Apart from Feith's absurd comment about timing -- bragging that they'd been talking to people for weeks, even months about their post-conflict participation (oy!) -- nothing he said was objectionable. Although clearly they all thought the Iraqis were going to tolerate being occupied (without it being an occupation, of course) for a good deal longer than has turned out to be the case.

The real issue is how come they didn't do the things they said they were going to do? The Shrill Blog has excerpts from Peter Galbraith's piece in the NYRBs on the bungled transition. He reminds one and all that the Pentagon was the paymaster and deciding how, where and when funds would be spent. And it wasn't as if they were all that bogged down in procurement issues -- they sole-sourced humongous contracts that normally would have required months of competitive bidding to go out. (To the extent they were playing with Iraqi oil revenues rather than US gov't funds, the accounting oversight body for the Development Fund for Iraq want some answers from the US on sole-sourcing contracts. And those answers aren't forthcoming, said a very irritated board in a press release Wednesday. Statement by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board on Iraq, Sept. 8, 2004)

The American public and US troops weren't the only ones relying on the promises these guys were making. The whole brewing crisis over Kirkuk you just wrote about, as Akerman points out, stems in great part from the Kurdish members of the Council devoting great energy and time to negotiating the Kurds' political rights and status under the TAL. The process that's now starting to be implemented doesn't square with what they negotiated. (Again see Galbraith's remarks on the absurdity of the TAL.) We sure didn't do any of the Kurd leaders a favor if we strong-armed them into negotiations and then can't deliver on what was negotiated.

Now that things have handed over to the State/AID folks taking the lead, we're not hearing much about what's happening in the ministries. That might be a good sign. Hopefully some of the inexperienced hacks who are described in Galbraith's article have left the building. It's so incredibly sad, however, that the management of this process was so much worse than could have been imagined. See the first comment to the Galbraith post

My impression is that by June 30 most of the ministries had a pretty decent idea what they wanted to do. That's probably reflected in Negroponte's recent request for reallocating the $18.4 billion to front-load it and spend a lot on "soft" items (salaries, security for officials and staff, institutional & political development, etc). I'd expect the funding proposal is based on adding up the various ministries' requests, as funnelled through the person who is acting as the US liaison at each ministry. State/AID are going to be under huge pressure to get the money spent, but in a way that leaves a paper trail this time. It's unfortunate that the money was such a disaster under the CPA. AID can get money out the door fast if it's really, really urgent. Now their procurement and internal controls people have been burnt, however, it will be much harder, because they'll be putting themselves personally on the line every time they agree to expediting short-cuts.

If the US liaisons are doing their jobs at all properly, they will have an agreed program with each ministry, including which Iraqis are going to have lead responsibility for each program component. Let's hope that the Iraqis will really be running the show ASAP, with the Americans there to get the funds flowing as fast as possible.

The most positive sign that someone in the main economic ministries is getting his act together was in remarks by the IMF's spokesman,Tom Dawson, yesterday in a pre-annual meetings press briefing covering a range of topics. Here's Reuter's summary of the Iraq discussion:

The International Monetary Fund on Thursday said Iraq could have an IMF-backed economic program with financing in place by the end of 2004 following "good progress" made in talks last week in Paris.

But the fund said Iraq will first have to clear its $80 million in arrears to the global lender before aid can flow under an IMF post-conflict facility, which generally comes with fewer conditions than other more formal programs.

"The mission made good progress in discussions on policies that could form the basis of an economic program that could be supported under the emergency post-conflict assistance facility sometime in the last quarter of 2004," IMF spokesman Thomas Dawson told a regular briefing for reporters.

Dawson said further meetings with Iraq's interim government would take place in early October around the IMF's annual meeting in Washington.

Discussions between the IMF and Iraq have taken place outside Iraq since the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, which saw multilateral lenders withdraw their staff from the country for security reasons.

Dawson said a debt deal between Iraq and the Paris Club of sovereign lenders was not necessary for the IMF to lend under its post-conflict facility.

The Fund can't proceed on a loan like that without a reasonably competent counterparty, so somebody's working in Baghdad/ On the Paris Club, the same article in Reuters also reports:

Comments made on Thursday by U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs, John Taylor, suggested an agreement on Iraq's $120 billion in foreign debt was on track for year-end.

"At previous meetings of finance ministers there was agreement to get the Iraq debt settled by the end of this year, so that is the goal, to get a resolution by the end of 2004," Taylor told a media breakfast in Cape Town, South Africa.

Apart from Feith's absurd comment about timing -- bragging that they'd been talking to people for weeks, even months about their post-conflict participation (oy!) -- nothing he said was objectionable. Although clearly they all thought the Iraqis were going to tolerate being occupied (without it being an occupation, of course) for a good deal longer than has turned out to be the case.

As I see it, Feith actually didn't have a plan, just a kind of general sense of what could be done and an acknowledgement that work had been done by other agencies. I get that from comments like "Yeah, health or something," which indicates very little certainty about which ministries are and aren't political. I don't buy the "we didn't know what we were going to find" excuse. How hard could it be to get the story on what the Iraqi ministries were like?

And this suggests just how far behind they were in the process:
"We hope and expect that there will be substantial participation from coalition partners in the work, in the stability operations and in the humanitarian and reconstruction work in Iraq in the event of a war. And we are in the process of reaching out to many countries to get specific on the kind of contributions they want to make and roles they want to play in post-war Iraq. And the same applies to international organizations and NGOs."

And this suggests that he vaguely knew what had to be done but hadn't done it yet, only four weeks before the invasion:
"This is a process where you've got to get more and more specific down to the point where it's absolutely clear who's going to take responsibility for what and who's going to be in the planning, and who's going to deploy, and who's going to commit to what extent, and that's a rolling diplomatic process and it's underway."

All of this suggests a very deep lack of seriousness, I think. It's like the college kid doing his term paper the week before, telling his advisor that he did a search and knows the books are available.

Regarding the Kurds -- I think it will be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle. All of the Kurdish stuff I read is screaming out for independence, and they're pressuring their leaders, whom they view as holding Kurdistan back for political reasons. They're spoiling for a fight.

There's a nagging thought in my head that some of the smarter neoconservatives did not actually intend for everything to go well ... that is, they figured that Iraq would break up on its own, and they literally do see themselves as redrawing the map of the Middle East. Undoing the mistakes made at the Cairo Conference when they drew the current lines. In this view, a brilliant guy like Wolfowitz is saying one thing in public and looking like a screwup, but privately is one or two steps ahead of the game. Let's assume he pretty much considers the Sunni the enemy. So he wants to use the Kurds as a lever to crack open Iran and Syria, creating a new Kurdish state that can be our anchor in the ME. He wants to use the quietism of the Shi'a to undermine Khomeneism in Iran, and wants to create another U.S.-friendly area in the event that we need to takeover the Saudi oil fields.

But that could all just be crazy talk.

A quick comment as I prepare to run out the door -- Galbraith is a paid advisor to one of the Kurdish groups, IIRC. So I would read his comments with that in mind.

Another item about the woeful lack of preparation for an occupation that the neocons themselves anticipated -- by virtue of their grandiose ambitions -- would require years.

James Webb had an op-ed in the WaPost early Sept 2002 asking rhetorically whether we were really ready for a 30-year occupation. In explaining why both active and retired brass were grumbling about the wisdom of a second Iraq war, he wrote:

America's best military leaders know that they are accountable to history not only for how they fight wars, but also for how they prevent them. The greatest military victory of our time -- bringing an expansionist Soviet Union in from the cold while averting a nuclear holocaust -- was accomplished not by an invasion but through decades of intense maneuvering and continuous operations. With respect to the situation in Iraq, they are conscious of two realities that seem to have been lost in the narrow debate about Saddam Hussein himself. The first reality is that wars often have unintended consequences -- ask the Germans, who in World War I were convinced that they would defeat the French in exactly 42 days. The second is that a long-term occupation of Iraq would beyond doubt require an adjustment of force levels elsewhere, and could eventually diminish American influence in other parts of the world.

Other than the flippant criticisms of our "failure" to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of Iraq, but it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay. This reality was the genesis of a rift that goes back to the Gulf War itself, when neoconservatives were vocal in their calls for "a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad." Their expectation is that the United States would not only change Iraq's regime but also remain as a long-term occupation force in an attempt to reconstruct Iraqi society itself.

The connotations of "a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad" show how inapt the comparison is. Our occupation forces never set foot inside Japan until the emperor had formally surrendered and prepared Japanese citizens for our arrival. Nor did MacArthur destroy the Japanese government when he took over as proconsul after World War II. Instead, he was careful to work his changes through it, and took pains to preserve the integrity of Japan's imperial family. Nor is Japanese culture in any way similar to Iraq's. The Japanese are a homogeneous people who place a high premium on respect, and they fully cooperated with MacArthur's forces after having been ordered to do so by the emperor. The Iraqis are a multiethnic people filled with competing factions who in many cases would view a U.S. occupation as infidels invading the cradle of Islam. Indeed, this very bitterness provided Osama bin Laden the grist for his recruitment efforts in Saudi Arabia when the United States kept bases on Saudi soil after the Gulf War.

With a "MacArthurian regency" in mind, how could the Feiths and Perles of this world conduct themselves as they did? It's quite inexplicable. I will grant that one or two Wolfowit-type thinkers may have had a bigger game afoot and may have been less concerned about how the Mid East house of cards would, over the long haul, sort itself out, provided I'd imagine, that we maintained hegemonic status vis a vis the region and its oil. But how could they be sure that at the end of regional upheaval the US would be in the catbird seat?

For the rest of the less sophisticated neocons, I chalk it up to what I've started calling mentally "Shumpeter meets Dr Pangloss." This notion that creative destruction is not only inevitable but an unalloyed good. And the mess that is left from creative destruction gets remade in the best-of-all-worlds fashion if markets are left to themselves to create new structures. This is bad enough when applied to economics, but it seems to be increasingly extended to areas of human endeavor by the Virginia Postrels, whose insights are interesting, but not sound enough to build an entire world view uipon.

This preference for market solutions -- the purer the market the better -- seems to have elevated the market as decisionmaker to a sort of "higher level of legitimacy" -- as if it has some sort merit as "neutral arbiter," as if markets are untouched by human hands.I think it's part of why people like George Soros, who actually understand how markets really work, keep trying to explain that this reification of the market is total nonsense. Markets don't work as smoothly, and adjust towards equilibrium as regularly, as theory would have. They need lubricants in some areas, and sand in the wheels (to use Tobin's metaphor) in others. They certainly aren't neutral. Depending on their structure, they reward and penalize all sorts of preexisting advantages and disadvantages -- as between individuals, companies, sectors, countries, regions -- in the starting endowments of economic factors including labor, financial and intellectual capital, and resources, and a host of intangibles.

I'm trying to put my thoughts together on that mindset as applied to the Iraq invasion -- something along the lines of "beware of what you wish for." Looking at the unintended consequenses in possible turmoil across Middle East/North Africa. Not exactly reverse dominos, maybe more like forest fire. But that's for another day.

Forgot to leave the link for the Webb column. It's on the SFTT site (it's in the WaPost archives by now).

I would say that my intuition is that in this war good change -- the kind that builds lasting institutions -- needs to happen slowly, whereas bad change can be quite rapid indeed.

I keep thinking back to the "Egypt is our best shot and look how little we have to show for it" argument when I read articles like this one. We have the same challenges in reforming the Iraqi nanny state, but with the added bonus of being hated occupiers prosecuting a guerilla war. My pessimistic assessment is that January will not solve the legitimacy problem and that the resulting situation will be no more democratic than that of Egypt, which does have at least a semblance of political parties and a legislature, however weak.

Your "pessimistic" assessment is called realism. In fact, it's rather optimistic in that it doesn't assume a full-blown civil war will be underway by then.

Your comments on Egypt underline how difficult and time-consuming it is to build "real" democracy. And that, in a rather stable social and political setting (some would claim ossified, being part of the problem).

This notion we keep hearing repeated of liberation=freedom=democracy is again part of the "Schumpeter meets Dr Pangloss" world view I keep seeing in so many domains. The question you and I seem to come back to, worrying like a dog with a bone, is -- were the neocons totally naive or complete cynics?

[BTW -- These are the first scribbles on the "beware of what you wish for"/"Shumpeter meets Dr Pangloss" line of thinking. Your reactions are actively solicited.

I'm going to copy the text to a separate post under "Work in Progress -- Musings & Scribbles" so I can keep working on it while leaving this thread more focused on the specifics of planning (and lack thereof) and the Sistani thread on some of the election-specific Shi'a issues.]

The intellectual background of the neocons in the Bush Admin and their pundit/think-tank supporters is as pushers of the "limited government" argument: government just sets the "rules of the road" and makes sure that people generally don't violate the rules at the expense of others. And otherwise, gets out of the way. A fine objective for a mature political and economic system. It's also an instructive concept for a nascent system, with very limited institutional capacity, to set priorities on where it ought to focus that capacity.

Fukuyama pronounces himself horrified that these same people who are critics of state intervention beyond a limited set of roles, primarily because they believe top-down or centrally directed change is both inefficient (incompetent) and distorts optimal outcomes, could undertake such a grandiose experiment in centrally directed change as rebuilding Iraq politically and economically.

Yet they didn't seem to find the disconnect uncomfortable. Is it possible that the reason is their lodestone of political philosophy -- relying on marketplaces of ideas and political and economic power -- overlooks just how messy and uncertain the process is, however. The the invisible hand of the marketplaces of ideas and power -- just like marketplaces for money, goods and services -- may indeed optimize outcomes for the general welfare if they are orderly and transparent markets.

Even so, we shouldn't expect the marketplace to be "tidy" (in Rumsfeld's words) or produce clear outcomes any time soon. But marketplaces get hijacked. Adam Smith was neither the first nor the last to point out that people are always trying to maneuver their way into either cornering/dominating the market or changing the rules for their own benefit. Even more so when the stakes are enormous, as they are when the winds of destruction (creative or otherwise) have come sweeping through a system, and many of the old sources of power and wealth have been destroyed or severely damaged.

It's one thing for Bush/Cheney to appropriate the liberation=freedom=democracy theme for politcial purposes. They and the neocons seem, however, to have bought their own propaganda. Do they truly fail to grasp that major liberalization in the economic sphere and democratizaton in the political sphere are revolutions -- with all the turmoil and violence (socially and economically if not physically) that comes with revolutions. These liberalizing events are not orderly, sequential transfers of power from one group to another who then operate, going forward, under a new, coherent set of "rules of the road".

As more and more people recognize explicitly, the creation of new institutional structures or transformation of old ones is a much longer process -- generational turnover required at the least. But what much of the discussion about democratization seems to ignore is that institutional structures don't simply grow according to the original genetic code they are given at their initial creation. They arise in response to their environment (which at least at the start is a revolutionary one), are shaped by revolutionary outcomes, and in turn shape the environment to come.

This misunderstanding of "nature vs nurture" and the timing mismatch between letting the genie out of the bottle and building reliable, predicatable, orderly institutions, seems to have been at the heart of much of the CPA bungling. Some of them indeed recognized that institutions take time to build -- hence their plans for a 4-5 year CPA control period with gradual handover of authority to Iraqis as they became "ready" to manage specific functions. But Bremer and the CPA were slow to realize they wouldn't have the luxury of time. Rather than create an orderly transformation, they added to disorder by getting rid of the old regime's arrangements and starting down a path of planned sequences of eventually having a good set of "rules of the road" and modern, efficient ministries, legal and political institutions. And when it became clear their days as official controllers were numbered, their priorities were on leaving behind a set of immutable rules and marginalizing/destroying the "anti-order" revolutionary forces. They were creating more vacuums rather than encouraging the Iraqis in favor of establishing an orderly system to start fillingl vacuums that were already created by the overthrow of the regime and the CPA's activities for a year.

Will January solve the legitimacy problem? It's certainly too late for that, if it was ever possible, even with early elections called for by Sistani and others last year. The primary benefit of elections is to start down the road toward legitimacy, at least for a portion of the population.

Elections, and the organization of a government in their aftermath, would hopefully create another arena within which battles for power can focus -- an arena that could lead to some intermediate outcomes that are more constructive than those being "achieved" in the current battles being fought with physical violence. It would also hopefully encourage those battling for power (as distinct from those battling for chaos) to focus organizational energies on something other than physical fighting and intimidation.

The one "bright spot" I see in the current chaos of vacuums the CPA produced is that it certainly reduces the likelihood of a good old-fashioned coup. Those classic levers of national control -- army, secret police and TV broadcasting -- just aren't available to another Saddam.

But hey, I'm just the optimistic type.