Tuesday can’t-believe-what-I’m-reading

According to this extract from Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, retired US General Jay Garner was appointed by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to head the post-war planning group just before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The job was the result of a presidential directive and gave Garner “responsibility for all the tasks normally run by national, state and local governments.”

In a meeting with President Bush and his staff, Garner told them that, of the nine tasks assigned to his group, four of them were beyond the capabilities of his team, and should instead be assigned to the military. These tasks included defeating terrorists, reshaping the Iraqi military and reshaping the other internal Iraqi security institutions. The assembled luminaries nodded in apparent understanding, but Garner took away with him the impression that the issue of who would take up these tasks instead of his group was not being addressed.

Soon after Garner arrived in Iraq, the president’s envoy Paul Bremer arrived to head up the Coalition Provisional Authority, effectively sidelining Garner, who was back in the US by the June after the invasion.

Garner met with Rumsfeld to tell the Defence Secretary of the “three tragic decisions ... three terrible mistakes” Garner thought had been made in the aftermath of the invasion:

He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, disbanding the Iraqi military and banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party from government jobs — effectively sending them underground. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganised, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.

Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. “Jerry Bremer can’t be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You’ve got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.”

Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.” ...

“They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.

“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically. ...

They then held a press conference at which Garner completely contradicted what he had privately told Rumsfeld, saying of Bremer: “I think all the things he’s doing are absolutely the right things.”

The two men later met with Bush, Cheney and Rice at the Whitehouse, during which none of Garner’s concerns were addressed in any way. Garner apparently made the conscious decision not to press those matters further, his reasoning being that, having reported his concerns to Rumsfeld, his boss, the ball was in Rumsfeld’s court.

As Woodward observes in this extract, those were “the three tragic mistakes we’re living with now.”