Secretary Of War

(6 of 10)
But Garner faced another challenge: the Bush Administration wasn't keen to acknowledge what he was doing. Before the shooting started, the White House was at pains to disguise any indication that a war was inevitable. The decision to go to war was Baghdad's, not Washington's, went the daily talking point. Job one was to position the President as a reluctant warrior. Any emphasis on what would come after the war would have put the President in a public relations bind. That didn't mean Garner couldn't do his job in secret. It simply meant that no one was inclined to give his job a very high priority, at least in public. A top Pentagon official explained the balancing act this way: "It was all perverted. The government was still going through this charade that we were going to solve it peacefully, so we couldn't get too far out there on the postwar. It was a cost-benefit analysis: Was the fig leaf of diplomacy as important as getting it right on the ground? It was decided that it was." And where was Rumsfeld in all this? Looking back a few days ago on this complicated minuet, Rumsfeld half conceded only that the U.S. was trying to avoid any impression that war was unavoidable. "We didn't want that inevitability," he said, pausing slightly before quickly editing himself, "because it wasn't inevitable! We were hoping it wouldn't happen."

--Where Did All the Soldiers Go?

If Rumsfeld had initially handed over the postwar planning to Garner, once Baghdad fell he didn't relinquish control. And that places Rumsfeld in the vicinity of one of the great miscalculations of the year: the decision in late May to disband the Iraqi army, which basically put hundreds of thousands of young men out on the Iraqi streets without work. The story of the demobilization makes clear that even when Garner did have a blueprint for what was to follow, the U.S. couldn't or wouldn't stick to it.

All through last winter, the big worry had been the life-and-death stuff, not schools and sewers. Garner's to-do list read like the table of contents from the Book of Apocalypse: food panics; blazing oil rigs; a nuclear, chemical or biological exchange with WMD-contaminated provinces to quarantine; water shortages; a three-month siege of Baghdad; cross-border refugee flows; and ethnic conflict or cleansing. It was lucky that none of those things happened, but nobody gets credit for the bullets they dodge. The U.S. authorities were left less prepared for the different kind of chaos that followed.

Garner wanted to preserve a portion of the 400,000-man Iraqi army in part to help keep the peace when the shooting stopped. The U.S. expected thousands of Iraqi troops to surrender, as they had in 1991. "We had planned on keeping the army together and using it pretty actively in the reconstruction of Iraq," Garner tells TIME. "But our planning was somewhat flawed in that the army didn't surrender."