Hello there everyone. Apologies for not responding sooner. As one of you rightly pointed out, I have a day job at The Washington Post, restricting the time I have to respond during the day. I'm also doing book-related events. (I was speaking at Georgetown tonight.)

To those wanting a response to Dan Senor's op-ed in today's Washington Post, stay tuned. Tomorrow's blog entry will be all about it. Rest assured, I've got plenty to say about it.

As for the approximately $8 billion in Iraqi oil funds that are unaccounted for, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, I don't know where the money went. If I did, or if the inspector general did, you can bet that you'd see some stories about it in the newspaper. That said, I'm not sure all of it was lost to corruption. The CPA had fairly shoddy accounting practices. (I write about how one contractor, Custer Battles, was given $2 million in start-up funds in shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills.) It seems that some of this money was spent on legitimate projects but the paperwork wasn't processed properly. It also seems clear that some of this money simply vanished. There were published reports in early 2005 that large sums of money were being spirited out of Iraq by members of former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi's government. To date, however, I'm not aware of anyone who has discovered where that money went.

Mark Raven, I enjoyed your response to the Senor piece. I didn't mention Simone Ledeen because she doesn't get more than a mention in my book. Others have written about her time in Iraq and I wanted to highlight the lack of qualifications of other CPA staffers.

For another rebuttal to the Senor piece, see this:

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/10/10/43345/677

For those of you who take issue with my statement that I thought we could "pull it off," my response is that I am trying to be as honest as I can here. I know some will brand me as naïve for even thinking it was possible. (By "possible," I don't mean things would have been prefect. There still would have been an insurgency, albeit smaller and less violent, and there still would have been some tension between various ethnic and religious groups, but something far, far from the disaster that it is today.) But had the U.S. government done the requisite planning before the war, had the necessary resources been marshaled, had there been enough troops to prevent the looting, had more Iraqis been involved in the reconstruction effort, had there not been an open-ended occupation, had the Bush administration not sent a viceroy over there, had the U.S. government tried to quickly stand up an interim Iraqi government, had the Americans allowed Iraqis to hold local elections in 2003, had Bremer not issued his orders to disband the Iraqi army and ban many mid-level Baathists from government employment, had more skilled Americans participated in the reconstruction effort -- then, perhaps, Iraq might have turned out differently. All of the things I outlined could have been accomplished. It's just that the administration -- and it's appointees in Baghdad -- chose not to do them.

 For those of you who are wondering why I didn't report this earlier, let me quote from my response to a similar question posed by The Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell: "This wasn't a case of holding back the juicy details because it would make for a better book. Had I known how the CPA's hiring practices worked while I was The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, I certainly would have written about it. But it wasn't something I learned about until I returned home and began working on the book. We should also keep in mind that the CPA was run much like the Bush White House. Reporters weren't allowed to troll the halls without an escort from the Strategic Communications Office. And even if you could get a CPA staffer alone, it was tough to determine what was really going on. Many of them were told, in no uncertain terms, that they were not speak to reporters without a minder present. It wasn't until many of those CPA staffers returned home to the United States that I was able to get them to open up to me." 

For those of you who take issue with my initial views of Bremer, please read the book. I am very, very critical of Bremer, both his management style and the decisions he made. I feel that my critique has more honestly because it comes from someone who didn't begin with a snap-judgment that he was the wrong man for the job. I began by giving him the benefit of the doubt. Had he listened to the Iraqis, had he pursued different policies, had he approached the whole job differently, then his tenure would have been very different. At the time, it wasn't clear what he was going to do. Sure, he has issued the deBaathification order, but it was still early days. The United States still enjoyed goodwill and political capital among Iraqis. Of course, I didn't go soft on Bremer in my stories for The Post. But for the purposes of the book, I felt it was important to trace my views of the man too. Ok. More from me tomorrow.

Posted at October 10, 2006 7:49 PM in response to Welcome to the Emerald City