Pentagon Postwar Plan Takes a Hit

The White House sought Friday to quell an intra-government cat fight over how to administer postwar Iraq, insisting that the U.S. government will not pick the next leader of Iraq and that the United Nations will not be cut out of the process.

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice stressed that Iraqi exiles have experience and resources to offer Iraq once Saddam Hussein is deposed, but that they will not be allowed to form a provisional government, as Pentagon planners have proposed.

“Iraqis currently free, and Iraqis who will soon be free, and Iraqis who have for decades kept alive the hopes of a free Iraq while in exile, will all have much to contribute to the interim authority and Iraq’s future,” Rice said in a briefing for reporters.

Her remarks signaled that the White House is trying to reassert control and end an unseemly, increasingly public battle between the Pentagon on the one hand and the State Department and CIA on the other.

Both sides see more at stake than bureaucratic advantage. Pentagon planners have spoken of the need to create in Iraq a model of democracy for the Middle East. The State Department sees such ambitions as dangerous unless they are pursued in concert with the United Nations and regional allies.

The Bush administration’s postwar plan had been agreed upon weeks ago and did not give Iraqi exiles a dominant role. Instead, once fighting died down, U.S. officials envisioned holding a kind of national constitutional congress that would bring together Iraqis from all regions, tribes and ethnic groups to choose an interim authority.

Administration officials had previously emphasized that Iraqi exiles who sought positions of authority in postwar Iraq were going to have to win the confidence of their countrymen inside the country.

But in recent days, Pentagon officials have pushed for a swifter process in which the U.S. would install an interim government, composed largely if not entirely of exiles, perhaps even before Baghdad has fallen.

The message out of the White House on Friday, however, was clear. “The interim authority will not be a coalition-imposed provisional government,” Rice said.

Although she praised Iraqi exiles for their dedication to their homeland, she said they would be only one part of the solution for postwar Iraq.

The Iraqi Interim Authority “should also have membership from within the country, where there are people being liberated every day and where local leaders are beginning to participate with the coalition in the liberation of Iraq,” she said.

“We are certain that as the liberation of Iraq takes place, more people will emerge who can be a part of that leadership.”

Tensions between the State Department and Pentagon have grown since last summer, when they were at loggerheads over whether to seek U.N. approval for military action against Iraq. Subsequent disagreement over administering postwar Iraq became public this week.

The Pentagon favors the Iraqi exiles, who have long-standing relationships with key planners, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz. The State Department, on the other hand, insists that in order to gain international legitimacy, an interim authority should focus heavily on finding leaders among the vast majority of Iraqis who remained at home.

“We want an interim authority that is a representative of all the groups who have an interest in the future of Iraq,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Friday after talks with Javier Solana, the European Union’s chief foreign policy official.

The issue is not just balancing insiders and outsiders, but balancing among segments of Iraq’s ethnically and religiously diverse population.

The Iraqi National Congress, which represents Iraqi exiles and has strong backing from the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, is dominated by Shiite Muslim and Kurdish officials. Less represented are Sunni Muslims, who have dominated modern Iraq’s power structure -- and who dominate the wider Arab and Islamic worlds.

A post-Hussein government without strong Sunni Muslim backing could produce suspicion, resentment or rejection in the Islamic world and also jeopardize badly needed funds from oil-rich Persian Gulf governments, all led by Sunni Muslims, State Department officials fear.

Moreover, the State Department and CIA worry that any authority installed at gunpoint by U.S. forces will be seen as illegitimate in the Muslim world.

Rice said she expects that if the interim authority is chosen by Iraqis and represents all Iraqi communities, it will gain international credibility.

She did not specify how the members of the interim authority would be chosen, but an administration official said holding a kind of national conference of community leaders was still the goal, as long as security conditions on the ground permit it.

“Nothing’s going to be decided by fiat,” the official said. “There are no coronations going on.”

A second point of contention has been what kind of role the United Nations should play. Rice said the U.N. would not be confined to a humanitarian role, but it is too soon to say exactly what it should be.

“We are not in a position, with the liberation of Iraq still going on, to know what is going to be needed,” Rice said. “But as Colin Powell said yesterday, it would only be natural to expect that after having ... liberated Iraq with coalition forces, and having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, that the coalition intends to have a leading role.”

As Rice outlined it, establishing a permanent government for Iraq would have three stages. First, as U.S. forces gain military control over the country, they would set up an Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, to be headed by a retired general, Jay Garner. In 1991, Garner helped Kurdish forces in northern Iraq set up a governing authority in the territory they controlled. Garner’s operation would reestablish basic services, such as water and medical care, which it would turn over as quickly as possible to the Iraqi Interim Authority.

In the second stage, the interim authority would assume more and more functions, and organize elections or other procedures to establish and elect a permanent government. Garner’s function would shrink to an advisory role. The final stage would see sovereignty passed on to a permanent government, a process similar to the one used to pick a new government for Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

Congress granted a White House request this week for $2.5 billion to fund reconstruction efforts in Iraq. But in a sign of congressional dissatisfaction with the Pentagon’s postwar plans, it designated the State Department as the only agency that can spend the money.

“The fact is that no one in the administration has ever shared with me or any members of [the Foreign Relations] committee of either party what in the world they had in mind” for postwar Iraq, said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the committee’s chairman. “It’s not as if we didn’t want to know.”

Rice tried to smooth over the dispute, saying that spending authority was requested for the president, not a particular department.

But she said that because the military will be in control on the ground, the money should go to the Pentagon.

“It only makes sense because we are in a war, that the phase of war termination and immediate aftermath would be a Defense Department effort,” Rice said.

The State Department is in the midst of a yearlong project to train Iraq specialists and draw up specific plans for everything from establishing a new judiciary and writing a new constitution to upgrading Iraq’s oil industry. But the Iraq specialists, who have met regularly for months, are now being largely excluded from the transition, U.S. officials say.

*

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Paul Richter contributed to this report.