Iraq on Verge of Genocidal War, Warns Ex-US Official

By Patrick Wintour
The Guardian UK

Monday 18 June 2007

The man who led the initial American effort to reconstruct Iraq after the war believes the country is on the brink of a genocidal civil war and its government will fall apart unless the US changes course and allows a three-way federal structure. He has also urged talks with Iran and other regional players.

Jay Garner, the former US general appointed two months before the invasion to head reconstruction in Iraq, admitted that before the 2003 war coordination between the various US departments and military had been disjointed.

He also disclosed that the US state department official in charge of postwar planning, Thomas Warrick, was prevented from joining his team by Donald Rumsfeld, who was defence secretary. He said he was shocked by the Pentagon's decision to reduce troop levels and disband the Iraqi army.

"The problem from my standpoint within the United States was that there had been a lot of planning done by each element ... by the CIA, the state department, the treasury department, defence department," Mr Garner told the Future of Iraq Commission chaired by Lord Ashdown, Lady Jay and Lord King.

"But the problem with that planning is that it had been done in the vertical stovepipe of that agency and the horizontal connection of those plans did not occur".

The Guardian disclosed, in an interview on Saturday, that Andrew Bearpark, the British director of operations for the body that took over from Mr Garner, the Coalition Provisional Authority, discovered the plan to boost Iraq's postwar electricity production ran to one page. He said those who failed to plan for the postwar period were guilty of "criminal irresponsibility".

In a Channel 4 documentary to be screened this week, Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, David Manning, admits he does not know why more was not done to plan for the war's aftermath. He said: "Well it's hard to know exactly what happened over the postwar planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.... But it isn't a question I find easy to answer "

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British ambassador to the UN, tells the programme Mr Blair was tearing his hair out asking "What are the Americans up to?"

Mr Garner revealed he spent two frantic days in February 2003 trying to discover what postwar plans existed, and how they related to one another.

He said: "I asked Tom Warrick ... to join our organisation which he did the following Monday, and then about Thursday of that week I was told to remove him from the organisation. So I argued with that. I told Secretary Rumsfeld I didn't want to do that.

"I went to see Stephen Hadley, the number two at the National Security Council and said I don't want to do that but I was told I had to."

Mr Garner also admitted he did not see several of the plans prepared by the Bush administration and does not know why. He also revealed that he rang Mr Rumsfeld to tell him to stop reducing the US troop deployment and warned him that the consequent power vacuums were filling up with " fundamentalists". He also admits he was stunned by the decision in mid-May 2003 to disband the Iraqi army, saying at one stroke, it created a 200,000- strong armed opposition.