Occupational Hazards

Washington hoped to maintain the basic administrative structure of Saddam's years, with Iraq divided into 18 provinces and governed by a strong central government. The Kurds insisted on recognition of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which had run parts of the Iraqi north for 13 years, and on expansion of their territory to include Kirkuk. They turned out to be successful bargainers. Although the contentious issue of Kirkuk was postponed, a form of federalism defined largely in Kurdish terms -- allowing for a highly autonomous KRG -- was written into the TAL. An article in the TAL gives the three Kurdish provinces, as well as others, the right to reject the constitution that is to be drafted by the new assembly and put to a nationwide referendum. The provision is controversial, but Iraq is expected to operate under the TAL until the new constitution is adopted.

In return, the Kurds agreed to the creation of a strong, central post of prime minister to be held by a Shiite. But some Shiites also began to demand the right to form semiautonomous regions in the south, where they dominate, starting with Basra and its neighboring provinces. Because their request raised the possibility that Iraq might fragment into partly independent subnational units based on ethnic and sectarian identity rather than geography, it ran into considerable opposition in some quarters. Iraq had always been unified, and its unity had been the bedrock of the Baathists' nationalist ideology. Defining Iraq's federal structure was, and still is, at the forefront of constitutional discussions.

Diamond also shows how time constraints shaped the electoral law that a special UN electoral team (which Washington had invited to help run the election) proposed. Diamond favored a mixed system of proportional representation based on districts using provincial boundaries, which would have ensured greater representativeness of local constituencies. But any such districting would have required a lengthy and complicated census, especially in Kurdish areas and Kirkuk, so in the interest of time, the UN adopted a single, nationwide district. Diamond feared that such a system would exclude Sunni areas, threatened by the insurgency and an electoral boycott, and contribute to ethnic and sectarian polarization among the electorate. In retrospect, his concerns were prescient.

Meanwhile, according to Diamond, the CPA was mismanaging the militias in the south. Its lack of control became very clear in April 2004, after the outbreak of twin insurgencies, one led by ex-Baathists, the other by Muqtada al-Sadr. By then, the militias had multiplied: Sadr's Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and the Kurdish Pesh Merga, to mention a few. The plan was to disband these groups or incorporate them into the newly emerging national army, but in some cases they were merely donning a new uniform. "We are taking Pesh units and slapping an ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] label on them," one U.S. Army officer told Diamond. The main challenge came from Sadr. Lacking sufficient military forces, Washington refused to confront him in time to avoid a conflict. Diamond left Iraq just as the country was turning particularly violent.

Diamond is also unsparing in his criticism of Washington's broader Iraq policy. "Mistakes were made at virtually every turn," he charges, ensuring that "a decisive and potentially historic military victory" became a failure. The Iraq project has become "one of the greatest overseas blunders in [U.S.] history." Although the mistakes Diamond points out are familiar by now, they are noteworthy. They include purging the Baath Party, disbanding the army, invading Iraq with too few forces to maintain security, letting the Pentagon set the strategy for postwar Iraq, and failing to plan effectively for peace. Diamond excoriates civilian Pentagon leaders for not listening to outside advice, especially the State Department's "Future of Iraq" project (a main subject of Phillips' book). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld frowned on nation building, and the White House was eager to downplay the sacrifices it might require of the American public. The Bush administration wanted to believe that the insurgency in Iraq would be limited and that Washington could rapidly turn over the country's management to pro-U.S. Iraqi exiles.

Occupation did bring some benefits -- new political parties, a stronger civil society, and a less dogmatic educational system -- but these benefits did not, in Diamond's view, outweigh the negatives. The collapse of public order in the immediate aftermath of the war devastated Iraq's infrastructure and opened the door to terrorists, feeding the insurgency and the chronic disorder that have stunted progress. The U.S. forces were always short of troops; the civilian team was underresourced, with too few people who knew the local language and culture. The Bush administration displayed too much hubris and engaged in too much wishful thinking. For Diamond, the administration's worst sin was not going to war, but going so unprepared.

BEST PRACTICES

By and large, Phillips agrees. Now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the deputy director of the council's Center for Preventive Action, Phillips was a senior adviser to the State Department on the Future of Iraq project from April 2002 to September 2003. His professional interest and the focus of his book are nation building. Having accepted Bush's security rationale for the war in Iraq, he is less critical of the invasion itself than of the administration's handling of the postwar stabilization and democratization program. He wants to derive from Washington's blunders in Iraq more general lessons about the transition from authoritarianism to democracy because, in his view, the U.S. government will use military force to eliminate rogue regimes again.