6.5 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, January to
March 2003
Between 10
and 12 March, President Bush approved important elements of the
US
post-conflict
plan:
•
a policy of
“light” de-Ba’athification that would preserve Iraq’s
administrative
capacity;
•
use of the
Iraqi Army as a labour force for reconstruction, but not
its
demobilisation;
•
the transfer
of governance authority to an Iraq Interim Authority (IIA) with
Iraqi
exiles and
Kurdish groups at its core, and the Coalition determining the pace
at
which power
was transferred.
On 10
March, Lieutenant General (retired) Jay Garner, Head of the Office
of
Reconstruction
and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), briefed President Bush on
ORHA’s
post-conflict
plan, warning that: “a tremendous amount of work was still
necessary
to make the
inter-agency post-war plans operational”.403
He
identified three priorities:
funding for
Iraq’s public service, police and army; the rapid deployment of
“international
stability
forces” after the fall of Saddam Hussein; and the need to use the
Iraqi Army for
reconstruction.
The President authorised Lt Gen Garner’s proposal to use the Iraqi
Army
“to
populate a large labor force for reconstruction
efforts”.
The same
day, Mr Frank Miller, NSC Senior Director for Defense Policy
and Arms Control,
secured
President Bush’s agreement to a policy of “light”
de-Ba’athification in order to
preserve
Iraq’s administrative capacity.
Two days
later, on 12 March, Mr Douglas Feith, US Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy,
briefed
President Bush that the Iraqi Army would not be demobilised. He
also proposed
the
transfer of power “shortly after Saddam’s fall” to an IIA. Iraqi
exiles and Kurdish groups
would
become the core of the IIA, working in partnership with the
Coalition’s transitional
authority
so that Iraqi citizens would have some political control from the
outset, with the
Coalition
determining the pace at which power was transferred.
President
Bush endorsed the plan. Hard
Lessons observed
that the plan assumed Iraqi
governmental
institutions would emerge from the war reasonably intact and that
the plan’s
implementation
was therefore dependent on the course of the war.
The
post-conflict demobilisation of the Iraqi Army is addressed in
Section 12.1.
945.
After talks
in Washington on 13 and 14 March, UK officials suggested
that
UK/US
thinking on the role of the UN was “80 percent
congruent”.
946.
Sir David
Manning was informed that the principal point of difference
was
US
resistance to a UN representative exercising control over the
transitional
administration.
403
Bowen SW
Jr. Hard
Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. U.S.
Government Printing
Office, 2009.
483