One month before U.S. forces invaded Iraq, the U.S. Institute of Peace circulated a 16-page report titled "After Saddam Hussein, Winning a Peace if It Comes to War."
The treatise, paid with tax dollars that fund the congressionally created institute, envisioned an array of possible pitfalls including an insurgency, the collapse of civil society and a surge in terrorism. The report also offered suggestions for avoiding those scenarios and urged the government to engage in postwar planning to quickly stabilize the country.
"Political fragmentation and social disintegration are likely. Combined with the brutal lethality of modern weapons, this may create one of the toughest political and humanitarian emergencies to date," wrote Ray Jennings, who ran the USIP's Iraq program.
"We were basically ignored," said J. Robinson West, the USIP's board chairman and an assistant secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration.
Not anymore.
As congressional supporters watched some of the report's bleakest warnings come true, the institute -- a government think tank set up years ago as a counterweight to Pentagon planning -- gained a renewed importance. Last month, it was rewarded.
After an eight-year campaign, Congress handed the nonpartisan institute $100 million for a long-promised building on the last available site on the Mall.
More than a way out of the USIP's rented digs in the dreary National Restaurant Association Building, the new facility and grand location offer a greater chance to interact with the public.
"The building is a way to make what we do more visible," said Richard H. Solomon, a former U.S. ambassador and Asia specialist, who has been director of the USIP since 1993.
The $100 million for the building came through, to the surprise of the institute's senior management, after more than a decade of lobbying Congress. Solomon and others believe it resulted from a growing consensus in Congress that nonmilitary approaches need better attention before a conflict begins.
The building, designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie, is a 120,000-square-foot, glass-and-beam structure crowned by the wings of a dove. It will rest on a 2 1/2-acre site at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 23rd Street NW, overlooking the Lincoln Memorial and adjacent to the Korean War Veterans and the Vietnam Veterans memorials.
Construction is slated to begin in 2007, but Solomon said more money will need to be raised privately for the project. Separately, Congress gave the USIP a $10 million bonus, on top of its 2004 budget of $17 million, for new postwar programs in Iraq.
The institute has used the money to open up an operation in Baghdad, hire local staff and begin negotiations and conflict-management training for a new crop of Iraqi civil servants.
Several months ago, the USIP also received a congressional mandate to coordinate a Washington task force on restructuring the United Nations.
