Last modified: Wed Nov 26 11:15:02 EST 2003

Jay Garner's November 25th interview with the BBC

The BBC interviewed Lieutenant General Jay Garner, the man originally responsible for post-war administration in Iraq. Garner confirms that the State Department's pre-war planning efforts were deliberately ignored by the Defense Department. The Guardian has a bit more detail, if you don't want to or can't listen to the RealAudio version.

Here are a few choice excepts from the AP wire story about the interview:

Regarding the relationship between State and Defense:

Garner also complained of bad relations between the Pentagon and State Department, saying he didn't learn of a detailed study by Secretary of State Colin Powell for post-war Iraq until just a few weeks before the war began in March.

The former lieutenant general said that after learning of the State Department plan in February he had brought in Tom Warrick, a senior planner at the State Department involved in the study. But Garner said he was forced to fire Warrick by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Tom was just beginning to get started with us when one day I was in the office with the secretary of defense, and he said 'Jay, have you got a guy named Warrick on your team?' I said, 'yes, I do.' He said, 'well, I've got to ask you to remove him.' I said, 'I don't want to remove him; he's too valuable.'

"But he said, 'This came to me from such a high level that I can't overturn it, and I've just got to ask you to remove Mr. Warrick."'

Regarding troop levels:

"If we did it over again, we probably would have put more dismounted infantrymen in Baghdad and maybe more troops there," Garner said.

Regarding the disbanding of the Iraqi army:

"I think it was a mistake," Garner said. "We planned ... on bringing the Iraqi army back and using them in reconstruction."

Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army effectively threw hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and provided potential recruits for insurgency, he said. The original plan had been to pay the army to take part in reconstruction work.

"You're talking about around a million or more people ... that are suffering because the head of the household's out of work," said Garner, who arrived in Baghdad on April 21 and was replaced as head of the interim administration on May 12.