RECONSTRUCTION PLANNERS WORRY, WAIT AND REEVALUATE

  Informe de Susan B. Glasser and Rajiv Chandrasekaran en “The Washington Post” del 02.04.2003

 KUWAIT CITY, April 1 -- This was the scenario: Baghdad has fallen after several days of urban combat. Corpses litter the streets and homes are damaged by bombing. Electricity and water are scarce. There are "pockets of resistance," and parts of Baghdad are still in flames when retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner and his team arrive to start running the country.

The future of postwar Iraq is being planned in closed sessions like this one held a few days ago at a cream-colored beachfront villa in Kuwait by a Pentagon group headed by Garner. Participants in the session -- a "rock drill," in military terms -- ran through schemes for collecting garbage, restarting power plants and "what do we do with corpses that are found."

The actual war in Iraq has left the country's government-in-waiting still in rehearsal. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, with a Kuwait-based staff already numbering in "the low hundreds," had expected to move quickly into Iraq after a swift war that toppled President Saddam Hussein and won over Iraqis grateful to the United States for liberating them from more than three decades of authoritarian rule.

But with military commanders warning of a longer and more difficult war, Garner's team also has been reevaluating its strategy. Plans to send a large number of U.S. civilians into Iraq are being postponed, given concerns about security even in areas of southern Iraq nominally under U.S. control.

"We all thought we were going to be in there by now," said one official familiar with the Garner group's work. "Instead of throwing things together in a week, we've had a lot more time to think about it."

The additional time has fueled additional worries. Instead of being welcomed as a liberation force, some in the group fear, a U.S.-led transitional government will be greeted with deep suspicion, perhaps even resistance. The group is devoting meetings to discussion of "what is going to happen when the hostilities end," according to the official.

In Washington, meanwhile, disagreement over control of the program surfaced as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vetoed the State Department's selection of eight current and former diplomats to join Garner's team. Some officials here complain that the Pentagon is seeking to dominate every aspect of Iraq's postwar reconstruction.

Garner's mandate is to provide humanitarian assistance, reconstruct damaged infrastructure and set the country on the road to a representative self-government before authority is fully handed over to Iraqis. Not since the period after World War II has the United States embarked on such an ambitious transformation project -- seizing control of a large country to refashion its political system and rebuild its economy.

Garner constantly lectures his staff, several officials said, on the limited nature of their mission, telling them they must be prepared to "work their way out of a job" within 90 days. On his first visit to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr today, Garner made that point publicly.

"We're here to do the job of liberating them, of providing them with a form of government that represents the freely elected will of the people. We'll do it as fast as we can, and once we've done it, we'll turn everything over to them. We'll begin turning things over right away, and we'll make this a better place for everybody," he said.

But some officials doubt that three months is a realistic period in which to put the country on its feet. "This is a very short-term project -- 90 days. Basically we can get people back to work, we can get kids back to school, we can make some high-profile infrastructure fixes," said one official. "What comes after that 90 days, we don't know."

Many of the most difficult policy issues that would face this government-in-waiting are unresolved. The group is discussing how much power the interim Iraqi government would have compared with U.S. overseers, how to root out apparatchiks from Hussein's ruling Baath Party while keeping government functioning, and how to drastically restructure and reduce the size of the Iraqi army while providing for future national security.

Some of those involved in the discussions say they believe the United States would retain power over important government functions even after the formation of an Iraqi authority. Others privately concede the task could stretch on for many more months.

"Some of us came out here thinking it would be a three- or four-month operation," one member of Garner's team said. "Now it's clear that we're going to be here, and eventually in Baghdad, for a lot longer than we expected."

One participant in a recent planning session questioned whether the group fully recognizes the complexity and chaos that officials are likely to encounter in a postwar Iraq.

"The presentation was full of charts and reporting lines and discussions about whether there should be a dotted line or a straight line," he said. "It was like a Boston Consulting Group presentation to IBM. It was so different than what the situation really is in Iraq. That is going to be a big, big shock to them."

Garner's team is made up almost exclusively of Americans, many of them former or current officials. Aides come from the Pentagon, the State Department and other departments and agencies, including Treasury, Justice, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The only non-Americans are a handful of British and Australian diplomats, and a small group of Iraqi exiles. The United Nations is expected to "play some part in the equation," an official said, but U.S. officials have made clear it will be a subordinate role.

Three officials have been named to administer areas of Iraq: Bruce Moore, a retired general, in the north; Barbara Bodine, the former U.S. ambassador to Yemen who served in Baghdad in the 1980s, for the central region, including Baghdad; and Buck Walters, another retired general, in the south. Three other Garner deputies are in charge of broad areas -- humanitarian assistance coordinated by George Ward, a former U.S. Marine and ambassador to Namibia; reconstruction by Lewis Lucke, a veteran of USAID; and civil administration by Michael Mobbs, a Reagan-era arms negotiator and Pentagon legal adviser.

Differences between the Pentagon and State Department over the team's composition have affected officials who were on their way to the region. It is not known whether the dispute will further slow the group's work.

Here at the beach, Garner's transitional government-in-waiting has begun to shape that agenda with military precision -- day-by-day timetables for restarting key government functions, checklists for taking over ministries. The official mantra is secrecy. "It'll get rolled out when it gets rolled out," one official said.

Yet the process of reinventing Iraq is also happening in plain view of the press corps gathered at the same hotel. As scenes of destruction in Iraq blare on television sets, Garner's postwar planners tote Filofaxes along with their military-issue gas masks. British Gurkhas, tapped to provide security for the team, walked across the sand one recent morning in civilian clothes. Each morning at 7:30, the military officers in the group gather near a swimming pool to get their marching orders for the day.

Participants are developing plans for taking over Iraq's 23 government ministries, with a key U.S. adviser supervising work along with Iraqi exiles. Experts from Treasury are deciding how best to scrap the Iraqi currency -- featuring likenesses of Hussein -- and replace it, at least temporarily, with the U.S. dollar. At another hotel up the road, a group of Iraqi exiles working with Garner has formed the "indigenous media group" to reinvent Iraqi television, radio and newspapers.

Although Garner's team is assembling a list of Iraqi exiles with expertise in specific areas of governance -- finance, agriculture, health and so forth -- U.S. officials acknowledge that they have little idea of what they will find in each ministry.

"When they are reopened, who will show up for work?" one participant said. "How do we find the technocrats?"

Lack of on-the-ground knowledge is a key impediment for Garner's group. A handful of State Department officials involved in the process have had experience in Iraq, but none after 1990, when the United States severed diplomatic relations with Hussein's government.

The experiment may get its first test in southern Iraq, in areas near Kuwait already under U.S. and British control. Sources familiar with the discussions here said it is possible that Garner's group may move into southern Iraq even as the fight rages farther north.

British Maj. Gen. Albert Whitley, serving as a deputy to the U.S. commander of land forces in Iraq, said military planners envision a "gradual transfer" of responsibility to Garner for humanitarian assistance once they can "provide a secure environment" in which civilian aid groups can operate.

There is much more uncertainty about how to restart a functioning government without the all-pervasive Baath Party, and Whitley, who is in charge of postwar planning for the land forces here, made clear that many of those decisions would fall to the Garner team. For example, British forces are currently detaining dozens of local Baath Party officials and paramilitary forces with the expectation that they will be subject eventually to "some judicial process," Whitley said. "But who that judge and jury will be, I don't know," he added.

Staff writer David Finkel reported from Umm Qasr.