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that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took a hard look at the team Feith and Garner had assembled. The next day, Rumsfeld summoned Garner. According to Garner’s account of the discussion, Rumsfeld began with an apology.
    â€œJay, I haven’t paid enough attention to you,” he said. “I should have given you more of my time.”
    Then he proceeded to question the credentials of several top ORHA staffers, particularly those from the State Department. “He said, ‘I’m just uncomfortable with these people,’” Garner recalled. “I said, ‘Uh, it’s too late for you to be uncomfortable with them. I’m leaving tomorrow.’”
    â€œHe said, ‘I’ll get you new people.’”
    â€œI said, ‘You don’t have time to get me new people.’”
    After more back-and-forth, Rumsfeld asked Garner to look over his staff list and indicate who “you absolutely have to keep.”
    â€œAnd I said, ‘By the way, who would DOD have that’s qualified to do agriculture?’ And he didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘How about education?’ And I went down [the list] and I said, ‘How about banking? Who could do banking?’ So he said, ‘Look, I don’t want to argue with you on this one, but I’m gonna get you better people.’”
    As soon as Garner left, Rumsfeld blocked the departure of senior State Department personnel assigned to ORHA on the grounds that they were “too low-profile and bureaucratic.” He relented only after Powell called and threatened to pull every State employee from ORHA, which undoubtedly would have been front-page news. The Pentagon wanted as few State people on the team as possible, but not at the price of a public-relations embarrassment.
    When Garner’s advance team arrived in Kuwait in early March, they were informed that there was no room for ORHA at any of the military bases in the city-state. They would have to find their own accommodations. The only place with enough beds was a Hilton beach resort, which set aside a wing of luxury villas for Garner and 168 other ORHA members, who arrived in Kuwait the day before the war began. The group spent almost six weeks consuming gourmet meals and sipping sparkling water as they worked up plans to deliver food rations and drinking water to Iraqi civilians. The Hilton’s two-story, cream-colored villas had down pillows, flat-screen televisions, maids’ quarters, and breezy balconies overlooking the Persian Gulf.
    Meetings consumed much of the mornings, but most were rambling affairs lacking specificity. Because everyone assumed that Iraq would be in the throes of a humanitarian crisis after the war, several sessions were devoted to planning the distribution of food and water. Garner also convened “rock drills,” military-speak for simulation exercises. One drill assumed that corpses would be littering the streets of Baghdad, electricity would be out, and parts of the city would be on fire. Some ORHA members regarded the scenarios as far-fetched, but they nonetheless talked about how they would respond. They knew they didn’t have enough staff or equipment, but they figured they would have military units at their disposal to provide transportation, communication, and other much-needed assistance.
    It wasn’t that Garner didn’t have a plan. The one he had was titled “A Unified Mission Plan for Post Hostilities Iraq.” It was marked SECRET/REL USA MCFI , meaning it could be shared only among Americans with appropriate security clearances and vetted members of governments who had joined Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” By the time Garner arrived in Kuwait, the second draft of the document had grown to twenty-five pages. It began with a one-page introduction written by Garner. The first sentence was both prescient and banal: “History will judge the war against Iraq not