There's plenty of speculation about what, exactly brought about the departure of Jay Garner, the retired general who led the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid--and consequently led Iraq--for exactly three and a half weeks. (Who's Who).

There's plenty of speculation about what, exactly brought about the departure of Jay Garner, the retired general who led the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid--and consequently led Iraq--for exactly three and a half weeks. Clearly, the utter chaos in which Iraq remained during his month on the job precipitated his replacement, in mid-May, by retired State Department official L. Paul Bremer. Yet many inside the Pentagon aren't sure that Garner and his staff deserve the blame. "I think [Garner] was given the job but not enough assets to do it right," said one retired Army officer who served with Garner in Operation Provide Comfort, the mid-90s effort to protect Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq.

But Iraqi citizens may not absolve Garner so speedily. They watched as the general and his staff--chiefly Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen charged with overseeing Baghdad, and Margaret Tutwiler, a former assistant secretary of state in George H.W. Bush's administration who was supposed to be Garner's spokeswoman but who spent her tenure refusing to return press phone calls--set themselves up in one of Saddam's old palaces in a style reminiscent of the old British Viceroys of Iraq.

The palaces are heavily fortified and inaccessible to petitioning Iraqis. Phones were down, Garner rarely left the grounds, and visitors to his Gothic headquarters were met only by stone-faced American soldiers, who turned them away at the gates. Not exactly the best advertisement for a participatory democracy.