[Mb-civic] Passing the Dinar By JOHN TIERNEY-NYTimes

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Passing the Dinar
By JOHN TIERNEY

Two months before the Iraq war began, David Kay reported to the Pentagon for
a job in the agency being formed to run postwar Iraq. Kay, a former Defense
Department scientist and weapons inspector in Iraq, was supposed to oversee
the police.

He assumed this meant preparing for the looting and crime to be expected
when any regime collapsed. But those problems didn't seem to be on anyone
else's mind, he told me, recalling his first day on the job.

"I said our first priority should be to establish order quickly, but that
was considered a peripheral issue," he said. "The attitude was that it's not
a problem, and if something happens the military will deal with it. I had
one of the worst feelings ever in my gut, that this was going over a cliff."

On his second day on the job, he resigned ‹ an excellent career move in
retrospect, although Kay doesn't believe it took any special clairvoyance.
There were tough questions before the war, like figuring out whether Saddam
had W.M.D. or forecasting the strength of the insurgency. But the looting
and disorder were easily predictable, and Kay wasn't the only one making the
predictions, as Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor document in their
new book on the war, "Cobra II."

Before the war, Dick Mayer, a former policeman working for the Justice
Department, came up with a plan to send in thousands of international police
officers to maintain order after the invasion. But Pentagon officials
bristled at the expense, and the White House rejected the plan.

A similar plan was proposed in a prewar briefing at the Pentagon by Robert
Perito, a veteran of peacekeeping operations in other countries. He told the
Defense Policy Board, the advisory group led by Richard Perle, that neither
Iraqi authorities nor American soldiers could be counted on to maintain
order, and that the U.S. should send in a constabulary force as soon as it
occupied Iraq.

"The group at the Pentagon liked the concept and said it was a worthwhile
thing to do," Perito told me. "But as one member put it, 'Not this war.'
Their feeling was that the conflict in Iraq would be over so soon and things
would be back to normal so quickly that it wasn't worth the effort."

Some Pentagon officials did warn of civil disorder and crime, but they
didn't do anything about it. They passed the buck to Gen. Tommy Franks, even
though he didn't have enough troops or money for the job and showed little
interest in postwar planning. He simply assured President Bush that there
would be a "lord mayor" in each city and large town to deal with civilian
problems.

Looting, crime, mayhem ‹ that was always someone else's department. The
buck-passing reached its most absurd level at a briefing in the Situation
Room just before the invasion, when Bush heard about the postwar plan to
rely on Iraqis for law enforcement. According to Gordon and Trainor, the
president was told of an intelligence report concluding that the Iraqi
police "appeared to have extensive professional training."

That was like concluding that Inspector Clouseau appeared to be a master
detective. During Saddam's era, when his security forces were the prime
enforcers of order, the Iraqi police were notorious for corruption and
lethargy. Officers waited for citizens to report crimes and expected bribes
for investigating them. To the police, preventing crime, or even doing
street patrols, was not their job.

When the regime fell, they didn't even protect their own police stations
against the mobs of looters, a lack of professionalism that came as no
surprise to the Iraqis I encountered shortly after the invasion. Nor were
they surprised by the initial outbreak of violence against the buildings
built by an oppressive regime.

But they were shocked at how little the Americans did in response. The
looting went on so long that it became a regular job. Thieves methodically
dismantled office towers, removing wires, pipes, walls, floors, escalators.
In the summer of 2003, they took the "broken windows" theory of social
disorder to a new level ‹ to broken buildings ‹ and Iraq has been paying the
price ever since.

That summer, as Iraqis watched looters and criminals taking control, they
kept asking why nobody put a stop to the crime. The answer from officials in
Washington, it turns out, is the same one that would have been given by the
old Iraqi police: not my job.

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