"The bureaucratic antibodies were immediately activated." Barnett's Department of Everything Else meets Washington's Catch-22

In his State of the Union address last month, President Bush called for the formation of a US civilian reserve corps that would aid in external post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction. So what are the chances for such a corps?

Well, in 2004 Senators Richard Lugar and Joe Biden crafted legislation along the same lines -- for a Response Readiness Corps "to be called upon at a moment's notice to respond to emerging international crises." The legislation crashed and burned.

And the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization (SCRS), a version of the readiness corps that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell threw together for the State Department, got hobbled before it left the gate. Then it hobbled smack dab into Washington's version of Catch-22.

Carlos Pascual -- toughened by his service as ambassador to Ukraine -- was put in charge of the office. Thus began his odyssey:

The problem was the price tag: $350 million for the first year [of SCRS operation], Pascual and his staff figured. The White House budget office balked. Pascual's request was whittled down to $100 million.

Congressional appropriators were even more skeptical. Republicans questioned whether the initiative was a priority for the White House. Democrats expressed concern that the reserve corps might encourage the administration to invade another country.

The appropriators chopped so much that in the end the SCRS got just $7 million in 2005.

The message from Congress was clear: If State wanted to fund the corps, it would have to find the money elsewhere in its budget.

"The bureaucratic antibodies were immediately activated," said Michèle Flournoy, president of the Center for a New American Security. "The rest of the State Department tried to kill SCRS because it was a competitor for funds. It never had a chance to succeed."(1)

Pascual is a veteran of Ukraine Oligarch politics, so in 2006 he made another suicide run -- and this time ran into Catch-22, starting at State:

"There was this perverse cycle that began," he recalled. "The legislative staff at State would say, 'The Hill doesn't like this, therefore we shouldn't ask for much because we're not going to get it.' Then you had the Hill saying, 'The administration hasn't made this a priority so we're not going to fund it.' "

The Pentagon was in favor of the idea. "If you don't fund this, put more money in the defense budget for ammunition -- because I'm going to need it," one Marine general warned at the time.

Eventually, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, persuaded Congress to allow the Pentagon to transfer up to $100 million to State for post-conflict civilian deployments.

But Defense and State couldn't agree where to spend the money. Defense wanted much of it spent on stabilization operations in Haiti. State wanted to use it to help in the aftermath of last summer's war in Lebanon, officials on both sides recalled.

And then there was a round of fighting in State over which office should spend the money. Not everyone thought it belonged to the SCRS.

But the money had come with a condition: Spend it before the Pentagon could find other uses for it. By the time it was all sorted out some nine months later, the $100 million had dwindled to $10 million.[...]

Today, the SCRS corps that Pascual envisioned as a rapid-response force with 200 federal employees ready to deploy has just 11 people on active duty.(1)

Alert readers will ask why stabilization in Haiti and Lebanon took precedence over the screaming need for stabilization in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several in Washington have asked the same question:

Some current and former SCRS staffers, as well as people familiar with the office, contend that Pascual should have focused his operation on helping with State's two biggest priorities: rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he and Powell decided in 2004 to use the SCRS to prepare for future crises and to help with smaller-scale stabilization missions.

Pascual said the SCRS would have been "overwhelmed" if it had assumed responsibility for rebuilding Iraq or Afghanistan. "It would not have been able to have done either well," he said. "The intent was to learn from both of those missions."

But some current and former SCRS personnel believe the office should have sought to work on part of the Iraqi reconstruction -- perhaps assuming responsibility for a few provinces -- as a way to make itself more relevant.

"If we had been working on Iraq instead of Haiti and Sudan, we would have had a better chance at getting the money we wanted," a State Department official said.

Had that occurred, the official said, "SCRS could have been producing many of the civilians we need in Iraq today."(1)

None of those observations are an answer to the question that any reasonable person would ask. Why Haiti instead of Iraq?

I think at the bottom of it all is the fact that it's not only "Democrats" who fear that a fully functioning Department of Everything Else will encourage the US to more preemptive military strikes. US military supporters of the Powell Doctrine, US NATO allies; the G8 club, an overwhelming majority at the UN, and CEOs of large globalized corporations the world over fear that efficiency at regime change begets regime change.

The bottom line is also a big issue: American fiscal conservatives don't want the US carrying the lion's share of the expense of policing the world. They're already upset that the US is carrying NATO.

Another reason for concern is imbedded in my first reaction to Thomas P. M. Barnett's idea for a US civilian post-conflict corps -- "The Department of Everything Else" he envisions to handle everything outside military action in post-conflict situations.

I blurted, "He's talking about social workers with guns."

The Washington Post article I've quoted above deals in large part with the myriad problems encountered in doing reconstruction work in Iraq, which include security for the reconstruction workers. It's all very well to attempt to avoid just the kind of situation that the Iraqis -- and the Coalition -- are stuck with in Iraq's post-invasion phase. But if a civilian reconstruction corps is to be used in post-conflict regions, it means they don't have firepower. So any such corps needs protection in order to do their job, which bats the ball to the UN blue helmets or a national military/coaltion. Or the corps needs to be armed.

So then the question is, why not simply expand the mission statement for the United States Army Corps of Engineers instead of creating an entirely new layer of bureaucracy?

The answer: because the Department of State doesn't want the Department of Defense to gather any more power than they've wrested from State in the years since 9/11.

So where do things stand now? The civilian corps that Bush asked for last month won't materialize anytime soon because of budget considerations: "The administration's 2008 budget, which was sent to Congress earlier this month, includes no money for it. A senior administration official said the White House plans to wait another year before asking Congress for funding, according to the Post article.

As to the Lugar-Biden legislation, last week the senators reintroduced the bill:

[...] which mandates the formation of a 250-persona active-duty response unit drawn from the federal government and the creation of a 2,000-strong civilian reserve corps. It also authorizes $145 million to fund the operation.

"Hopefully, Lugar said, "we've come to a point where we finally realize the need to do this."(1)

If history is a guide, the point is a dot on the horizon. It might well remain a dot until we tackle the question buried under all the others:

By transforming the very sloppy, painful and mistake-ridden consequences of warfare into an efficient system for reconstruction, are we being Promethean?

If so, we should recall the punishment that Zeus meted out to Prometheus for the offense of teaching humans to make fire. This is not enough reason to jettison Barnett's idea; after all, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights are Promethean. But we really need to think before we leap into the process of sanitizing war outcomes. Put another way, do we want to take the lead among countries when it comes to post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction?

1) All quotes in this post are from Iraq Rebuilding Short on Qualified Civilians by Rajiv Chandrasekaran with contributions by Thomas E. Ricks; February 24, The Washington Post.