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Building the peace
A retired American general, Jay Garner, and a career diplomat, L. Paul Bremer, will guide the massive reconstruction effort in Iraq. Are they up to the job?
He is a lifelong military man. Garner grew up in a small Florida town where the annual rodeo was big and patriotism was a way of life. “I mean, we were flying flags around here before it was the thing to do,” said the local school superintendent. Garner’s mother had to discourage him from lying about his age and enlisting when he was just 16. After brief stints in the National Guard and the Marines, Garner joined the Army for good in 1962 and rose through the ranks to become a three-star general. “If God had designed a soldier,” said Garner’s cousin Ned Pooser, “he would have made Jay.”
What did he do in the Army?
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A little of everything. Garner served two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he roughed it in the highlands recruiting Montagnard tribesmen to form counter-guerrilla units to fight the North Vietnamese. In one of his last posts, Garner headed up the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command. He directed several major Defense Department programs, including Star Wars, the laser-based missile defense program. He retired from the Army in 1997 but didn’t stray far. For the last six years he has been president of SY Coleman, a military missile-defense contractor.
He has a proven record there. In 1991, Garner ran Operation Provide Comfort, the U.S. military effort to help Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime. His successful three-month stint in Northern Iraq made it possible to establish the autonomous Kurdish region, which is now far more prosperous and peaceful than any other area of Iraq. The Bush administration hoped he could manage a repeat performance rebuilding the entire country, so his old friend Donald Rumsfeld coaxed him from his million-dollar home near Disney World to run the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq.
Was he a popular choice?
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Yes and no. Garner has been universally praised for his work with the Kurds, but he is no stranger to criticism. Many in the Arab world complain that he is too pro-Israel for a high-profile job in the Middle East; he once signed a letter issued by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs praising the Israeli military for its “remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence” by Palestinians. Others question the propriety of putting the postwar peace in the hands of an executive whose company makes millions selling technology used on the battlefield. Many argued that what the U.S. needed in Baghdad was a solid diplomat, not another general. “This guy is not our road map for peace in the Middle East,” said Jason Mark, a human rights activist.
What is Garner’s job?
His assignment can be broken down into three tasks: rebuilding a war-torn nation, delivering aid to 24 million people, and setting the stage for the establishment of an interim Iraqi government. Along the way, Garner and his staff of 400 will have to make decisions on everything from a new Iraqi currency to training police officers to the disposal of corpses. Three regional governors are already in place; ministers for 23 departments will be installed shortly.
Who will guide Iraq’s new leaders?
Garner got that job started, but he won’t get to finish it. He organized two meetings for representatives of a cross section of Iraqi society, where opposition leaders agreed on the basics: The new government will respect human rights and freedom of religion. But the White House recently concluded that having a retired general forge a new government could create the impression that the Iraqi leaders were puppets of the American military. The details reportedly will be up to a new appointee, career diplomat L. Paul Bremer. “You need a senior diplomatic person there,” said one U.S. official. “That was the missing piece.”
Why did Bremer get the job?
He’s a career diplomat who served as a top assistant to six secretaries of state, and once headed the State Department’s counterterrorism office. After 23 years in government, he joined Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm that former secretary of state Henry Kissinger built by offering the expertise of a stable of former top government officials. Bremer is still in the same business, but he now serves as chief executive of Marsh Crisis Consulting.
Who will be in the new government?
A key task of the transition team will be separating the good guys from the bad guys. In postwar Germany, the process was called de-Nazification. Reconstruction experts have called for a similar process of de-Baathification in postwar Iraq. That’s a tall order, because under Saddam Hussein, the entire bureaucratic class was required to join the Baath Party. The difficulty will be finding Iraqis to run the country who are not so tainted by the former regime as to lose all credibility.
What is the timetable?
That’s the subject of ongoing debate. Richard Perle, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, said recently that the United States might be able to pull out of Iraq within “a matter of months.” Other experts predict that the American military will stay considerably longer: Henry Kissinger estimates it will be two years; Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, believes five years will be needed to develop a relatively stable democracy.
