Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Read Free Book Online

by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.”
    The first section cautioned against staying too long. The document went on to warn of potential civil disorder and noted that the “establishment of a secure environment is the highest priority military task.” But key parts of one of the document’s most important sections were noticeably blank. Section 8—the civil administration pillar—lacked a mission statement, a concept of operations, key objectives, or time lines. Those parts of the document were unfilled less than a week before American marines felled Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.
    The responsibility for pulling together a civil administration plan rested with Mobbs, Feith’s former law partner and a former arms control official in the Reagan administration. Mobbs had spent months in the Pentagon working up strategies to fight the oil well fires that Iraqi troops were expected to ignite as American troops invaded. He had no prior experience in the Middle East, no history of working with Iraqi exiles, and no exposure to other post-conflict reconstruction operations. He quickly lost the confidence of Carney and the other State Department personnel assigned to his pillar. In Kuwait, Mobbs would convene a morning meeting of the people on his team and then he’d vanish. “He was not a leader. He didn’t know what to do,” one ex-ambassador said. “He just cowered in his room most of the time.” The State people began to joke that Mobbs couldn’t organize a two-car funeral. A week after the ORHA team arrived in Baghdad, Garner sent Mobbs back to Washington.
    David Dunford, a retired ambassador who was put in charge of the Foreign Ministry, was among the fortunate few to receive a briefing packet before his deployment. In it was a four-page memo about the ministry that seemed to Dunford as though it had been written by a summer intern at the State Department. When his requests for more information from State went unanswered, he posted a plaintive query for advice on an Internet message board frequented by Middle East specialists. The gist of his message, Dunford said, was “Here I am and I don’t have a clue as to what to do.”
    Carney, who was given no guidance or information about the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, also spent his afternoons in Kuwait trolling the Internet. He found a biography of the Iraqi minister, but little more. He had no idea how many workers the ministry had or how many factories and state-run companies there were. He began surfing online for books. He ordered the translated works of al-Mutanabi, Iraq’s most famous poet. Miraculously, they arrived before he left for Baghdad. He quickly settled upon his favorite line: “When a lion shows its teeth, do not assume he’s smiling at you.”
    Although he enjoyed the poetry, there was one set of documents Carney desperately wanted but could not get: the reports of the Future of Iraq Project.
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    According to people who were privy to what little postwar planning was conducted by the U.S. government, including the classified reports produced by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the Future of Iraq Project was Washington’s best attempt to prepare for the post-Saddam era. Run by midlevel State Department personnel, the project organized more than two hundred Iraqi exiles into seventeen different working groups to study issues of critical importance in the postwar period, including the reconstruction of shattered infrastructure, the creation of free media, the preservation of antiquities, the administration of justice during the transition, the development of the moribund economy, and, most important, the formation of a democratic government. The working groups produced reports with policy recommendations that totaled about 2,500 pages. Although the