| Sumario: | In emergency medicine, "the golden hour" is the first hour after injury during which treatment greatly increases survivability. In post-conflict transition terminology, it is the first year after hostilities end. Without steadily improving conditions then, popular support declines and chances for economic, political, and social transformation begin to evaporate.James Stephenson believes we have lost Iraq's golden hour. A veteran of post-conflict reconstruction on three continents, he ran the Iraq mission of the Agency for International Development in 2004-05 with more than a thousand employees and expatriate contractors. The Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversaw the largest reconstruction and nation-building exercise ever, was a dysfunctional organization the Department of Defense cobbled together with temporary employees and a few experienced professionals from the State Department and other agencies. Iraqis soon became disillusioned, and the insurgency grew."Losing the Golden Hour" tells of hubris, incompetence, courage, fear, and duty. It is about foreign assistance professionals trying to overcome the mistakes of an ill-conceived occupation and help Iraqis create a nation after decades of despair. Neither criticizing nor defending U.S. foreign policy, Stephenson offers an informed assessment of Iraq's future.This book chronicles the thirteen months I spent in Iraq as mission director for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). But the prologue lies in my childhood and years of experience that led me to Baghdad. When I was ten, my father joined what would become USAID and moved the family to a remote dam site in central India. We lived in India for six of my most formative years. I attended college in the United States, followed by four years as a U.S. Army officer. In Vietnam, I learned how to lead men under difficult and dangerous circumstances, and swore I never wanted to do it again. Law school and private practice followed, but I was bored. Invited to join USAID, virtually by happenstance, I was immediately sent to Egypt, in the heady days after Camp David. Egypt was followed by Barbados, Grenada, and the civil war in El Salvador, where I spent seven years.In 1997, I was sworn in as USAID mission director to Lebanon, which was struggling to rebuild after sixteen years of civil war. Three years later, the fall of Slobodan Milosevic took me to Serbia and Montenegro.The cadre that does diplomacy and foreign assistance in war zones is a very small one, known as specialists in that art. By 2003, I had served in seven countries either at war or struggling with a fragile peace. We suffered defeats in some, won victory in others. Twenty-five years had passed in the blink of an eye, and I had become recognized as a leader in the stabilization and reconstruction of fragile or failed states. The request to take over the USAID program in Iraq thus came as no surprise, but it was something I neither sought nor wanted. I knew just how shallow the talent pool was and as a Foreign Service officer had sworn to serve anywhere. Confident in my own abilities, I was naively confident in America's ability to focus its best talents and win the peace, even in the face of daunting challenges. After all, collectively we knew how to rebuild nations. We had done it all over the world, and I had been a part of that accomplishment.This is not a treatise on policy or a memoir of my daily life. Others have written and criticized the policy that took us to war and the implementation once there. While there is some of that, I write from the viewpoint of the practitioner on the ground. As such, it is not a work of investigative journalism either. Others, with the advantage of hindsight, have written eloquently on both the military and civilian efforts there. Here, I have endeavored to give the reader a sense of what I knew and how I reacted, in real time. Accordingly, the story is told chronologically for the most part, to recreate the environment in which decisions were made and actions taken - or not. Undoubtedly, some will have a different view of the events that I discuss, but they did not stand in my shoes or view them through the same lens, tempered by unique perspective and responsibility.The planning for what the military calls Phase IV, post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction was conducted almost exclusively by the Department of Defense (DOD). For the first fifteen months, Phase IV implementation was controlled by DOD, first through the auspices of the short-lived Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), and then through the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Both organizations were essentially civilian, and though they availed themselves of some experienced officers from the Department of State, USAID, and other agencies, they relied heavily on temporary employees recruited and hired by the Pentagon. Few of these employees had any overseas experience, much less experience in post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction. This disadvantage was compounded by events, as Iraq quickly disintegrated into a virulent insurgency. It was anything but "post-conflict."Stabilization consists of the reestablishment of law and order, public services, and economic activity. Reconstruction is the rebuilding of the instruments of governance and civil society and takes years. In Iraq, stabilization was never achieved, but we nonetheless embarked on reconstruction. Unfortunately, the CPA saw reconstruction as primarily an effort to rebuild the physical infrastructure of Iraq, as if bricks and mortar could heal a deeply divided country traumatized by decades of brutality and misrule. Too late, stabilization and reconstruction were turned over to the Department of State and career practitioners. By then, the entire venture had become a complex counterinsurgency - the hardest of conflicts for governments and their allies to win.The literature on Iraq tends to make villains of those in the Pentagon who planned and ran the enterprise, to concentrate on the most bizarre and incompetent of those who served in the CPA, and to focus on the excesses of the Green Zone. There were no villains, only incompetence and hubris. The Green Zone was a necessary haven, populated by the well-meaning but often culturally insensitive. It was separated, not divorced, from the rest of Baghdad, but it was not the "Little America" that some have described.Iraq has been - in blood and wealth - America's costliest foreign venture since Vietnam. This book tells what it was like to live and work as a part of that venture.
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