The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
54.
The
consolidation of post-conflict planning in ORHA led to a
“turbulent” period of
55.
Mr Frank
Miller, NSC Senior Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control,
who in
summer 2002
had been appointed to head the NSC Executive Steering Group on
Iraq
in order to
“jump-start” US post-war planning (see Section 6.4), recalled DoD
officials
saying “you
guys stay out, we don’t need your help”.29
56.
Mr James
Kunder, acting Deputy Administrator of USAID, described USAID
as
“stunned”
by the sudden disappearance of the NSC Humanitarian Working Group
led by
Mr Elliot
Abrams, NSC Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and
International
Organizations.
57.
Hard
Lessons,
Mr Stuart Bowen’s account, as US Inspector General for
Iraq
Reconstruction,
of the US experience of reconstruction between 2002 and
2008,
explained
that Lieutenant General (retired) Jay Garner, Head of ORHA, faced a
range
of challenges.30
They
included:
•
the
practical tasks of staffing, housing and equipping the new
organisation;
•
lack of
access to material produced by the earlier inter-agency planning
process;
•
ambiguity
in the division of responsibilities between ORHA and
Joint
TaskForce 4
(JTF-4), the separate post-conflict planning unit embedded
in
CENTCOM;
and
•
disagreement
with General Tommy Franks, Commander-in-Chief CENTCOM,
over ORHA’s
operational independence from CENTCOM.
58.
Against that
difficult background, Lt Gen Garner succeeded in organising
ORHA
into three
“pillars”: humanitarian assistance, civil administration and
reconstruction.
The
humanitarian pillar took on the food programme and disaster relief
from the
NSC
Humanitarian Working Group. The reconstruction pillar started using
contracts
negotiated
by USAID to engage technical experts. The civil administration
pillar faced
the
difficulty of finding credible information about public services
and ministry functions
in Iraq and
was the least well developed of the three.
59.
Ms Short
described the decision to make the Pentagon responsible for all
post-
conflict
planning as “stunning”.31
She told
the Inquiry:
“… if you
then wanted the world to come together and support the
reconstruction
of Iraq,
you needed … the military to do their bit, and then you needed to
bring
28
Bowen SW
Jr. Hard
Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. U.S.
Government Printing
Office, 2009.
29
Bowen SW
Jr. Hard
Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. U.S.
Government Printing
Office, 2009.
30
Bowen SW
Jr. Hard
Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. U.S.
Government Printing
Office, 2009.
31
Public
hearing, 2 February 2010, page 58.
320