The missing player: a 'czar' to manage the Iraq war
The White House has envisioned a coordinator role for the multibillion-dollar, multiagency effort, but is having trouble finding a willing candidate.
from the April 26, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
More specifically, a number of experts who have seen the administration's Iraq policymaking from the inside say it has lacked a clear strategy and a defined chain of command all along.
"One of the problems in Iraq from the beginning – and really even before we entered Iraq – has been this lack of sufficient integration and coordination between the military and political tasks," says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq on governance in 2004. "The disjunctive military and political efforts have been a factor in our lack of success, as has the absence of clear lines of authority from Washington."
Even some experts more sympathetic to the administration's handling of Iraq policy say the mix of personalities has been problematic for policy implementation. "Institutionally, this kind of coordinating should be done at the National Security Council, but it was difficult until recently because Rumsfeld was such a strong advocate for his and Pentagon views," says James Phillips, a Mideast policy expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "had the job for a while [when she was national security adviser in Bush's first term], but she didn't really coordinate," says Charles Dunbar, a foreign-policy expert and former ambassador to Yemen. "She was up against [Vice President Dick] Cheney and Rumsfeld and [then-Secretary of State Colin] Powell, and she knew she couldn't play."
Such problems have not ceased, nor are they seen merely as unavoidable personality clashes. Earlier this year, Secretary Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly aired their differences over plans to expand the number of reconstruction teams in Iraq – even though the two are generally on a closer wavelength than Mr. Powell and Rumsfeld ever were.
Rice will attend an Iraq neighbors conference in Egypt next week in an attempt to rev up the diplomatic offensive on Iraq. But her focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the beginning of the year is tacit acknowledgment on her part, some foreign policy analysts say, that the new reliance on US forces to stabilize Iraq crowds her out.
Her relative disengagement may also suggest that Rice, hoping to secure some foreign-policy successes for her and Bush's legacies, is relieved that the military component of the US role in Iraq will remain paramount at least into the fall, some experts say.
White House officials insist that no final decisions have been made on creation of a coordinator, and in particular on the right person to fill such a post. But a recent report in The Washington Post said that although three four-star generals had been tapped to fill the position, all three turned it down.
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