Steamboat Springs – The tenacious insurgency in Iraq that continues to claim the lives of American soldiers could be defused through jobs and undermined if Islamic clerics took a strong stand against violence, the first U.S. administrator for the country said Thursday.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who served six months in 2003 as director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for postwar Iraq, offered those thoughts as part of a hopeful assessment of the country during a visit to this ski-resort town as part of a public-policy seminar.
“Would we have done things differently? Absolutely. But we are where we are,” Garner said. “Ultimately, I think we’ll be successful. I think the glass is half full. But it doesn’t taste very good, and it’ll be hard to drink it.”
Garner was candid and frank, veering frequently from the Bush administration’s endlessly upbeat “message” about Iraq and its reluctance to acknowledge mistakes.
“We’ve made plenty of mistakes. We haven’t quite endeared ourselves to the Iraqi people. Their expectations were high, and we haven’t delivered on a lot of things,” he said, noting that electricity and drinking water still are in short supply, and that disbanding the Iraqi army and the complete “de-Baathification” of the civil service have crippled the country.
Garner maintains that he supported the war and toppling Saddam Hussein because of human-rights abuses, but he said the timing of the invasion detracted from the war on terrorism and has spread U.S. troops too thin.
“We didn’t have enough troops (to rebuild Iraq). We still don’t,” he said. “We had enough troops to win the war, (but) we don’t have enough troops to win the peace. … If we have another crisis in another part of the world, we could not respond right now. The force is just too small.”
One key to improving security and making dramatic progress in reconstruction would be to find jobs for the 14- to 26-year-old males who make up the majority of the insurgents, Garner said.
“I don’t think any of us expected (the insurgency) to be at the level it is,” he said. “But then, I never thought I’d see a day that Muslims would destroy mosques, or that Muslims would kill clerics.”
Garner suggests that the new Iraqi government should consist of four or five relatively autonomous provinces based on religious or cultural divisions like the Kurds have in the north, with a weaker federal authority that would handle national affairs.
Allowing the country to split up, though, would likely result in civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis, unnerve Turkey with an independent Kurdistan and allow the “extremist influence” of Iran in the south, he said.
Garner doesn’t foresee any graceful exit for U.S. troops in the near term and said that while the invasion of Iraq remains divisive, the nation is committed at this point to rebuilding the country.
“I think we’re going to be there for a long time. I don’t think there’s going to be any choice,” he said, calling on President Bush to level with the American public about the costs in terms of lives and dollars. “There’s no alternative.”
