Bremer had "timeline" bk. for Iraq ministries (they had/have a plan)

[donsu]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50518-2004Sep25?language=printer


As Iraq descends into something resembling chaos, it's hard to remember how grand, even orderly, the plans for its future once were. I had a glimpse of those plans last January in Baghdad as I interviewed L. Paul Bremer in his dusty office at the center of Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace. I asked Bremer, who was then midway through his tenure as America's viceroy in Iraq, whether what he was attempting was unprecedented. Perhaps it was, he said, but the model he was using was the resurrection of post-Hitler Germany.

Bremer, a historian by training, then reached over to his desk for a thick briefing book that laid out detailed timelines for the development of each Iraqi ministry. He pointed out a chart that he consulted more than any other: "MILESTONES: Iraq and Germany." It laid out the handover of state institutions during the 1945-52 occupation of Germany, side by side with corresponding plans for Iraq over a more compressed period. That way, Bremer said, he could "keep track of where we are versus Germany." The U.S. occupation embraced that model so completely that officials lifted whole passages from Marshall Plan-era documents in designing the future of Iraq -- once forgetting, in a section dealing with currency, to change "Reichsmark" to "dinar."

-snip-

But if the administration is rhetorically projecting ahead a generation, its own plans for Iraq do not go beyond the next two years -- and never did. Its strategy calls for a national legislature to be elected in January, a constitutional convention a few months later and a permanent government by the end of 2005. The Pentagon has also outlined a rotation plan for U.S. troops in Iraq extending to October 2006. Yet it has not laid out an exit strategy for troops, arguing that to do so would encourage the insurgents, and administration officials have not made clear what the benchmarks of success would be. American troops, after all, are still deployed in Germany -- and that was considered a great triumph. When it comes to laying out longer-term plans for Iraq, "there is a deafening silence from the administration," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said recently. "Incredible rhetoric, deafening silence."
-snip-
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so there you have it - their plan is the same plan used after WWII for Germany only speeded up.