A colonialist debate: "A MacArthur-Karzai debate had raged within the administration for months: should the United States run Iraq like Gen. Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan or seek a local Karzai-like leader and operate behind the scenes? Bremer still believes the MacArthur route was imperative. An exile-dominated Iraqi government would have had no legitimacy or competence. Nor would it have changed the legal fact of the U.S. occupation. “The way we did it gave Iraqis the best chance of a sustainable political process,” he argued. Nonsense, Khalilzad believes. “I feel strongly that the U.S. ruling was wrong. We could have had an interim Iraqi government. I argued, based on Afghanistan, that with forces, diplomacy and money, nothing can happen anyway without your support.” Powell agrees. “Everything was Bremer, the suit, the boots, the whole nine yards.” It was a mistake not to move “more rapidly to putting an Iraqi face on it.”" (And why is Khalilzad's tenure in Afghanistan treated as a success story? Unless his mission was to bring back the Taliban into the country.)