26-29 September: Affordable Housing Development Summit Middle East, Manama
27-28 September: Unconventional Gas, London
3-5 October: Middle East Investments Summit 2010, Dubai
3-6 October: SWPF - Saudi Water & Power Forum 2010 Conference & Exhibition, Saudi Arabia
3-7 October: Funds Forum Middle East, Bahrain
4-6 October: POWER-GEN Middle East 2010, Doha, Qatar
10-12 October: The 3rd annual Saudi Arabia International Oil & Gas Exhibition & Conference, Dammam
11-12 October: Unconventional Oil 2010, London
12-14 October: Offshore Middle East 2010: The 3rd Annual Offshore Middle East Conference & Exhibition, Doha
18-19 October: Maghreb/Middle East Renewable Energy Conference, Marrakech
24-27 October: MENA Mining Congress 2010, Dubai
26-28 October: Iraq Mega Projects 2010 Conference & Exhibition, Istanbul
27-28 October: Gas to Liquids 2010, London
21-23 November: Private Equity World MENA 2010, Dubai
29 November-1 December: Iraq Petroleum 2010 Conference, London
6-8 December: Smart Grids Middle East, Dubai
Untitled Page
Issue 706, 21 March 2003
Iraq’s ‘Day After’ Men Face A Long Wait In The Wings
The carpetbaggers are heading south and for companies, international organisations, and governments looking to position themselves with the expected post-Baathist Iraqi government the message is becoming increasingly clear – unless current trends reverse, Iraq will be governed by US statesmen and military leaders for 12-18 months. The ‘day after’ men of the external Iraqi opposition parties look likely to be relegated to ‘years-after’ men, fated to fill out the ranks of a future Iraqi legislature rather than the near-term executive branch.
The future of post-war Iraq – rather than the likelihood or course of a drive on Baghdad, continued to dominate thinking in Washington at the 11th hour – in a fluid debate influenced by a mixture of day-to-day bureaucratic plays by US government agencies and more contemplative attempts to learn from history, focusing particularly on the lessons learned from the UK’s involvement in Iraq throughout the 20th century.
US government agencies have broadly divided over two contending approaches to the transformation of Iraq:
• In and out: The first approach calls for a US military governorship that lasts for months, according to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This would initiate an extensive de-Baathification and democratisation process, building an interim government around external and internal opposition groups flown into Baghdad. This approach is championed by Rumsfeld’s Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), its neo-conservative backers in the American Enterprise Institute and other think tanks, and Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC); the INC would be placed in pole position, including a potential figurehead role for its leader.
• A longer engagement: Rapidly gaining ascendance has been a second approach, which envisages a longer and closer US engagement in nation-building, involving 12-18 months or longer of US military governorship, a slow transition to democracy, and the intermeshing of technocrats from the Iraqi diasporas and from existing government ministries. The model, which would see external opposition groups effectively marginalised, is championed by the State Department (USSD), Envoy for Free Iraqis Zalmay Khalilzad and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Pentagon-versus-State
The ongoing debate between both camps was starkly apparent when OSD Under-secretary Douglas Feith and his USSD counterpart Marc Grossman went toe-to-toe in Senate committee hearings on 11 February. Neo-con totem Feith mapped his vision of a rapid handover of power to Iraqi leaders and a de-Baathification process mirroring the de-Nazification of Germany. Grossman outlined the need for “two years” of close engagement and integration of existing leadership figures.
Emerging trend lines suggest that while OSD may get the war it has pushed so hard for, USSD has won the peace.
According to Pentagon insiders, Vice President Richard Cheney’s expression of doubts over the feasibility of OSD’s concept and the specific credibility of Ahmed Chalabi – a controversial figure ever since the Petra Bank scandal of the 1980s in Jordan – have handed the reins to the State Department.
The outlook for a post-Baathist government will conform to the slow transition model, albeit with the potential for modifications injected by Cheney and key Bush advisor Karl Rove in the lead-up to the USA’s 2004 presidential elections.
Transition team
Where once analysts talked about a transition from US to Iraqi control, the debate is shifting to how control will transition from military governorship to a joint US military and civilian administration, and thence to Iraqi civilian control.
The first mechanisms are now being put in place. In the immediate aftermath of war, US Central Command Commander-in-chief General Tommy Franks will maintain overall control of Iraq as expected, but day-to-day security issues will take up most of the Viceroy’s time.Below Franks, the USA has appointed retired Lieutenant General Jay Gardner and his deputy Retired Lieutenant General Ron Adams to head up the OSD’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Development.
The OSD ORHD is due to appoint three US administrators to govern US-delineated Northern, Central, and Southern sectors of Iraq. The Southern sector administrator has not yet been appointed, but the Central Iraq sector will be administered by USSD veteran Barbara Bodine, a tough-minded former ambassador to Yemen.
Bodine spent two tours in the State Department Office of Arabian Affairs and served as USSD Principal Officer in Baghdad. The October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole took place on Bodine’s watch in Yemen, where she took a firm stance in dealings with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to maintain relations with the Yemeni government.
The Northern sector may be treated as a special case according to Washington-based Gulf experts canvassed by GSN.
In Washington recently, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Barham Salih told GSN that the KRG’s highly successful experience of self-administration makes it likely that Washington will employ a light touch in the North, utilising the existing bureaucracy to allow it to focus efforts in the Centre and South.
Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy concurred, stating that the USA would largely “leave the KRG to it and get back to it later”.
This, of course, depends on just how pre-emptive the Turks plan to be during the conflict.
Technocrats needed
The three administrators are likely to receive lavish financial support and some technical assistance. In the immediate post-conflict phase, the US administrators are likely to directly pay the salaries of up to 2m government employees for one to three months. Certain Iraqi military personnel may immediately be utilised in reconstruction roles, assisting demobilisation and injecting employment and wages into the economy.
Iraq’s local government structure is likely to be firmly enmeshed with the new military governorship. As Barham Salih noted after meeting with Vice President Cheney: “Washington does not want the US military blamed for local shortages of water, electricity, and garbage disposal – low-level issues will still be dealt with by the local bureaucracy.”
The OSD will draw heavily on USSD technical resources to execute its long-term mission. Senior State Department officials are set for major roles:
• Thomas Warrick – Special Advisor in the USSD Office of Northern Gulf Affairs, formerly a long-term resident at the USSD human rights desk;
• Meghan O’Sullivan – USSD Assistant Director of Operations and Plans, bringing experience on the economic aspects of US foreign policy and ethnic violence; and
• Sherri Kraham – Special Assistant to the Office of the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security (USSD hawk John Bolton). Kraham, a Clinton-era USSD Iraq desk officer, was a bête noire of the neo-conservative camp for her opposition to the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.
The three US regional administrators are due to be supported by a network of USSD-hired Iraqi technocrats. In part, this community is being hastily assembled from the Iraqi diaspora in the USA (notably the Michigan area), the UK, and Europe (particularly Germany, Sweden and Switzerland).
The State Department aims to hire 30-50 rapporteurs, sending two or three to visit each of Iraq’s 17 provinces to survey reconstruction and governance requirements, hiring them on initial three- to five-month contracts. The USSD will also support the sector administrators with products and personnel involved in the Future of Iraq Project. The USSD project’s working groups cover economics and infrastructure, transitional justice, public health, public finance, media outreach, water, agriculture, and the environment.
As well as creating road maps for US administrators and identifying potentially recyclable officials within Iraq, some members of the working groups are likely to visit Iraq to liaise with local technocrats.
The project is likely to lead to spin-offs in Iraq such as the planned Iraq Development and Reconstruction Council announced at the December meeting of the Economic and Infrastructure Working Group.
… politicians need not apply
While the USA is desperately searching for technocrats throughout the diaspora, it is attempting to freeze the opposition politicians that it has carefully cultivated over the last decade – some of whom, like Chalabi, have been promoted by neo-con icons like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
Instead of flying the opposition into Baghdad as a government-in-exile, the USA government looks likely to deny many of the external opposition figures any political role until long after the stabilisation period, thawing them out to participate in future Iraqi party politics.
The USSD views the external opposition as un-elected representatives and is unlikely to grant them even an interim governing role.
The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) – by dint of the KRG’s elections and the presence of both organisations in Iraq – are viewed as different cases, as is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which at least retains close ties to the Shiite community in Iraq.
Opposition groups excluded from this US planning – notably the INC, Iraqi National Accord (INA) and Sharif Ali Bin Al-Hussein’s Constitutional Monarchy Movement – are in disarray. Failing a change in current trends, which cannot be excluded, their remaining role is to group together in a parallel system that will seek to interact with the slowly coalescing US-backed administration in Baghdad.
At the opposition’s recent Sulaymaniyah meeting, a six-member “consultative body” was established to represent the opposition groups, backed by 14 committees that would give input on the work of most of the key government ministries. Considering the time and effort required to make meaningful progress on the USSD Future of Iraq project, these groups may represent too little, too late even though National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on 15 March that this “Iraqi Interim Authority” would assist the US-led administration.
