Official Shakes Up Iraq Effort

Although he has yet to arrive, the newly appointed U.S. official charged with leading Iraq’s transition already has begun to shake up the operation here -- including changing key officials -- in an attempt to overcome debilitating internal problems and cope with a dangerous volatility on the streets.

L. Paul Bremer III, a counter-terrorism expert who will supplant retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner at the top of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, has been tapped to better coordinate the civil and military aspects of the U.S. operation. He is expected to bring in several of his own people at high levels.

One of the first top officials to go was Barbara Bodine, a veteran diplomat given the key task of getting Baghdad and central Iraq running again. The agency has yet to formally announce Bodine’s sudden departure, and the State Department insisted that her exit was a routine rotation, but she said she was given three days to leave. At least two other senior officials are expected to depart soon as well.

With the departing Bodine going so far as to say that “we didn’t know what we were walking into,” U.S. officials concede that many of the key assumptions that drove planning for the postwar administration were wrong. For instance, they are shifting from a military-style security operation to one that relies on neighborhood patrols. Across the board, they are struggling to adjust their strategies to the realities on the ground.

“It’s too soon to say whether this is working or not working,” said Tim Carney, the senior U.S. advisor for the Ministry of Industry and Minerals. “What you can say is that it’s ragged. Some things are working because Iraqis here got their act together, especially in putting back together ministries and essential services.”

Reconstruction agency staff members expressed some apprehension about the kind of changes Bremer will bring, but there was also hope that the situation could improve after he arrives this week.

“I don’t know if he’s a leader, but he’s a manager. And that’s what we need right now,” a senior agency official said.

Bremer plans to replace Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen who did diplomatic duty in Baghdad in the 1980s and Kuwait during Iraq’s invasion of that country in 1990, with a retired foreign service officer, said a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Others who went in with Garner -- who has said he will leave after a limited “hand-over” period -- could be rotated out, the source said. A list is circulating at the State Department of people whom Bremer wants to take with him, the official said.

In addition to Bodine, John Limbert, who served as the advisor to Iraq’s Cultural Ministry, will leave. Limbert was serving in the U.S. Embassy in Iran when students took it over during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and he was among the hostages. Senior agency officials suggested that Margaret Tutwiler, the ambassador to Morocco who was once a top aide to Secretary of State James A. Baker III, could be leaving her communications post soon as well.

Bremer will be working with a system that has built-in problems, a hybrid that tries to fuse two very different government cultures: the Defense and the State departments.

At the same time, the agency’s officials are struggling to deal with a litany of practical problems. The city still lacks an operating telephone system, so staff members are often forced to stand outdoors using hand-held satellite phones. Perhaps most important are security concerns, which make it impossible for the staff to move around the country, or for contractors to begin their work.

“The biggest problem is security and communication,” said a senior official with the civil administration. “I would move heaven and Earth and spend a lot of money to fix those pieces on the belief that a lot of other issues would then fall into place.”

The civil administration has two missions: to get the country’s ministries providing services again and to foster the process for forming an interim, and ultimately a permanent, government.

In addition, a separate military operation is, at least until now, the chief authority in the country and operates as an independent institution. Bremer, who will report to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will, it is hoped, better synchronize the efforts of the two bureaucracies.

Just as the military encountered unexpected resistance in southern Iraq, the civil administration has been encountering unanticipated obstacles. When U.S. officials mapped their effort to get the country going again, they prepared for a significant flow of refugees, a humanitarian crisis, thousands of prisoners of war and for a longer honeymoon period -- a time in which Iraqi people would be heady with a sense of relief at the departure of Saddam Hussein.

Hardly a single Iraqi fled the country, however, and far fewer were internally displaced than projected. The prisoners of war have mostly been released.

What came as the biggest surprise was the violent and long-running looting of government offices -- looting that persists on the streets of a capital that seems perpetually on the cusp of chaos. Although officials had a foretaste of Baghdad’s anarchy in the looting that ensued after allied troops entered southern Iraq, the collapse of Baghdad came so quickly that the civilian officials were unable to adjust in time to cope with it.

Agency officials said that despite weeks of planning, they were unprepared for the number of obstacles. “There was a constant reevaluation,” Bodine said.

A major problem has been the civil administration’s inability to communicate with Iraqis, either to explain what the U.S. officials are doing, or where to go if they are trying to collect their $20 stipend or where to sign up to return to work. In the absence of concrete information, thousands of Iraqis have followed fraudulent instructions from self-appointed leaders trying to create a power base.

This week, the civil administration hopes to restart a television station and a newspaper. So far, the main communication has been by radio.

Despite its troubles, the civil operation has taken significant steps in the last few weeks, notably to revive the country’s ministries, which oversaw most day-to-day operations.

While that process will take months to complete, it has started at the ministries of Health; Industry and Minerals; Planning; Trade; and Oil. Each of those ministries now has a U.S. or allied country advisor, an Iraqi manager who worked previously in the ministry and an Iraqi exile advisor selected by the Pentagon.

But many employees have yet to return to work. Most ministries still lack offices, either because the buildings were bombed during the war or, more often, because looters destroyed them.

Security problems have debilitated the reconstruction agency’s operations, hampering officials’ efforts to leave even the palace grounds so that they can see the places they are supposed to be rebuilding, and also have delayed the arrival of many of the contractors who will do the actual work of reconstructing the country’s infrastructure.

The lack of security has undermined Iraqis’ faith in the U.S. because they now regularly face personal crime, ranging from theft to murder.

Changes already are being made in the security operation, but Bremer is expected to make this a top priority. Military police are now beginning to arrive in Baghdad, along with additional troops. Joint patrols involving Baghdad officers and the U.S.-trained military police have begun and are expected to increase.

An early mission will be to change the way the Iraqi police operate -- they are accustomed to sitting in their office and waiting for the secret police to tell them whom to arrest.

Now they will be expected to walk a beat like British constables and community police in the United States.

For those U.S. officials who arrived in Baghdad two weeks ago and camped in a palace that had no electricity, running water or even windows, the operation seems to have come a long way.

“It was completely absurd -- our world shrunk in on us,” said a senior civil administration official. “Slowly, what we’ve been doing is trying to push our world back out.”

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Times staff writers Robin Wright in Jerusalem and Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.