ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

good governance and so on. In its broadest interpretation, however, transformational
diplomacy could also encompass very interventionist policies in the internal affairs of
states. This always seemed to me uncomfortably close to an ideological justification of
the policies that got us into Iraq. But the idea that transformation of dysfunctional states
into successful states is a very high priority in today’s world is, I think, legitimate, and it
is certainly a different priority from the one we had in the Cold War when we supported
states just because they were on our side and not Moscow’s.
Q: When you were in policy planning did you pick up on the tensions between the State
Department and the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld?
PERINA: Yes, the fact of these tensions was no secret. They were evident on many
levels, starting with the relations between Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. I saw some of the
memos between the two of them, and there was no love lost. One area where policy
tensions were very evident was on the issue of who would be responsible for the
administration of Iraq after we occupied it. Initially, the Defense Department took the
lead on this and angered many in the State Department, who felt that State should be in
charge. The Defense Department soon saw that this was going to be tougher than
anticipated and decided it really didn’t want the job. At the same time, State recognized it
lacked both resources and personnel for such a huge undertaking. The truth is no one in
the U.S. Government, neither DOD nor State, was adequately prepared to take on this
task. Let me go back to one illustrative anecdote on this. In about March 2003, while I
was still Special Negotiator, I received a call from the office of Marc Grossman, the
Undersecretary for Political Affairs, asking if I would be interested in going to Iraq to
work with Jay Garner, the retired general who took over as the first administrator of Iraq
after the invasion. I said emphatically that I would not be because I was very happy with
the Special Negotiator job and had no interest in leaving. But I was astounded that I
would even be considered for such a position since I knew nothing about Iraq and that
part of the world and had neither served nor even visited there. I had absolutely no
expertise for such a job but the Department was just trying on short notice to find
available people with Ambassadorial rank to fill the slots it had agreed to fill on Garner’s
staff. This is an illustration of how prepared the Department was to take on the nationbuilding
of Iraq.
This experience did, however, lead to one of the Department’s initiatives during my time
on the Policy Planning Staff and that is the creation of the Office of Reconstruction and
Stabilization. This office was created in order to ensure that in the future the Department
would be capable of taking on reconstruction and stabilization of post-conflict states and
not be caught flat-footed as it was after Iraq. It was also hoped that the creation of the
office within the State Department would settle the issue of which agency had the lead in
such instances. The idea as originally conceived was that there would be a coordinator
and a small staff of about a dozen people who would compile action plans and lists of
experts—including those outside the government—who could be called up on short
notice to help with the many specialized tasks of post-conflict reconstruction, things like
providing humanitarian assistance, training police, establishing civil authority and so on.
The Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization itself was not intended to take on these
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