Here’s a couple key grafs from an article in tomorrow’s Post …
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has rejected a team of officials proposed by the State Department to help run postwar Iraq in what sources described as an effort to ensure the Pentagon controls every aspect of reconstructing the country and forming a new government.
While vetoing the group of eight current and former State Department officials, including several ambassadors to Arab states, the Pentagon’s top civilian leadership has planned prominent roles in the postwar administration for former CIA director R. James Woolsey and others who have long supported the idea of replacing Iraq’s government, according to sources close to the issue.
…
Powell and senior State Department officials, along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have maintained that a quick turnover from U.S. military control to the United Nations would give postwar Iraq more international legitimacy. They believe it also would encourage participation in the reconstruction effort by countries that opposed Bush’s decision to go to war without U.N. authorization.
But Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, supported by Vice President Cheney, have been leery of any substantial U.N. role on grounds that it would inhibit U.S. ability to shape Iraq’s future. Under a postwar plan supervised by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, the military would maintain control of Iraq for an indefinite period, until new institutions could be constructed and a representative Iraqi government installed. The plan allows a U.N. role in humanitarian assistance, under U.S. supervision.
Does this inspire you with a lot of confidence?
On the issue of personnel, it’s only fair to point out that one of the people noted in the article as slated for the Iraqi 
Defense Ministry is Walt Slocum, Bill Clinton’s highly-respected undersecretary of defense and obviously not a Bush or Rumsfeld crony. On balance, though, the article makes painfully clear that Rumsfeld is intent on stacking the entire post-war American occupation government with members of the DC Iraq-regime-change mafia. It’s not even an American occupation; it’s an AEI occupation. Every made-man in the gang gets his own ministry apparently. Maybe they’ll set up an Iraqi Defense Policy Board that Richard Perle can run in Baghdad. I hear he’s on the market again. Ken Adelman, Ministry of Pastries?
Now we know where all those discredited
cakewalk Iraq-hawks are headed. They’re going to Baghdad to run the occupation.
