Rice not 'that self-reflective' about Iraq mistakes Jason Rhyne

Published: Friday November 9, 2007



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Print This Email This Security problems currently plaguing US-occupied Iraq are due to in part to a mistake in strategy made prior to the invasion, according to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who says local Iraqi leaders should have played a larger role in US planning. Rice describes herself in an interview with Newsweek's Michael Hirsch as not "that self-reflective." "I'm sure there are lots of things we might have done better," she said. "I'll give you one with Iraq. If I had to do it all over again, we would have had the balance between center, local and provincial better. But that's the kind of thing you learn over time." Hirsch writes that although Rice has conceded previously that "tactical" mistakes have been made in Iraq, specifics have been scant. While still maintaining that the creation of a democratic central government in Iraq was "going to be judged very well" over time, Rice said the process could have been significantly aided with a more localized approach: "I think we didn't identify a lot of the kind of provincial and local leaders that might have been able to deliver services as well as politics on a more localized level early on," she said. But Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority's administrator in Iraq through 2004, told Newsweek that he'd done all he could -- with the resources he had -- to reach out to local leaders. "It's important to remember that we had what we called governance support teams in all of the provincial capitals by the fall of 2003," Bremer remarked. "We certainly had the concept there. Could we have done more? We were chronically understaffed throughout the CPA. We never had enough in the provinces. So I don't really know." Bremer lays a portion of the blame on Sunni leaders reluctant to give up their power in Iraqi provinces -- but even Bremer acknowledges that the US could have increased its efforts to bring them to the negotiating table. "Could they have come to that solution in 2004?" he asked. "I devoutly wished they had. That's not to say we couldn't have done more."" But Bush administration critics say Rice's acknowledgment of error is too little too late. "The overarching comment you can make about administration policy in Iraq is not that they haven't learned, it's that they've always been behind the curve," Larry Diamond, a scholar from the Hoover Institution and a one-time advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, told Newsweek. "And that at every historical moment they've been racing to catch up with reality." Another Iraq expert, Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University, voiced similar criticisms to the magazine. "If you look at Saddam's rule, he knew very well how important local and tribal leaders were," Yaphe said. "It seems to me anybody in that area understands that full well. That's how that system has operated there for a long time." Rice, however, said that the need for such a plan wasn't necessarily known at the time of the invasion. "I would like to go back and find out who gave that [advice]," she said, responding to the suggestion that experts had predicted such a localized strategy would be required "Arab states can be very centralized. This is actually a fairly new model of local and provincial responsibility. I don't think it was self-evident that this was the case."



