care system. Burkle has a medical degree, four postgraduate degrees. He's got purple hearts. He served in Kosovo and in Somalia, in Haiti.

But a week into it he gets an e-mail from his senior official back in Washington, a friend of his, saying the White House wants a loyalist on the job, and in his place was a guy named Jim Haveman. He was no doctor. He was the director of community health in Michigan. His pal, the Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, contacted Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services. He contacted Paul Wolfowitz and said, "Hey, this guy Haveman would be really good."

Haveman's international experience really was limited to sort of doing outreach for the Dutch Reform Church. He had worked previously at an adoption agency where they encouraged children not to have abortions. He'd never worked in the Middle East. He never had any experience in post-conflict health care. But he was the guy the administration saw fit to send out there.

He got out there, and he came up with ideas like not devoting much money to fixing Iraq's emergency rooms, even though injuries from car bombings and insurgent attacks were probably the single largest health crisis the country is facing. Instead, he brought in a team of people to go line by line through the list of drugs that the country was importing to try to figure out which ones could be taken off the list. He wanted to develop a new formula. Why did he want to do this? Because in Michigan, he had saved millions of taxpayer dollars doing this.

-Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was WaPost Iraq Bureau Chief during the Lost Year.

The second quote deals with Lt. Gen. Garner and State Dept Official Warrick. In February of 2003 there is the first meeting of all US Govt Officials who are thinking about the future of Iraq (meaning post-war Iraq). The invasion is roughly six weeks away. Lt. Gen. Garner has been told he will be in charge of post-war Iraq. (In reality he will be usurped by J. Paul Bremer just before the invasion is over.) Garner is surprised at how chaotic the meeting is. However, over and over again one man seems to have most of the answers to his questions:

Finally at noon, as they're sitting down to lunch, Garner turns to this guy and says: "Who are you? Why have you got all of the answers?" The guy says: "Well, I'm Tom Warrick. I'm from the State Department, and I've been working on this Future of Iraq Project for over a year now." Garner says, "Well, as of Monday, you come to work for me." "OK," says Warrick. Finally somebody wants to know this stuff. Then, unfortunately, Garner runs into a bus. He's told not long afterward by Donald Rumsfeld, "By the way, you need to get rid of this Tom Warrick guy, and also that [Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan] Meghan O'Sullivan woman." Garner is deeply puzzled by this: "Wait a second. I need these people. I finally am finding the experts I need."

This goes back to the issue of the Bush administration not wanting expertise, because it was getting in the way; it was asking difficult questions. It was very shadowy to Garner. But his conclusion was that it was Vice President Cheney's office vetting people, really on their politics, and saying, "We don't like that Warrick guy; we don't like that Meghan O'Sullivan person," and telling Rumsfeld, "Get rid of those people."

-Thomas Ricks, WaPost Pentagon Correspondent

The next quote is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's response when he was asked about the DoD/CPA's hiring process and on who got hired:

It was a bunch of young kids -- had no experience managing finances -- who were given the task of running Iraq's budget. It turned out that this group of kids who had come over together couldn't quite figure out why they'd been chosen. They finally discovered that what had tied them together was that they had all applied for jobs at the Heritage Foundation, this conservative think tank in Washington.

What happened was that the hiring was done by the White House liaison to the Pentagon, an office of the Pentagon political appointee. This office served as the gatekeeper. Instead of casting out widely for people with knowledge of Arabic, knowledge of the Middle East, knowledge of post-conflict reconstruction, they went after the political loyalists and canvassed the offices of Republic congressmen, conservative think tanks and other places where they knew they would find people who would be unfailingly loyal to the president and to the president's mission in Iraq. ...

The hiring process involved questions that would have landed a private-sector employer in jail. They asked people what their views on Roe v. Wade were, whether they believed in capital punishment. A man of Middle Eastern descent was asked whether he was Muslim or Christian. People were asked who they voted for for president. ...

Bremer, after some months in Iraq, realized he needed more people to help, and as a former guy from the private sector, he had a pragmatic streak in him, and he dispatched one of his deputies back to Washington to scour the country and get some of the best people sent over to Baghdad.

This deputy, who was a former Goldman Sachs banker, did what anybody in the private sector might do. He contacted a couple of his friends who work for large executive headhunting firms, and he asked them to come to the Pentagon and help identify promising candidates to go to Baghdad.

When the White House [liaison] office to the Pentagon found out about this, they freaked, and they ordered those guys to pack up and leave that same day. Bremer's deputy interceded and managed to keep the headhunters around, but their jobs were relegated to sort of vetting people's résumés. The actual decisions of who's going to be brought in, that all rested with the White House and the White House's people at the Pentagon, and with people like Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld. They were able to tap people.

So you wind up getting people like John Agresto to go run Iraq's higher education system instead of getting somebody who had, let's say, run a very large public university system. He was a former president of a small college in Santa Fe, N.M., with 500 students. But he had connections. He served on the National Endowment for the Humanities with Lynne Cheney; Joyce Rumsfeld sat on his board of directors at St. John's College.

For [Iraq's] primary and secondary education, [they] brought in a guy from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a very conservative think tank, who had written extensively on the need for school vouchers. This is not a guy who has any experience in rebuilding school systems in the Middle East.

We've talked about Jim Haveman, the guy from Michigan who had very little experience in public health, being brought over to rebuild Iraq's health care system. And the list goes on -- a bunch of political appointees with very little practical experience.

-Rajiv Chandrasekaran

These quotes show just how inept the Bush Administration was during, perhaps, the most important time of the Iraq Occupation. For those interested, "The Lost Year in Iraq" is a powerful, deeply informative documentary which goes on to show how inept Bush Administration policy was (not just execution) as well as how badly the Bush Admin/DoD/CPA handled such things as the insurgency. It is an incisive documentary and if you have an hour you can watch the entire doc at its website.