"We just thought it was a joke," says an I.N.C. official. Says another: "The idea that there was a well-organized project at the State Department that was producing sophisticated postwar planning is ridiculous. The scholarship was at the high school-essay level." Others believe I.N.C. and its allies in the Administration already knew what they wanted to do and undermined an effort to unite Iraqis of all persuasions around a common project. "What happened to all that work we put in?" says Laith Kubba, an Iraqi at Washington's National Endowment for Democracy. For whatever reason, the Future of Iraq project was pretty much ignored. "The White House barely knew about it," says a former official involved in postwar planning.

Just after Labor Day, Rice summoned her top staff to an evening meeting and set up four working groups to try to coordinate inter-agency squabbling. State, as usual, was trying to find a multilateral approach to Iraq and to boost the status of opponents to the regime inside Iraq. The Defense Department was happy to go it alone and rely on its favored Iraqi exiles. The cia, meanwhile, was trying to warn that governing Iraq after the war would not be as easy as some of the exiles had thought.

But, just as important, the Rice group responsible for postwar planning, led by Elliott Abrams from the National Security Council and Robin Cleveland from the Office of Management and Budget, woefully underestimated the cost of reconstructing Iraq. It was the work of that group that in large part led omb director Mitch Daniels to estimate a year ago that the total price tag of the Iraq adventure would be just $50 million to $60 million, a range Bush surely now wishes were true. The failure to get the costs right turned on two false assumptions: that Iraq's infrastructure was in relatively decent shape and that Iraqi oil exports would pay for much of the country's reconstruction. But Iraq's electricity grid is barely functional, and its oil installations aren't much better. "The oil refineries can't be repaired, in my opinion," said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a visit to Iraq last month. "They have to be replaced."