BUSH PLANS FOR IRAQ AFTER WAR TURN SOUR

  Artículo de David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt 

In-fighting added to problems filling void left by Saddam

WASHINGTON Long before President George W. Bush ordered the attack against Iraq, the White House drew up a detailed plan for running the country after the war, a program that was nearly as meticulous as the military's battle plan.

But if the surprises of the war itself were mostly favorable, White House and other administration officials have watched over the past weeks as the wheels have threatened to come off their plans for establishing the peace.

The plans called for quickly returning Baghdad cops to their beats, and having Iraqi soldiers build roads and clean up rubble. They envisioned cheering crowds and a swift restoration of electric power and other vital utilities; they called for brooking no interference from Iraq's neighbors.

Iraqi exiles would be brought in to help 23 government ministries get back to work and a civilian Iraqi interim authority would quickly be established.

Instead, the looting, lawlessness and violence that planners thought would mar only the first few weeks has proved more widespread and enduring. Many of the 10,000 Baghdad beat cops they counted on are only trickling back to work - and there were not enough American forces around to back them up. To the enormous frustration of Bush, Iranian agents poured into the country seeking to fill a political vacuum and turn local clerics and the populace against the coalition.

No one in Washington anticipated the degree to which the chaos would undermine the administration's central goal - to present the United States as a liberator, not an occupying power, senior officials said.

In fact, it was that instinct that may have worsened the problem, senior officials said in a series of interviews. Inside the White House, officials feared that if the looters were shot - the fastest way to restore order - the pictures on Al Jazeera would reinforce the worst images of America in the Arab world.

Now, five weeks after Baghdad fell to American control, Bush finds himself exactly where he did not want to be: forced to impose control with larger number of troops, and to delay the start of efforts to turn power over to Iraqis. The message that reached the White House from two meetings with potential Iraqi leaders, officials say, was to achieve security before attempting democracy.

Inside the administration, the backbiting has intensified. Some blame Jay Garner, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant general charged with the physical and political rebuilding of Iraq, for moving too slowly.

But even critics of Garner, who last week was replaced by a career diplomat, L. Paul Bremer 3d, say he has also been a victim of fierce in-fighting between the Pentagon and State Department for control of postwar operations, and of a security environment he does not control.

Senior administration officials said they could foresee some problems, but not all. "You couldn't know how it would end," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a telephone interview on Friday. "When it did end, you take it as you found it and get at it, knowing the single-most important thing is security."

Rumsfeld said the Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top American commander in Iraq, has begun "migrating a war-winning force into a post-Saddam Hussein force that would be best able to mesh with things that did happen and didn't happen."

Indeed, some 20,000 additional troops, including 2,000 more military police are expected to arrive in the coming days.

But even Garner, in videotaped testimony delivered to Congress last week, acknowledged that his Pentagon agency, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, was just now after three weeks on the ground getting its arms around a set of immensely complex issues.

"This is an ad hoc operation, glued together over about four or five weeks' time," Garner told the House International Relations Committee last Tuesday, adding that his team "didn't really have enough time to plan."

But even as Garner told lawmakers that his team of several hundred former military officers, diplomats, aid workers and contractors had now "coalesced," he also implicitly sought their help in insure that 11 major goals - from restoring order in Baghdad to distributing food efficiently nationwide to addressing outbreaks of cholera and dysentery - are achieved by about June 15, his projected departure date from the country.

"The next 30 to 40 days is probably the critical period now in this operation," Garner told lawmakers. "If we make headway on a lot of major things, we will put ourselves in a marvelous up-ramp where things can begin happening. If we don't do that, we're on a negative ramp."

The seeds of the troubled reconstruction effort go back to late January, when Rumsfeld lured Garner away from a top post at a defense contractor to head up perhaps the most ambitious postwar effort since World War II.

Garner, 65, had won acclaim for protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, a much smaller job than the current task. Within a month, Garner had assembled a team of about 200 experts from across the government, and on Feb. 21 held a two-day rehearsal in Washington to review plans for everything from communications to currency.

But problems were already cropping up. Critics complained that Garner failed to build support on Capitol Hill and delegated his deputies to meet with humanitarian aid groups. "The humanitarian community made repeated efforts to meet with Garner to express our concerns," said Sandra Mitchell, vice president of the International Rescue Committee. "He was always unavailable."

Garner and a cadre of top aides, including Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld's chief of staff, left Washington in mid-March. By early April, Garner had been able to make only day visits into Iraq, and was chafing at being cooped up in a Kuwait hotel with his staff until the military's Central Command deemed security safe enough to begin operations in Iraq, officials said.

Garner was also increasingly caught in bureaucratic crossfire in Washington and allied capitals. British officials expressed concern that Garner would look too much like a military proconsul overseeing an American protectorate in Iraq, stirring distrust in the Arab world.

In Washington, a bitter fight between the Pentagon and State Department over control over postwar operations escalated as reports of looting and lawlessness in the Iraqi capital caught American officials by surprise.

"Garner and the U.S. were unprepared to deal with the security vacuum," said Kenneth Bacon, a former Pentagon spokesman who is now president of Refugees International, an aid group. "We've had security vacuums in Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan. It should have been expected, but they didn't have a good backup plan."

Last week, Rumsfeld praised Garner for doing "a spectacular job for this country," and said in the interview that Bremer's taking over was a natural progression of the plan.

A senior aide to Garner in Baghdad put the situation this way: "Think about the scope of this thing. Three weeks ago, we were not here. Today, we are, and are moving out across a number of fronts. It will take time. It will be messy. There will be success and setbacks. But the trend is clear: We are moving forward."