State Department Doesn’t Leave Dock

The ship of State, Department that is, is increasingly revealed as failing to leave port to fulfill its role in the Iraq war.

My column in today’s Examiner, “U.S. Government Can’t Even Mobilize Itself for Iraq,” details the State Department as “slow, understaffed and underexperienced to fill their needed role in the war in Iraq.”

The President’s new emphasis on counterinsurgency, via General Petraeus, appears off to a promising start, but behind it is required the localized help by Provincial Reconstruction Teams to build better Iraqi leadership and governance and to coordinate quick results civil-military reconstruction projects that will make security gains more than ephemeral.

State, and other civilian agencies, as the Iraq Study Group pointed out, are not up to their task, after over three years of war, and despite the painfully learned and forgotten experience of its criticalness in Vietnam almost four decades ago.

Saturday, the Washington Post dug deeper into how this failure came to be, “Iraq Rebuilding Short on Qualified Civilians.”

By the fall of 2003, Lugar [then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] had grown worried about the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq. L. Paul Bremer, who was running the occupation government in Baghdad, had been pleading for more staffers with skills in post-conflict rebuilding -- people who could repair the electricity infrastructure, rehabilitate hospitals, retrain the police. Bremer urged Cabinet secretaries to send experts in their departments to Iraq. Some did; others blew him off. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were recruiting young Republican Party loyalists for tours in Iraq. Many of them lacked reconstruction experience, but they were willing to work in Baghdad….

Neither the administration nor Congress took the need seriously enough to fund the effort.

"There was this perverse cycle that began," he recalled. "The legislative staff at State would say, 'The Hill doesn't like this, therefore we shouldn't ask for much because we're not going to get it.' Then you had the Hill saying, 'The administration hasn't made this a priority so we're not going to fund it.' "

Defense saw the need to build a civilian reconstruction corps, and offered to fund it out of its budget, but both it and State emphasized other geography than Iraq:

Eventually, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, persuaded Congress to allow the Pentagon to transfer up to $100 million to State for post-conflict civilian deployments. But Defense and State couldn't agree where to spend the money. Defense wanted much of it spent on stabilization operations in Haiti. State wanted to use it to help in the aftermath of last summer's war in Lebanon, officials on both sides recalled.

So, today, we’re maybe just getting around to funding and staffing the State Department Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization (SCRS).

Today, the SCRS corps that Pascual envisioned as a rapid-response force with 200 federal employees ready to deploy has just 11 people on active duty.

Lugar and Biden reintroduced their bill this week. It mandates the formation of a 250-person active-duty response unit drawn from the federal government and the creation of a 2,000-strong civilian reserve corps. It also authorizes $145 million to fund the operation.
"Hopefully," Lugar said, "we've come to a point where we finally realize we need to do this."

New Republic senior editor Lawrence Kaplan asked, “What if they threw a war and nobody came?” in describing this failure of State and other civilian agencies to leave dock for Iraq. Some of the disappointing results in Iraq are evident. And, some to come, will be due to the tugboat that wouldn’t and left port too late.