LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

Collins
While wiser heads had predicted a short honeymoon, 120 many officials
such as Abizaid, Feith, Khalilzad, and Garner wanted a quick turnover of
governmental authority to Iraqis. Indeed, this was the plan approved by
President Bush just days before the invasion. It did not come to pass. There
were significant situational difficulties. There was no Iraqi equivalent of a
Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. An international conference to legitimize
an appointed government, as the UN-sponsored Bonn Conference did with
Afghanistan, proved difficult to organize in the prevailing international climate.
Many Iraqis were wary of a rapid turnover becoming Ba’athism without
Saddam. Others worried about Shia domination. The Kurds worried about
both of these scenarios and also kept one eye on Turkey. 121 Throughout it all,
the rivalry between Iraqi “externals,” such as Ahmed Chalabi, and “internals”
was also a factor. In a similar vein, the few hundred Iraqi National Congress
exiles led by Chalabi were not well or widely employed and accomplished
little when they were brought into theater to help put an Iraqi face on coalition
efforts. To complicate matters, there was another group of externals that
had sought shelter in Iran during Saddam’s regime. By mid-May 2003, any
sense that Western-based Iraqi exiles or other externals—strongly distrusted
in any event by the CIA and Department of State—might come to lead Iraq
had evaporated in the spring heat.
The rapid turnover of power to Iraqis was key to the U.S. postwar plan,
but it could not be arranged in advance or imposed by fiat. Khalilzad and Garner
wanted to begin by holding a nationwide meeting of notables on May 15,
2003, a follow-up to three previous conferences in February and April 2003.
Bremer, who had supplanted both of these officials, thought that such a meeting
would be risky and canceled it; he also doubted the move to turn over
elements of governmental authority rapidly to some sort of interim Iraqi body.
In addition, he asked the President to end Khalilzad’s status as a Presidential
envoy under the premise that having two envoys would be confusing. However,
removing Khalilzad took away the administration’s de facto representative
to all elements of Iraqi society. Khalilzad’s popularity in Iraq and his status as
an empathetic American of Muslim background were impossible to duplicate.
Powell and Khalilzad were both surprised by this personnel shift, which was
proposed by Bremer and approved by the President without benefit of interagency
deliberation. 122
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