Truth - Al Franken [103]
What had gone wrong?
GARNER: I think that it was a mistake that we didn’t use that. I agree with that. It was my intent to use that, but we didn’t.
FRONTLINE: Why didn’t we use the Future of Iraq [Project]?
GARNER: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. I was just told, and now it’s just a decision they made that we’re not going to do that.
FRONTLINE: Who told you that?
GARNER: I got that from the Secretary, and I don’t think that was his decision.
FRONTLINE: Secretary Rumsfeld?
GARNER: Mm hmm.
Garner had actually tried to hire Tom Warrick, head of the Future of Iraq Project, as part of his staff for postwar reconstruction. At a lunch with The New Yorker’s George Packer, at which we were waited on by Jay Garner himself, Packer told me that it was Dick Cheney who had personally blackballed Warrick. Why? Because he came from the opposing team. No, not the terrorists. Not the Democrats. He came from the reality-based community over at the State Department.
As Packer told me:
The Future of Iraq Project wasn’t the key to all solutions in Iraq. It was just a very useful compendium of information, a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to tackle all the range of problems in the postwar that would have been of great use to any postwar administration.
Rumsfeld and Cheney didn’t believe the State Department’s version of the electrical grid in Iraq was worth looking at. Because it’s the State Department version. We have our own version of the electrical grid in Iraq, which is that it’s actually in very good shape and it’s not going to need a whole lot of repair.
When Garner was recalled to Washington, Packer reports, he was brought to the White House for a meeting with Bush. During the forty-five-minute encounter, you might have expected the President to ask questions like “G-man, how’s it going in Baghtown?” Or “General Jay, what’s rockin’ in Iraq?” Or “Given everything that’s happened, how can we win the trust of the Iraqi people and put the reconstruction effort back on track?”
But instead of dealing with substance, the meeting consisted largely of idle and perfunctory chitchat peppered with occasional joshing.
“You want to do Iran for the next one?” the President joked.
“No, sir. Me and the boys are holding out for Cuba.”
Ha ha ha. HA HA HA HA HA.
But what about the other Future of Iraq Project? The project to turn the future of Iraq over to the shifty Ahmed Chalabi? If Chalabi could carry the ball, who gave a shit about the Irrigation Ministry? That was his problem.
On April 6, two weeks after the start of the war, Ahmed Chalabi made his triumphant return to the country of his birth and early childhood, flown by the U.S. military into Nasiriyah with seven hundred members of his own militia.
Expectation: A broad-based spontaneous popular uprising would crystallize around the charismatic Chalabi, simplifying even further the job of the coalition forces, and sweeping him into power as the pro-Western head of a new democratic government.
Reality: A curious throng, long starved for entertainment, gathered to stare at the first non-Baath politician most had ever seen. While they listened politely, there were few recruits for the two-hundred-and-thirty-mile march to Baghdad.
Unimpressed, American generals deposited Chalabi and his men at a derelict military base in the desert, which he failed to use as a staging ground for his popular rebellion based on the philosophy of Chalabiism.
Jay Garner’s replacement in Baghdad was L. Paul Bremer, career foreign service officer, protégé of Henry Kissinger, former ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, graduate of Harvard and Yale, and speaker of eight languages including Arabic, Norwegian, and English. If anyone could realize the neo-cons’ vision for Iraq, Bremer could. The fact that he couldn’t proves what a bad idea the enterprise was.
In point of fact, Bremer did an absolutely terrible job