On Iraq, U.S. Turns to Onetime Dissenters

In 2003, Timothy Carney, right, and an American soldier displayed the cargo of a sport-utility vehicle: metal trunks containing just under $1 million in cash. The money was used to pay salaries at Iraq's ministries and government-run factories. Carney was in Iraq to run the Ministry of Industry and Minerals. (Ahmed Dabboush)

The plan unveiled by Bush last week calls for many people who lost their jobs under Bremer's de-Baathification decree to be rehired. It calls for more Sunnis, who were marginalized under the CPA, to be brought into the government. It calls for state-owned factories to be reopened. It calls for more reconstruction personnel to be stationed outside the Green Zone. It calls for a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes providing security to the civilian population over transferring responsibility to local military forces.

Carney believes such measures could have been effective three years ago. Today, he worries they will be too little, too late.

During the phone call, Satterfield told him that the new reconstruction effort might not succeed. The two men agreed that if it was to have a chance, Americans would have to work more closely and collaboratively with Iraqis.

To Carney, it suggested "a sense of reality."

"It's certainly different than anything I saw out of the CPA or the aftermath of that," he said. "It seemed a little refreshing, actually."

He paused.

"It's been a long time coming."

A Plan in Need of a Leader

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Bush and his national security team began working on their new Iraq strategy in earnest shortly after the Nov. 7 midterm elections, which amounted to a rebuke of the president's war policy. They met among themselves. They talked to diplomats and military commanders in Iraq. They conducted a videoconference with Iraq's prime minister. They consulted with retired generals, experts at think tanks and academics.

By late December, the president and his closest security advisers -- Vice President Cheney, new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley -- had coalesced around the need for more troops in Iraq. They had settled on Crocker to handle political strategy on the ground, replacing Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. And they had picked Petraeus to take over from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., whom they deemed to be too focused on the handover of responsibility to the Iraqis instead of on restoring peace to Baghdad's strife-torn neighborhoods.

But it wasn't until Monday, when Bush was going over a draft of the address he planned to deliver on television Wednesday, that they confronted the issue of who would coordinate the administration's new economic initiatives for Iraq.

Bush was planning to propose increasing the number of province-level reconstruction teams operating outside the Green Zone from 10 to 18. There would be new efforts to help the Iraqi government improve budgeting and management functions. And, most important, there would be a significant new emphasis on putting unemployed Iraqis to work. The strategy also included an implicit reversal of Bremer's policy on state-owned factories.

Scores of Americans ensconced in Baghdad's Green Zone would be involved: The U.S. Embassy has an economic section. There's a U.S. Agency for International Development mission. And there's the Project and Contracting Office, which manages reconstruction funded by an $18.4 billion U.S. aid package.