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By Root 3814 0

the transition to the post-war phase in Iraq.22 To run the organization, I recruited Jay Garner, a barrel-chested retired lieutenant general who had spent nearly four decades in the U.S. Army. I had met him when we served together on the Space Commission in 2000. General Garner knew Secretary Powell and had fought in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In what was called Operation Provide Comfort, Garner had led twenty thousand troops to assist Iraqi Kurds battered by Saddam’s regime. He helped to secure an autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. When U.S. troops withdrew from Kurdistan and the American flag was lowered in July 1991, Garner was the last American to cross into Turkey. Thousands of Kurds delayed his departure by lifting him on their shoulders in celebration of his work.23

I saw Garner’s military background as a valuable asset. I knew the civilian reconstruction effort in Iraq would have to be done in close cooperation with CENTCOM’s military personnel—the unity of effort envisioned in the President’s directive. Once on the ground in the Gulf region, Garner’s office would become an element of CENTCOM, reporting to Franks, and thereby assuring unity of command. I believed a retired general, one who knew many CENTCOM officers and understood military culture, would have the best chance of avoiding friction with the military personnel. I also thought that Garner’s prior association with Colin Powell would foster good relations between the reconstruction office and the State Department.

Garner believed, as I did, in empowering local populations to do things for themselves. “We’re notorious for telling people what to do,” he said. Garner thought American heavy-handedness had been a mistake in Vietnam, one he didn’t want to repeat in Iraq.24 Once the military had toppled Saddam’s regime, I thought it was strategically important to put the United States in a supporting role to the Iraqis as soon as possible. This was the Pentagon’s and—at least as I understood it—the President’s vision.

Months before the war began in Iraq, we encountered strong resistance from State and the CIA to the idea of working with Iraqi expatriates. I couldn’t quite understand why the idea was controversial. One of the first things we did in Afghanistan, after all, was develop relationships with the Northern Alliance and Afghan exiles. Hamid Karzai, in fact, had lived for years abroad. I thought it made sense to do something similar in Iraq: reach out to the anti-Saddam elements (largely confined to the autonomous areas of Kurdistan) and to the Iraqi exiles who had been advocating the liberation of their country for many years.* These Iraqi “externals,” many living in the United States or London, included some highly educated and skilled professionals. Some clearly had ambition. While by no means monolithic in their politics or their views, they shared an interest in Iraq’s freedom and success. I thought the diversity of views among them was not only natural, but healthy. Why, I wondered, wouldn’t we want them involved in a post-Saddam Iraq early, rather than late or never?

Key officials at State and in the CIA, including at senior levels, viewed the externals in general as untrustworthy, however. Particular animus was directed against Ahmed Chalabi, a secular Shiite from a wealthy Baghdad family who lived abroad. Chalabi had worked with the CIA in the 1990s to promote resistance to the Iraqi regime. The relationship soured after the CIA and Chalabi quarreled over responsibility for a failed operation in northern Iraq that led to the murder and exile of many hundreds of anti-Saddam Iraqis. Despite his differences with State and the CIA, Chalabi retained bipartisan support among elements of the U.S. Congress, having been a strong proponent for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.

Some concocted a myth that the Pentagon was engaged, as CIA Director Tenet put it in his book, in “thinly veiled efforts to put Chalabi in charge of post-invasion Iraq.”25 Chalabi knew a number of administration