Iraq Rebuilding Short on Qualified Civilians

The Pentagon was in favor of the idea. "If you don't fund this, put more money in the defense budget for ammunition -- because I'm going to need it," one Marine general warned at the time.

Eventually, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, persuaded Congress to allow the Pentagon to transfer up to $100 million to State for post-conflict civilian deployments. But Defense and State couldn't agree where to spend the money. Defense wanted much of it spent on stabilization operations in Haiti. State wanted to use it to help in the aftermath of last summer's war in Lebanon, officials on both sides recalled.

And then there was a round of fighting in State over which office should spend the money. Not everyone thought it belonged to the SCRS.

But the money had come with a condition: Spend it before the Pentagon could find other uses for it. By the time it was all sorted out some nine months later, the $100 million had dwindled to $10 million.

Some current and former SCRS staffers, as well as people familiar with the office, contend that Pascual should have focused his operation on helping with State's two biggest priorities: rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he and Powell decided in 2004 to use the SCRS to prepare for future crises and to help with smaller-scale stabilization missions.

Pascual said the SCRS would have been "overwhelmed" if it had assumed responsibility for rebuilding Iraq or Afghanistan. "It would not have been able to have done either well," he said. "The intent was to learn from both of those missions."

But some current and former SCRS personnel believe the office should have sought to work on part of the Iraqi reconstruction -- perhaps assuming responsibility for a few provinces -- as a way to make itself more relevant. "If we had been working on Iraq instead of Haiti and Sudan, we would have had a better chance at getting the money we wanted," a State Department official said.

Had that occurred, the official said, "SCRS could have been producing many of the civilians we need in Iraq today."

Little Eagerness to Work in Iraq

When Kiki Munshi started the Diyala reconstruction team last April, she expected she would have an agriculture specialist working for her. The Department of Agriculture had promised to send six farming experts to Iraq, including one to her team.

Since fruit and vegetable farming is the principal occupation in Diyala, Munshi figured she could generate support for the American presence in the restive province by helping growers increase their yields. "Knowledge is something the Iraqi farmers really need," she said.

Winning over the local population through small-scale projects was the logic behind the provincial reconstruction teams. While Washington was squabbling over whether to fund Pascual's proposed civilian reserve corps, the teams were established in Iraq last year by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had pioneered the concept in Afghanistan. Before that, the U.S. government had essentially no civilian presence in Iraq beyond the Baghdad Green Zone and a handful of regional embassy outposts in four major cities. In theory, the teams would significantly increase the number of American civilians in places where they could actually help Iraqis on the ground.

But as Munshi found, that was often just a theory. Her agriculture specialist never even arrived.