Newsweek: Condi Rice admits the U.S. should have understood Iraq better

http://www.newsweek.com/id/69092

Condoleezza Rice is, by her own admission, not "that self-reflective." But in an interview in her office on Thursday the secretary of state took a moment to contemplate the improved security situation in Iraq. Asked whether she and the Bush administration had made any mistakes early on "that you're perhaps trying to redeem yourself for," she responded with her trademark steely smile. "I'm sure there are lots of things we might have done better," she said. "I'll give you one with Iraq. If I had to do it all over again, we would have had the balance between center, local and provincial better. But that's the kind of thing you learn over time."

Rice has admitted on occasion that the U.S. government made "tactical" mistakes in Iraq, but rarely has she gone into specifics. Reminded that Mideast scholars had long advised that controlling Iraq would require winning over local, provincial and tribal authorities, Rice said, "I would like to go back and find out who gave that … Arab states can be very centralized. This is actually a fairly new model of local and provincial responsibility. I don't think it was self-evident that this was the case." Rice said that the U.S. occupation began to grapple with this reality in earnest in 2005, when the State Department began pushing to send so-called provincial reconstruction teams outside of Baghdad. She said the creation of a democratic central government and "the transition to administrative law, I think, is going to be judged very well" over time. But, she added, "I think we didn't identify a lot of the kind of provincial and local leaders that might have been able to deliver services as well as politics on a more localized level early on."

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Both Diamond and another Iraq scholar, Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University (NDU), say that just about every expert in the region, going back to the British occupation after World War I, has known how crucial it was to build relations with the provinces and tribal leaders in Iraq. Prewar reports by both the Future of Iraq Project, run out of the State Department, and NDU had emphasized this at a time when Rice was national security adviser, Yaphe says. "If you look at Saddam's rule, he knew very well how important local and tribal leaders were," says Yaphe. She also says that Rice's idea that this was a "fairly new model" is wrong. "It seems to me anybody in that area understands that full well. That's how that system has operated there for a long time."