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By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Friday, June 27, 2003; Page A21

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In Postwar Chaos, Chief Improvised

Mapping plans for postwar Iraq from a bungalow in Kuwait before Baghdad fell, the head of the U.S. relief and reconstruction team foresaw clouds of poison gas and hordes of refugees. He envisioned extensive wartime destruction and the need for a swift American humanitarian aid operation.

The humanitarian crisis never developed. Instead, Jay M. Garner soon found himself in an unsecured Iraqi capital confronting a separate set of challenges with a small and eclectic staff of a few hundred members. Buildings the Americans had counted on using had been stripped bare. Phones did not work. The electricity supply was sporadic. Military security was in short supply.

"It was chaotic. It should have been chaotic," Garner said yesterday in an interview. Expectations ran high that the Bush administration would turn the country around quickly. Yet the looting and tumult seemed to make the smallest task difficult.

Garner improvised.

"Those type of operations are always run by audibles," Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, said in offering his first detailed public assessment of his experience. "It doesn't matter how much you plan, they're all audibles called at the line of scrimmage."

Garner spent six weeks in Iraq as the senior civilian decision-maker and the public face of the U.S.-led occupation. During his tenure, the Bush administration embarked on its campaign to remake the country, but the progress was halting and U.S. authorities found themselves struggling to take control.

The White House hurried to send L. Paul Bremer, a decisive diplomat with expanded authority, to take charge. Bremer arrived in Baghdad in early May, several weeks before Garner's anticipated departure date. Garner said he offered to depart right away, but stayed at the request of Bremer and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

As Garner sees it, the reconstruction team made considerable progress against long odds. The first wave of U.S. administrators arrived April 20 to find that 17 of the 20 Baghdad ministry buildings they expected to use had been destroyed, mostly by looters. When the war ended, employees stayed home, police fled and the rule of law evaporated.

After spending, by Garner's estimate, 40 percent of their planning time on humanitarian calamities that did not happen, his team of not quite 300 staffers struggled to function without telephones, computers or the ability to leave their palace base without wearing body armor and traveling with military escorts.

Garner said, however, that the staffing levels were "sufficient for the aftermath." He pointed to the cumbersome private contracting process as one reason Iraqis did not see faster results on reconstruction. He said 75 percent of the contracts were not signed until after the war started.

"The way our government does this kind of business is through contractors," Garner said. "It just takes time. That ain't going to happen any faster the next time than it did this time, because that's the template we have."

Garner, who describes himself as "a glass half-full kind of guy," believes current tactics will end attacks on U.S. troops. He named the current U.S. military crackdown and Bremer's efforts to improve the economy, expand Iraqi influence and build a new Iraqi army.

"You've got a lot of agitation that's going to go on over there for a long time," Garner said. "It'll get cleaned up over time."

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Direct Link:
--http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37364-2003Jun26.html

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