Posted on 07/02/2003 9:16:49 PM PDT by chasio649
WASHINGTON, July 1 (UPI) -- If retired Army Lt. Gen Jay Garner knew in January what he knows now, Baghdad might be a very different place.
He would have brought with him a telephone system for Iraqi civilians to use so they could instantly communicate with one another and with the Americans running the government. He would have brought a police-training force to rapidly get the law on the street. And he would have brought more cash to stimulate the economy and win the allegiance of Iraqis hard hit by years of sanctions.
"If I knew then what I know now I'd try to have that pre-packaged," Garner told United Press International in an interview Friday.
Garner worked on reconstruction plans for Iraq from January until June. He defies those who label his time in Baghdad -- six weeks on the ground there -- a failure. What he was, he says, was a victim of the war's overwhelming success.
His 200-person strong organization, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs, was girded for a massive humanitarian crisis, for oil fires, for the outbreak of disease. When these crises didn't materialize, much of the planning and infrastructure he built went untapped.
"We thought there would be a lot of work in the humanitarian side," Garner said.
"Everyone would have been loving us if people had been dying, (if) we'd been handing out medicine, and it would have been a great story," he said.
Garner came to the job with what was thought to be a similar mission under his belt -- Operation Provide Comfort, a largely successful humanitarian relief operation for Iraq's Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, who were targets of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons campaign 12 years ago.
The only common thread, Garner said, "was chaos."
The speed with which the just-concluded war was won, the way large Army formations skirted cities and avoided mass civilian casualties and the tight security at oil fields added up to no humanitarian crisis.
"You've got to give credit for the bullets that were dodged ... to (Land Component Commander) Lt. Gen. Dave McKiernan," Garner said. "I think they rang Saddam Hussein's bell Day One."
With a massive refugee and food crisis averted, ORHA was not prepared for the devastation wrought by looters who stripped buildings of not just the traditional televisions and air conditioners, but also electrical wiring and plumbing. The looting and arson destroyed 17 of the 21 government ministry buildings Garner had planned to use.
Most of the damage was done before his team arrived in Baghdad.
"I was the recipient of the looting," Garner said.
He doesn't think the U.S. military is to blame for not stopping it, either.
"The looting began as troops got to Baghdad. If you are trigger-puller for the 3rd (Infantry Division) and you've been fighting a continuous combat for close to 20 days and you are there and looting is going on, are you going to shoot a kid carrying a TV out of the building? Hell, no," Garner said.
"I spent 35 years in the Army and I marched off to the sound of guns three times. And I don't know how to do combat operations and law-enforcement operations simultaneously. I could do combat for you; I could do law enforcement but I can't do both of those at the same time. I don't know how to do it."
He saw looting in northern Iraq. This was different.
"I'm not a looting expert. I'm not CINC-Looting," he said, referring to the initials for commander in chief. "What do you know about looting? I know that we loot in this country and after it is over everyone is mad, and the storeowner replaces the window and goes back to work.
"And I know that my experience in Provide Comfort is I didn't like that and they tore the building up a little bit but what I did I put some stuff back in and they all went back to work.
"What happened in Baghdad is they pulled all the wiring out of it, the plumbing out of it they completely stripped the building and they set it on fire. So I don't think that was expected."
Did someone fail in not expecting the post-war chaos? It is a question with which critics of the war have plagued the Bush administration and Pentagon. As the aggressor in the conflict -- no matter the perceived threat posed by Saddam and his alleged arsenal of chemical and biological weapons -- international law requires invaders to provide for the physical well-being and safety of the conquered.
"No," Garner said. "I think any time you do something like this, hundreds of things come up that, you say I didn't think that would happen. There's nothing wrong with this. That's why we're not monkeys, we're humans. We work through that."
The outrage and emphasis on the looting is overwrought, Garner seems to think.
"We don't have a boot on our neck and we loot the hell out of this country. So what's the difference?" Garner asked.
Garner acknowledges physical reconstruction was delayed. He blames, in part, international politics that prevented him from inking the deals he knew he would need.
"I don't want you to take this as criticism -- it's the American way of doing business and I don't think it needs to change -- but what happened to us is we had 13 major reconstruction contracts that do everything from building roads to rebuilding schools and putting local governments in place to training police. We had 13 of them. And 10 of them didn't get signed till after the war started. And the biggest one, the one with all the money in it with large amounts of physical reconstruction, that didn't get signed until ... the first or second week of May. And that was a function of a lot of things, (particularly) when the money got appropriated.
"And we were in a dicey game with the U.N. (Security Council) at that time and you kind of have to watch how much post-war stuff you talk about before the war starts."
Right up until the war began March 19, the Bush administration repeatedly denied that invasion was inevitable. Awarding reconstruction contracts -- even as a cautionary measure -- would have fueled the notion the war was a forgone conclusion.
"That's what happened here," Garner said. "Huge reconstruction didn't start immediately because the contract teams weren't there to do it."
In Garner's opinion, the problem with the first six weeks was not ORHA's -- it was outsiders' perceptions of how fast rebuilding should go, and their impatience with the process.
"'It's 30 days since Yorktown, so where's the Constitution?'" he asked. "It just doesn't happen fast, it can't happen fast, other than the humanitarian piece."
Garner felt the pressure of global impatience for results.
"Without you interpreting this as criticism of either (the Defense Department) or our government process which I don't mean at all, I think one of the great success of the British empire was for 200 years they took a guy and they said, 'You are in charge of this' and then two years later he came back and have them a report," he said.
Garner grades himself a "C" for his stewardship of ORHA and Iraq. He gives his team higher marks -- a "B."
"We are all Monday-morning quarterbacks and you go through something and you look back on it and think. 'Well, gee, I would have done that a little differently.'
"I don't think we failed at anything," he said.
Garner believes Iraq will be well on its feet in two years and an "entirely different country" in five -- one that might inspire its neighbors to follow suit into democracy and free-market economies.
"What the macro-thing here is if we are successful, and we will be, we're going to change the entire landscape of the Middle East -- not by what we are going to do in the Middle East but by the example of what Iraq is going to become," Garner said.
"Because you have a democratic government in Iraq, you have a good economy in Iraq and you got the money to rebuild things and you are electing your own form of government and if you don't like them you can throw them out at the will of the people," he said. "That's happening in Iraq and you're sitting in Iran and seeing that, you're sitting in Syria and seeing that, in Saudi Arabia, Egypt looking at that: that's going to change the whole landscape.
"Not by us doing anything to these other countries but by us taking care of this one country."
Looking back, Garner says he would not change the decision to keep U.N. aid organizations out of the country immediately after the war despite their post-conflict expertise. He takes a dim view of the organization.
"If the U.N. had its way, Saddam Hussein would still be killing people down in the killing fields and still be hanging people from meat hooks and all that kind of stuff," Garner said. "Everybody is mad at Tony Blair and they are all mad at the president (Bush) because they don't have weapons of mass destruction but they are not mad at the U.N., and they are not mad at (French President) Jacques Chirac.
"And if there are two organizations I think that you should hold accountable, one is the U.N. who never found anything (weapons of mass destruction) although they looked, No. 1, and would have everything the way it is right now. He'd (Saddam) still be in place. And Jacques Chirac who would have kept Saddam Hussein in place with the deaths of thousands of Iraqis in order to keep a few French contracts in place."
The U.N. Security Council, which is separate from the secretariat and the humanitarian agencies under its umbrella, slowed the lifting of economic sanctions that prevented Iraq from selling oil on the open market. The sanctions were intended to cripple Saddam's government. When he was ousted, the United States sought swift U.N. approval to lift the sanctions -- oil revenues being intrinsic to funding reconstruction -- but was stymied by France, which proposed lifting the sanctions only when it could be proven that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"I think there is a need for a U.N. function," Garner said. "I don't think the U.N. does things very well."
Garner worked with Kurds and Shiites whose families Saddam gassed with lethal chemicals and so brings a very personal passion to his belief in the former Iraqi leader's evil, comparing him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
"Now what you've got: you've got Blair and Bush who unlike the leaders in the late '30s who didn't take on Hitler, they took on Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein is equal to Hitler," he said.
The so-far fruitless search for evidence of chemical or biological weapons in Saddam's arsenal does not concern Garner.
"I personally don't care," he said. "If you went and stood in those killing fields and look at those genocides that alone was enough to take issue," he said. "We should have done this earlier, is what you would have said."
Every conversation he had with Iraqis -- from Shiite clerics to a man on the street selling produce -- centered on two things, he said. They'd "gripe" about the electricity and the water, and the lack of jobs. He said he'd explain what was being done in each sector.
"Reasonable people, they listen to you. But at the end of all that, they all said, 'thank Mr. George Bush for taking away Saddam Hussein,'" Garner said. "And I don't like the words 'silent majority,' but the silent majority in Iraq is very pro-what happened. And they don't want to see us leave until everything has been put back together. They don't want to see us leave."
Garner left Baghdad June 1. He was replaced by career diplomat L. Paul Bremer on May 12.
"The guy's got at least the third-hardest job in the world behind Bush and Blair and it may even be harder than theirs. And he's doing it. He's doing a good job of it," Garner said.
Both Garner and Bremer deny that Garner was fired, a popular perception given his replacement just 3-1/2 weeks after he arrived. In fact, his tenure had always been planned to be short-term, and when he briefed reporters in the spring he acknowledged a civilian administrator may be installed above him.
Garner said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called him his first night in Baghdad to inform him of Bremer's selection as the presidential envoy.
"And I said, 'Fine do you want me to leave now?' and he said, 'No, stay there and transition, you and he work out the transition.'"
Bremer is a public fan of Garner's.
"Jay did a superb job under absolutely extraordinary conditions. You see me now sitting in a place where there's light and water. His people worked in this place for three weeks by candlelight with no air conditioning, no water," Bremer said on CNN Sunday. "And all of America owes Jay a debt of real gratitude."
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