You can’t really blame them for this. Nobody saw Iraq as a really pressing threat. Saddam’s military was down. Our policy was containment, the policy was succeeding, and we were whacking Saddam when he got out of line. At this stage of the game, there was a near zero likelihood that he could attack Kuwait, Iran, or Israel again. And there was no way he was going to initiate a serious attack against us, nor were we going to initiate anything major against him.

Besides, we had other, more pressing crises to manage. We were working the Kosovo problem, the Bosnia problem, the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the drug problem in Colombia . . . India-Pakistan, Korea . . . and much of Africa was going to hell.

So if you look at my inability to drum up interest in a post-Saddam Iraq in the light of what’s going on right now, you have to ask how they could have passed it up. But back then, it just didn’t seem high priority to anybody in Washington.

You also have to keep in mind the structural barrier to getting anything like that done in Washington. In Washington, there is no one place, agency, or force that directs interagency cooperation. The only such cooperation is on an ad hoc person-to-person or group-to-group basis. So if you have a problem like putting Iraq back together after Saddam, that requires the joint work of many government agencies (not to mention international agencies—NGOs and the UN), there’s nowhere to start.

I could go to DOD. But where does DOD go? Possibly to the President’s National Security Adviser. He or she might then interest the President. Or possibly someone will take the issue to a cabinet meeting and interest the President that way.

Failing that, you’re in limbo. There’s no way you can move the bureaucracy without action from the top.

OF COURSE the problem did not go away. I knew then there was a very good chance it would come back to haunt us. Which meant that if Saddam’s regime did collapse, “somebody” was going to get stuck with putting Humpty back together again.

I knew who that “somebody” was likely to be. It was “us”—the military. I knew that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were far from the best solution, but we would have to do until we came up with something better.

So I said to my guys, “We need to start planning on this.” And they did. But by then we were well into 2000 and I was coming to the end of my tour. And when I left CENTCOM (in mid-2000), the plan was nowhere near materializing.

I’m not sure where it went after I left.

As far as I can tell, the plan was pigeonholed. And by the time Iraqi Freedom rolled around, nobody in CENTCOM had ever heard of it. There’s no longer any corporate memory of it.