Reconstructing Eden: a Comprehensive Plan for the Post-War Political and Economic Development of Iraq - Book Review

Parameters, Winter, 2003 by Jeffrey Record

By Thomas E. White, Robert C. Kelly, John M. Cape, and Denise Youngblood Coleman. Houston, Tex.: CountryWatch, 2003. 380 pages. $29.95.

That the Bush Administration, and more specifically the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, made faulty assumptions about postwar Iraq and failed to plan properly for Iraq's reconstruction are no longer matters of opinion.

The "liberation" scenario peddled by the Defense Department's neo-conservative naifs before the war assumed swift and clean decapitation of the Ba'athist leadership, inheritance of functioning government ministries and police forces, rapidly restorable oil production and electric power, and a perpetually grateful Iraqi people all yearning to be Madisonians. It seems never to have occurred to the "neocons" that Operation Iraqi Freedom might morph into open-ended counterinsurgency warfare and even end up transforming Iraq into a new Mecca for every Islamist jihadist seeking to spill American blood. It certainly never occurred to them that ground force levels sufficient to overthrow Saddam Hussein (apparently still alive and as defiant as ever) would be insufficient to control Iraq after major combat operations ceased. (MacArthur entered Japan in 1945 with 500,000 troops and the authority of the Emperor behind him; during the subsequent seven years of US military rule, there was not a single act of politically motivated violence against American occupation forces.)

In Reconstructing Eden, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White, assisted by three coauthors from CountryWatch, Inc., which provides strategic overviews and macroeconomic forecasts on each of the world's 192 countries, offers a comprehensive, step-by-step, and often imaginative plan for transforming Iraq into a prosperous democracy. The book's starting point is that "the United States' advantage on the battlefield does not necessarily extend to nation-building," and that the situation in Iraq "threatens to turn what was a major military victory into a potential humanitarian, political, and economic disaster."

Though too much of the book is devoted to a recitation of Iraq's history and the diplomatic run-up to the war, White et al. have a clear and consistent vision of Iraq's future and how to get from here to there. They would restore Iraq's economy via reconstruction and expansion of its oil sector (including pulling the country out of OPEC in order to maximize Iraqi production); create an Iraqi National Oil Company with shares equally distributed to every Iraqi citizen; repudiate much of Iraq's crushing debt; and form a federal government that would permit considerable local and sectarian autonomy. They would also guarantee Iraq's future security by essentially converting the country into a US military protectorate; US bases and forces would be retained in Iraq, and an Iraqi army dependent on US training and equipment would be created.

One can take issue with some of the particulars of the plan, especially the retention of a US garrison in Iraq. But Reconstructing Eden, like a pre-war US Army War College study (Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario, February 2003), underscores the presence in the United States of enormous expertise on both Iraq and nation-building. Why was this expertise not tapped early on and in depth by the civilians at the Pentagon who were pushing for war? Because they were charmed by the self-serving claims of ambitious Iraqi exiles in the United States? Because the liberation scenario seemingly precluded the need for any comprehensive planning for postwar Iraq? Because of a conviction that the US armed services "don't do windows"?

Certainly in retrospect, designating the Defense Department to be the lead agency in postwar Iraq appears to have been a serious mistake. The State Department started earlier and spent a lot more time and energy on planning, anticipating many of the very problems the United States has encountered in postwar Iraq that have caught the Pentagon so off guard. But the State Department was ignored--yet one more piece of evidence of the growing militarization of US foreign policy.

Unfortunately, neither White's plan nor any other reconstruction plan has much hope of enduring success in the absence of military security and the provision of such basic public services as electricity, potable water, and police protection. Power and drinking water are slowly being restored, but security remains dangerously problematic. In a country of easy access to vast quantities of military small arms and ammunition, the combination of exploding crime, rapidly forming sectarian militias, and growing irregular warfare directed against Americans, collaborating Iraqis, economic infrastructure, and United Nations personnel brings to mind Lebanon of the early 1980s, from which US forces were humiliatingly driven. (To be sure, US interests and force strength in Iraq are far greater than they ever were in Lebanon.)