Now that the Coalition Provisional Authority is closing its doors and transferring sovereignty to Iraq, it is time to consider the many criticisms that have been made of the Bush administration's postwar reconstruction efforts and to separate out real failures from problems that no administration, no matter how well prepared, could have avoided.
Many people have asserted that the administration's problem lay in the fact that the Pentagon, which was responsible for organizing the reconstruction, failed to listen to regional experts in the State Department or the CIA on what to do. But it is a mistake to think that the regional specialists at either of those agencies understood Iraq well enough on the eve of the war to provide specific guidance for the political transition.
Iraq had changed dramatically since our embassy was shut down in 1991, and no American had a good understanding of any post-Saddam Hussein political landscape. For example, the role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as a leader for the Shiite community -- and his relative moderation -- is something we learned only in the months after the war.
The knowledge needed for nation-building tends to be contextual: The kinds of institutions appropriate for a given society -- and the path to building them -- come not from a master nation-building template but from on-the-spot judgments about local circumstances.
The real mistake regarding Iraq was the lack of a proper institutional context for decision-making on the part of the U.S. government. We simply did not have the ability or organization prior to the war to coordinate the enormously complex interagency effort required for reconstruction, although knowledge of how to do this had been painfully learned in earlier nation-building efforts -- from Somalia and Haiti through the Balkans to Afghanistan.
But the bitter rivalry and distrust that developed between the Pentagon, on the one hand, and the State Department and the intelligence community, on the other, led the former to demand sole control over the reconstruction process. The Pentagon, we learned only later, didn't have the capacity to organize things and didn't know what it didn't know.
When Army Gen. Tommy Franks, then head of Central Command, gave a war-plan briefing to the president and his principal advisors that didn't include a so-called Phase IV plan for what to do after the end of hostilities, none of his civilian bosses even thought to ask him where it was.
