September 2006: Bush Administration Did Not Intend on ‘Nation-Building’ in Iraq, Author Writes

In his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, author and New York Times media critic Frank Rich writes that President Bush never entered Iraq with any idea of “nation-building.” Bush “never talked about building a democracy in Iraq” during the planning and marketing of the invasion, Rich writes. “The reason he didn’t talk about it was not that he was consciously trying to keep a hidden, hard-to-sell motive secret. The record shows that, for once, Bush’s private convictions actually did match his public stance. Neither he nor the administration had any intention of doing any nation-building. The war plan was an easy exercise in regime change, a swift surgical procedure, after which the Iraqis would be left to build their own democracy by spontaneous civic combustion, like Eastern Europeans after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Americans would hang around in small numbers, perhaps, to protect the oil ministry—the only institution they did protect after routing Saddam. Every single administration action of the time confirms that nation-building was not in the cards. That’s why General Jay Garner was picked as the top American official after the fall of Baghdad (see January 2003): The White House wanted a short-term military emissary rather than a full-dress occupation administrator because the job description required only that he manage a quick turnaround of power to the Iraqis and an immediate exit for American troops. That’s why [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and the war cabinet bought a Tommy Franks plan to draw down those troops from 130,000 to 30,000 by the fall of 2003. It’s also why the only serious prewar plan for rebuilding Iraq, the State Department’s ‘Future of Iraq’ project, was shelved by the White House (see April 2002-March 2003). General Anthony Zinni’s ‘Desert Crossing’ plan for Iraq occupation, which he bequeathed to Franks, his successor, was also shunted aside (see April-July 1999). Any such bothersome little details were entrusted instead to the Defense Department’s Douglas Feith, whose only (non) qualification was that he had been a loyal provider of cherry-picked Iraq intelligence to [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [Cheney’s then-chief of staff Lewis ‘Scooter’] Libby before the war.… Had nation-building been in the White House’s plan, surely someone would have bothered to investigate what nation was being rebuilt.” Even after Garner’s replacement by Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer (see May 11, 2003), nation-building wasn’t on the agenda. The two heads of “private-sector development” in Iraq were, in Rich’s words, “a former Bush campaign finance chair in Connecticut and a venture capitalist who just happened to be [then-press secretary] Ari Fleischer’s brother.” The CPA was staffed by “twentysomethings with no foreign service experience or knowledge of Arabic simply because they had posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation (see June 25, 2004).… The ‘nation-building’ that America finally did undertake was an improvised initiative, heavier on PR than on achievement, to justify the mission retroactively. Only then did the war’s diehard defenders disingenuously grandfather it in as a noble calling contemplated by the Bush White House from the start.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 213-214]