Rice supplants Rumsfeld on RECONSTRUCTION

The Financial Times says that Bush has decided that the State Department would lead all US post-conflict reconstruction, a move that supersedes the controversial decision to give that task to the Pentagon in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

Back then, State Department experts who had planned for the post-war period were pushed aside by Pentagon officials, including defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who strongly resisted the notion of nation-building.

The appointment of L. Paul Bremer and Bremer’s subsequent disastrous tenure as head of the Coalition Authority has become canonical writ on how not to staff and run a complex nation-building operation. But the ludicrous extent of the Pentagon’s wrongheadedness across the board has made its amateur misdeeds the stuff of legend that would be hilarious were it not so arrogant and tragic.

As Scott McConnell writes in a review of George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate:

It is one thing to relate how Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon made no plans for post-invasion contingencies, even as it succeeded in blocking knowledgeable military and State Department officials from the postwar planning process. Or to describe how Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith—entrusted by Rumsfeld to prepare for the post-invasion—appointed his former law partner Michael Mobbs, a man with no relevant experience, to head civil administration in postwar Baghdad, and this personality—after clearing the matter with Scooter Libby —awarded Halliburton a $7 billion no-bid contract.

But it is even better to learn that Mobbs first showed up in the region “looking as if he were dressed for West Palm Beach” and, when he was unable to reach any decisions about civil administration, abandoned Baghdad to hang out in the Kurdish area with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi exiles.

The good news is that Mr Bush’s speeches this past week have each included an usually candid admission of the difficulties the US has faced in Iraq. On Wednesday he reiterated in particularly blunt terms that “it is true that much of the [pre-war] intelligence turned out to be wrong”.

A former senior official involved in what he called the “chaos” of post-war reconstruction efforts in Iraq said yesterday’s announcement also affirmed the growing power and influence of Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state.



It will be a while before the shake-out from such a switch in responsibility for reconstruction takes place, if the Administration is truly serious about nation-building, something that Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld never were.

The elevation of Rice, even symbolically, by the President’s new directive has the effect of an implied slap on the wrists of Rumsfeld and his political protector Cheney.

Cheney has always been in the vanguard of policy-making in this Administration. Whether Cheney will continue his energetic lobbying efforts on the Hill concerning controversial topics such as the use of torture remains to be seen.

The time may have arrived when Cheney and his escort Rumsfeld may have to get off their high horses and defer to Rice and the State Department in carrying out foreign policy.