Turning Discord Into Democracy

A swift war has handed Jay Garner, the retired American general charged with rebuilding Iraq, a rare and daunting opportunity: to create a new state -- from government ministries and police forces to money and TV stations.

It is a race against the clock, Garner acknowledges, against the forces of anarchy that are sapping Iraq and the growing resentment toward Americans who rid the nation of Saddam Hussein but left nothing, so far, in his place.

“If you are absent too long, while expectations are created for our government, our people and the Iraqi people, then a vacuum occurs,” Garner said Monday. “And if you are not there, the vacuum gets filled in ways you don’t want.”

Garner faces a major test today when he presides over the first meeting of Iraq’s potential leaders. About 70 Iraqis from all over the country and from abroad -- and from factions that are hotly distrustful of one another -- have been invited to attend the session in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

Garner and other U.S. officials call the meeting historic, a political discussion in a country where such events were often punished. Yet they have also sought to lower expectations.

The retired three-star general leads a team of about 300 former military men, diplomats and functionaries from numerous government agencies who have been recruited by the Bush administration, and especially by the Pentagon, to administer postwar Iraq. They have spent the last month holed up in sun-drenched, seafront villas in Kuwait City, awaiting marching orders, but last week began fanning out across southern and northern Iraq.

The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA, as it is known, represents a formidable nation-building program that has also been heavily criticized as American imperialism -- with Garner cast as a veritable pro-consul. (There’s already a “Stop-Jay-Garner” Web site that advocates putting the United Nations, and not the U.S. military, in charge of Iraq’s reconstruction.)

Senior U.S. officials, speaking at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Qatar, described today’s session as the first in a series of regional gatherings leading to a national meeting at which Iraqis will establish an interim authority to run the country.

“We would like to set up the interim authority as soon as possible,” said one U.S. official. “We’re talking about weeks, not a lot longer than that.”

Along with Garner, White House special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ryan Crocker will lead the discussion.

It was not clear Monday night how many of the invitees would attend. Some chafe at the U.S. dominance, and others may not yet feel safe enough to travel to Nasiriyah. A major Shiite opposition group announced Monday that it would not attend the meeting, saying it did not accept “a U.S. umbrella.” Ahmad Chalabi, a prominent leader of another opposition group and a Pentagon favorite to be the next president of Iraq, said he would send a representative.

Facing Iraqi Rivalries

Garner downplayed the intense rivalry among the Iraqi factions and especially between those Iraqis who remained in the country during the Hussein decades and those in exile.

“I don’t think you had a love-in when they began in Philadelphia,” Garner said of the United States’ early days.

“Tension and discord, that’s the way democracy begins. It’s part of the process, and the end point is them governing themselves,” he said in an extensive interview with the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

“Any time you start this type of process to lead to democratic self-government, it is fraught with dialogue, tension and coercion, and it should be. If you can’t answer the tough questions, you ought not be there.”

The ORHA project has been criticized for its failure to get off the ground and for the fact that it is dominated by the U.S. military, which critics contend is tone deaf to the cultural complexities of a country like Iraq, so riven by ethnic, religious and ideological differences.

Garner, a successful defense contractor who once helped run the Star Wars program, said he wants to set up shop in Baghdad as soon as possible. He awaits only Central Command’s verdict that it’s safe enough, he says. The plan is to cordon off a part of downtown Baghdad and set up tents there as headquarters.

Iraq will be divided into three sectors: central Iraq, including Baghdad, run by the former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine; the north, run by another retired Army general, Bruce Moore, who reached Irbil on Saturday; and the south, where retired Lt. Gen. Buck Walters set up temporary shop last week in Umm al Qasr before eventually moving on to Basra.

All will report to Garner, who has also designated members of his team to run each of Iraq’s 20-plus ministries and who envisions regional committees that will eventually usher in elections.

“You are not dealing with a Third World country here,” Garner said. “This is a pretty sophisticated country, with a lot of wealth -- it just hasn’t been shared by the people. There’s an intelligentsia, and Arabs are great traders.

“Arabs are very proud people, proud as we are,” he said. “There’s got to be a natural resentment we’re here. The way to [counter that] is by actions. Prove that things will get better and that we are giving [government] back to them as rapidly as we can.”

Garner said he expects it could take six months before he is able to allow elements of self-rule to the Iraqis.

The toughest challenges facing the U.S. team in Baghdad, he said, include establishing law enforcement agencies; repairing infrastructure such as electrical grids, water plants and factories; and setting “the ground rules for dissent and dialogue.” He could not rule out the possibility of reprisal killings, saying it might not be possible to prevent them.

Another problem: how to entice the return of bureaucrats and police officials essential to the workings of government while screening out the most abusive of Baath Party loyalists.

Garner said he expects Iraq could double or triple its oil production in the coming years and become one of the richest countries in the Middle East. He advocates temporary management of the oil industry by a “neutral agency” such as the World Bank. He also urged governments to forgive Iraq’s debt.

“One danger is giving them too much expectation. We’re not going to rebuild Iraq. We’re going to get it started up, pick it up, begin a process.”

Eager to Begin

A stocky, make-it-happen, can-do kind of guy, Garner is especially chummy with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. They have a secure-line video conference every other day, Garner said.

He said he hopes to get to Baghdad within days or weeks. “Every day we are losing a day of momentum in the reconstruction process,” he said.

Garner, who turns 65 today, ran the military operation to protect and aid the Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He retired from the Army in 1997, capping a career that began with two tours of duty in Vietnam as a special advisor.

On an arthritic right wrist, he wears a brass bracelet given to him by the Vietnamese; it’s nothing more than a placebo, he said. He also wears the St. Christopher medal his mother gave him during his first Vietnam tour, 1967-68, and his dog tags.

Vietnam underpins Garner’s philosophy. If the U.S. had fought that war the way it fought this conflict in Iraq, Garner says, America would have won.

“They should have taken the war north ... instead of waiting for it to come south,” he said. “If Bush had been president then, we’d have won Vietnam.”

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Times staff writer Mark Porubcansky in Doha, Qatar, contributed to this report.