Brown Journal of World Affairs: Could you describe your experience as U.S.-appointed governor of Baghdad immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government?

Ambassador Barbara Bodine: It’s been very interesting in the two years since I left. Many of my views have gone from high heresy to almost cliché. One of the basic problems we’ve had with the reconstruction in Iraq was that we had no plans for post-conflict Iraq. The troop levels were micromanaged by the civilians in OSD. Tony Zinni, who was the CINCENT before Tommy Franks, estimated in his invasion plan for Iraq (which he was adamantly opposed to and was very famous for calling it the “Bay of Goats”) that it would take somewhere around 500,000 troops. Not so much to defeat the regime—most people thought that it would crumble very quickly—but to handle law and order, security and stabilization. The pattern has been around the world that it does take more troops to stabilize than to defeat. As we know, OSD had exactly the opposite view.

One person no one has heard from—it will be very interesting when and if he finally decides speak—is General Shinseki, who said it would take several hundred thousand troops and was very publicly dismissed by Paul Wolfowitz as wildly off the mark.

So we went in with 130,000 troops to try and secure a country the size of California. Iraq is not the size of Rhode Island. It’s the size of California. I don’t know what the police force is for Los Angeles County, but my guess is it’s probably 130,000 or higher.

There was within DoD this Alice–in-Wonderland idea that we didn’t need more troops because there wouldn’t be a stabilization problem. We didn’t need a postwar plan because there was not going to be any reconstruction that needed to be done. We were going to go in, there was going to be a decapitation, and the entire rest of the body—I guess like a chicken with its head cut off—was somehow going to keep operating. And I don’t think chickens do that for very long.
The Iraqi bureaucracy—the two million people in the bureaucracy—would all be in their offices waiting for us. I’m not kidding! Waiting for us to show up, at which point the machinery of government would start to move once again.

What they thought was going to happen with traffic cops and regular crime was not at all clear. Somehow that would continue to operate. We would have to kind of tinker a little bit on a few things. But we were going to be gone by August. The civilian reconstruction would be largely over by August. When I was there, even in May of ’03, our military had an accelerated redeployment plan. They believed they were going to leave a little quicker. Liberators, roses and sweets, they honest to God believed it.

Now they say, “We couldn’t have anticipated any of those problems.” There isn’t a single major problem that happened in Iraq that was not only anticipatable, but anticipated. And there wasn’t a single major mistake made without somebody saying, “You really don’t want to do that.” Not just the troop levels: things such as the insurgency. There were a lot of us who were saying, “Look, the Iraqi army will fold. They’re not going to fight. They recognize superior force. But you’re going to end up with an insurgency.”

The example that we used was the Iran-Iraq war. The Iraqis went into Iran very, very quickly, took over what they called Arabistan, and held it for two and a half years. And the Iranians finally got themselves organized in about two and a half years. They pushed the Iraqis back to the border in a matter of weeks. When the Iraqis got to the border, they stopped, turned around, and you had six years of trench warfare—some of the most God-awful warfare anyone’s seen since World War I. Those were Shia and Kurds and Chaldeans and Turkomens and Assyrians. They weren’t fighting on the border because they loved Saddam and they weren’t even fighting because they feared Saddam. They were fighting because they didn’t want the Iranians in their country. Now if that’s how they’re going to react to the Iranians coming in, why on earth would you think that they’re going to accept us long term?

Getting rid of Saddam absolutely was a good thing. But the idea that we either didn’t have to be occupiers or that we would be accepted as occupiers was willful naivety that went against all of the literature that was out there: from the Army War College, RAND, almost every academic, a lot of people in the State Department, and the CIA. DeBa’athification was in some ways was just as damaging as demobilization: we got rid of every technocrat in the country. Basically, if you had a college education, and in some cases even high school, you were out. School teachers. Librarians. You can’t run a country if you’ve gotten rid of all of your educated people. And then we did demobilization. Again, how are you going to guard the borders of a country that large without the army? The one thing you could really count on the army to do would be to protect those borders. They’re going to keep the Iranians and the Syrians and everyone else out. The advice was, “Don’t do this. It’s not necessary.” Those decisions were taken in May 2003. And much of what we’re still suffering through is the result of those two cataclysmically avoidable mistakes.

Most of the questioning came from State and CIA, some parts of DIA. The Army War College did a study that predicted a lot of these problems. And there was also the very famous Project for the Future of Iraq, an NSC mandated program, 18 months, 5 million dollars. This wasn’t five people in the State Department getting together and coming up with their own plan. This was an interagency effort: Iraqis, Iraqi expats, people who had done post-conflict reconstruction in places like Bosnia and Timor. We had regional experts, we had people from the region, and we had post-conflict people in all of the departments. We came up with very detailed plan. Some parts of it were very well thought out. The demobilization and deBa’athification in particular was very, very strenuously worked out and argued. It was very good. Others, maybe not quite as good. But it was all there.

The decision from OSD when they were given the lead in late January 2003 was that they wanted no part in the Project for the Future of Iraq and they wanted no part in anyone who had been a part of the Project for the Future of Iraq: academics, Iraqis, U.S. government. If you had been in any way involved in the planning, you could not be part of the OSD effort. And people who were sent over to the OSD from the Project for the Future of Iraq were turned around and sent home. It lacked subtlety.

The OSD – specifically the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Kuwait - did develop the Unified Mission Plan. It’s about an inch thick, as opposed to about three or four feet of binders for the Future project. It’s 25 pages. It was written by a British colonel while we were sitting in Kuwait. It’s beautifully written—the English is just superb. It is basically an outline of tasks, but there’s no way you could call it a plan. And it was never shared interagency. When it was tabled at a staff meeting in Kuwait, the senior representative from USAID and I both asked if it had been shared in Washington. Has this been vetted interagency? What kind of ownership is there on this document?” And we were told, “They’re never going to see it.” Well, how do you get other elements of the government to—forget buy in—implement a plan that they’ve never seen, and they won’t see, and they’re not going to be allowed to see? The last version is stamped “working draft,” and dated 18 April. So yes, we had nothing that a reasonable person would call a plan.