The rivalry between the State Department and Pentagon over Iraq has been widely-reported, although the extent of that rivalry is just now starting to become clear. According to two US aid workers, the Pentagon in its mad lust for total control of post-war policy created a humanitarian relief team that overtook and stifled the government's traditional humanitarian aid programs housed within the State Department. Due to this, the workers claim that the Pentagon alienated non-governmental organizations and created issues due to lack of field experience, especially during the period of looting directly after the war:

The traditional American response to humanitarian emergencies and natural disasters abroad is carried out by the State Department's US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA).

In the months leading up to the war, these agencies trained up an 80-person team specially for Iraq, many of them with long expertise in emergencies, says the commentary, published by Frederick Burkle and Eric Noji in Saturday's Lancet.

But that initiative was hamstrung by the Pentagon which, breaking with tradition, decided to set up its own humanitarian planning team, say the authors.

...

The big problem, though, was that Pentagon planners had not taken into account the risk of looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The pillaging wrecked clinics, hospitals, emptied pharmaceutical stores and destroyed laboratories, "causing the collapse of the already tottering health system," the commentary says.

That crisis was worsened by chronic insecurity, hours-long power cuts and lack of sanitation.

Meanwhile, the ORHA team that was rushed to Baghdad was mainly staffed by policy wonks, it says.

They had little field experience in relief operations, many were ignorant of functions, charter and capabilities of UN agencies, Red Cross organisations or NGOs, and they simply created another unnecessary level of bureaucracy.

If there's an example of internal governmental distrust negatively affecting policy outcome, this is it. Currently there are two primary foils working within the US foreign policy apparatus — the White House/Pentagon and the State Department/CIA. How can foreign policy be formulated, let alone successfully implemented, when the entire governmental structure is fractured and is at what amounts to bureaucratic civil war? A massive overhaul is required, not simply the resignations of Rumsfeld and Powell. Only a new administration can successfully patch together the foreign policy community and make it functional once again. Is there nothing more important in a global war on terrorism than sanity within the foreign policy arm of the executive branch?

What's truly ironic is that Bush once claimed he was a uniter and not a divider. Hell, he can't even keep his own appointees from going at each other's throats.