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would be dispatched to Baghdad.
    Garner was an avuncular man, short but solid, with gray hair, metal-frame glasses, and a bourbon-smooth drawl. He exuded Southern hospitality mixed with country-boy informality, greeting people with a firm handshake and bidding them farewell with a back-slapping hug. Feith had called Garner because, for a brief period in 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, Garner had run the American military operation to protect ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq. He knew Iraqis, and he had experience providing humanitarian aid on Iraqi soil. He wasn’t eager to return to a war zone—he had a lucrative defense contracting job and a comfortable life in Orlando, Florida—but he was a soldier: when your country asks, you serve.
    When Garner arrived at the Pentagon in January, he had no staff and no blueprint for the job ahead. He was assigned to what he called a broom closet in Feith’s suite. His first calls were to a few of his buddies—fellow retired generals—whom he beseeched to help him. Over the next few weeks, several military reservists were sent his way, as was a small group from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and a handful of other civilian government employees. The State Department also insisted on seconding a few of its diplomats. Some of those who joined Garner’s team were first-rate; others were the dregs of the federal bureaucracy.
    Everything in the Pentagon has an acronym. Garner’s group became known as ORHA, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Weeks later, several ORHA staffers joked that the acronym stood for Organization of Really Hapless Americans. Others referred to Garner and his fellow retired generals as the Space Cowboys, a reference to the Clint Eastwood movie in which a bunch of geriatric ex-astronauts blast off to save the world.
    Garner claimed he never received any of the plans that were produced by Feith and his deputies. In fact, he said he didn’t know that Feith’s office was engaged in planning for the postwar administration of Iraq until ten days after he arrived in Baghdad, when his deputy, Ronald Adams, one of the Space Cowboys, returned to Washington because of a lung infection. Adams spent a few days working in the Pentagon and discovered there that Feith’s operation was working up policies for how to purge members of Saddam’s Baath Party, what to do with Iraq’s army, and how to install Chalabi and other trusted exiles as national leaders. An incredulous Adams called Garner and said, “Hey, you know there’s a whole damn planning section on postwar Iraq here?”
    â€œNo way,” Garner replied. “Did they just put it together?”
    â€œI think it’s been here for a long time,” Adams said.
    â€œWhat are they doing?”
    â€œI have no idea. They won’t let me see the stuff.”
    What Garner also did not see, but which would have been far more useful, was any of the reams of postwar plans and memoranda produced by the State Department, or any of the analyses generated by the CIA, or even the unclassified report written by the military’s own National Defense University based on a two-day workshop involving more than seventy scholars and experts. Garner asked Feith for copies of planning documents that had been drawn up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the U.S. government. Garner said Feith told him that nothing useful existed and that he should develop his own plans. Feith’s hope, as articulated to others in the Pentagon, was that without a clear blueprint for the political transition, Garner would turn to Chalabi and his band of exiles. Feith would get the outcome he wanted without provoking a fight ahead of time with State and the CIA, both of which regarded Chalabi as a fraud.
    Flying blind, Garner divided ORHA into what he called “three pillars”: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. He