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further divided his team into three administrative zones. But his zones bore no resemblance to the boundaries of Iraq’s provinces or to the placement of military forces. Given his previous experience in Iraq and a series of dire warnings by the United Nations that disease, hunger, and population displacement could affect millions of Iraqis in the event of war, most of Garner’s attention was devoted to planning for a humanitarian crisis. Reconstruction was the domain of a team from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Civil administration—the most important pillar, as it turned out—was handed off to Michael Mobbs, Feith’s former law partner. Garner paid little attention to that “pillar.”
    Garner appeared to be “a deer in the headlights,” said Timothy Carney, a retired ambassador who was asked to join ORHA by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary. Garner asked Carney what job he wanted. Carney offered to be ORHA’s ombudsman but added that the State Department was seeking to have him named interim minister of industry and minerals. Carney had no background in industry or minerals, but that didn’t matter to the upper echelons at State. Carney was their guy, and they wanted as many of their guys as they could get in senior positions at ORHA. Garner agreed that Carney should run the Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Garner’s team was heading to Kuwait in two days. Carney, who needed training and equipment before he could deploy, would join them later. “See you in Kuwait,” Garner said.
    The rest of ORHA was assembled in a similar helter-skelter fashion. The Ministry of Education was assigned to a midlevel bureaucrat from the Treasury Department. Another former ambassador, with no prior trade experience, was told to run the Trade Ministry. Stephen Browning, an engineer from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was asked to head up four separate ministries: transportation and communications, housing and construction, irrigation, and electricity; a week after the fall of Baghdad, he got a fifth—health. ORHA staffers were smart and well intentioned, but they weren’t experts in their areas of responsibility, they didn’t have much background working in the Middle East, and they were overloaded. Carney had one deputy to help him run the Industry and Minerals Ministry, which had more than one hundred thousand employees.
    Back in Feith’s office, there was no cause for alarm. According to two people who worked for him, the intention was never to have large teams of American specialists at the ready to run Iraqi ministries. When the war ended, it was anticipated that Iraqi civil servants would return to work and the ministries would run themselves. An interim government, presumably led by Chalabi, would select new ministers. The assumption was that the best-case scenario would prevail.
    The ORHA team soon found itself plagued with the same internecine rivalries between the Pentagon and the State Department that had poisoned attempts over the years to formulate a unified plan for dealing with Iraq. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, wanted as many of their people as possible on Garner’s team. They regarded the presence of seasoned diplomats and Arabic-speaking Middle East specialists within ORHA as a bulwark against attempts to hand power over to Chalabi and other exiled politicians. State deemed it essential to involve Iraqis who had been living in Iraq in the creation of a transitional government. Pentagon officials believed that State’s old-school Arabists were making excuses to justify their belief that democracy wouldn’t work in the Arab world. In the Pentagon, the view was that Chalabi and his colleagues were going to lead the way in creating a secular, stable democracy. The White House let both sides snipe at each other.
    It was not until two days before Garner departed for Kuwait