“Then we have to create interest,” I told myself. “We need to organize a conference, a seminar, or a war game that will spark people to generate an interagency plan for dealing with this issue. Out of this I can also develop a specifically CENTCOM plan, which would cover some of the more immediately practical issues.”
I decided to organize a “war game” that presented several post-Saddam Iraq scenarios. The game — called “Desert Crossing”—was conducted in the Washington, D.C., area late in 1999 at Booz Allen, the contractor (who run secure games for the government); experts from all the relevant branches of government took part.
The scenarios looked closely at humanitarian, security, political, economic, and other reconstruction issues. We looked at food, clean water, electricity, refugees, Shia versus Sunnis, Kurds versus the other Iraqis, Turks versus Kurds, and the power vacuum that would surely follow the collapse of the regime (since Saddam had pretty successfully eliminated any local opposition). We looked at all the problems the United States faces in 2003 trying to rebuild Iraq. And when it was over, I was starting to get a good sense of their enormous scope and to recognize how massive the reconstruction job would be.
Desert Crossing gave us the ammunition we needed to define the post-Saddam problem, but that was only a start.
“Well, who’s going to take the next step?” I asked.
The answer: Nobody. There was no interest in Washington in pursuing it. Most of the participants in the game were sympathetic; but none had any charter to develop a plan. They were more than willing to help us define the problem, maybe learn a little bit about what needed to be done; but nobody was in a position to sign up to anything. Post-Saddam Iraq was simply too far down the priority list of any agency with a reason to be interested in the problem.
You can’t really blame them for this. Nobody saw Iraq as a really pressing threat. Saddam’s military was down. Our policy was containment, the policy was succeeding, and we were whacking Saddam when he got out of line. At this stage of the game, there was a near zero likelihood that he could attack Kuwait, Iran, or Israel again. And there was no way he was going to initiate a serious attack against us, nor were we going to initiate anything major against him.
Besides, we had other, more pressing crises to manage. We were working the Kosovo problem, the Bosnia problem, the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the drug problem in Colombia… India-Pakistan, Korea… and much of Africa was going to hell.
So if you look at my inability to drum up interest in a post-Saddam Iraq in the light of what’s going on right now, you have to ask how they could have passed it up. But back then, it just didn’t seem high priority to anybody in Washington.
You also have to keep in mind the structural barrier to getting anything like that done in Washington. In Washington, there is no one place, agency, or force that directs interagency cooperation. The only such cooperation is on an ad hoc person-to-person or group-to-group basis. So if you have a problem like putting Iraq back together after Saddam, that requires the joint work of many government agencies (not to mention international agencies — NGOs and the UN), there’s nowhere to start.
I could go to DOD. But where does DOD go? Possibly to the President’s National Security Adviser. He or she might then interest the President. Or possibly someone will take the issue to a cabinet meeting and interest the President that way.
Failing that, you’re in limbo. There’s no way you can move the bureaucracy without action from the top.
Of course the problem did not go away. I knew then there was a very good chance it would come back to haunt us. Which meant that if Saddam’s regime did collapse, “somebody” was going to get stuck with putting Humpty back together again.
I knew who that “somebody” was likely to be. It was “us”—the military. I knew that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were far from the best solution, but we would have to do until we came up with something better.
So I said to my guys, “We need to start planning on this.” And they did. But by then we were well into 2000 and I was coming to the end of my tour. And when I left CENTCOM (in mid-2000), the plan was nowhere near materializing.
I’m not sure where it went after I left.
As far as I can tell, the plan was pigeonholed. And by the time Iraqi Freedom rolled around, nobody in CENTCOM had ever heard of it. There’s no longer any corporate memory of it.
Meanwhile, we’re living through the fall of Saddam Hussein, and my concerns have come true. Since nobody in Washington had seriously planned for the consequences of the fall, the military — by default — got stuck with the nation building that followed it.
On February 11, 2003, a month before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Zinni was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of post-Saddam reconstruction planning. He followed a panel of Defense and State Department officials who’d just been heavily criticized by the committee for their obvious lack of serious attention to that critical phase.
In his own testimony, Zinni recounted the lessons learned from Desert Crossing, and continued by relating from his own numerous past experiences that defeating hostile forces militarily does not necessarily mean victory. In Zinni’s view, victory only comes when the defeated people see that they have a livable future and that they have some say in it.
He first learned this lesson as a young lieutenant in Vietnam.
