It was clear that we had to start looking hard at this possibility. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if we didn’t, we could find ourselves in deep trouble.

“What we need to do,” I realized, “is come together and work out a comprehensive and joint plan. We need to get the other agencies of government—not only CENTCOM and the DOD [Department of Defense], but the CIA, the State Department, and their Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and USAID, and everyone else with something to contribute. And we’d also have to plan to bring in the UN, various NGOs, and Coalition members for this phase of the operation.”

“Who’s doing this?” I asked myself.

When I probed around Washington, I quickly learned that nobody was doing it; nor was there much interest in doing it.

“Then we have to create interest,” I told myself. “We need to organize a conference, a seminar, or a war game that will spark people to generate an interagency plan for dealing with this issue. Out of this I can also develop a specifically CENTCOM plan, which would cover some of the more immediately practical issues.”

I decided to organize a “war game” that presented several post-Saddam Iraq scenarios. The game—called “Desert Crossing”—was conducted in the Washington, D.C., area late in 1999 at Booz Allen, the contractor (who run secure games for the government); experts from all the relevant branches of government took part.

The scenarios looked closely at humanitarian, security, political, economic, and other reconstruction issues. We looked at food, clean water, electricity, refugees, Shia versus Sunnis, Kurds versus the other Iraqis, Turks versus Kurds, and the power vacuum that would surely follow the collapse of the regime (since Saddam had pretty successfully eliminated any local opposition). We looked at all the problems the United States faces in 2003 trying to rebuild Iraq. And when it was over, I was starting to get a good sense of their enormous scope and to recognize how massive the reconstruction job would be.

Desert Crossing gave us the ammunition we needed to define the post-Saddam problem, but that was only a start.

“Well, who’s going to take the next step?” I asked.

The answer: Nobody. There was no interest in Washington in pursuing it. Most of the participants in the game were sympathetic; but none had any charter to develop a plan. They were more than willing to help us define the problem, maybe learn a little bit about what needed to be done; but nobody was in a position to sign up to anything. Post-Saddam Iraq was simply too far down the priority list of any agency with a reason to be interested in the problem.