Exiles Make Plans to Rebuild Nation

On the morning after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the hard work would begin.

Ali Al-Attar is ready to lend a hand. The 39-year-old family practice physician has joined with more than 200 other Iraqi exiles to prepare for potential postwar crises, from cholera outbreaks to chemical weapons exposure. If given the opportunity, he will go back to help put those plans into action.

“I have everything here, but I miss something important,” he said. “I believe some part of me is still there. I’d like to go and fetch it.” These exiled Iraqi academics, professionals and technocrats, mostly Americans, have embarked on a novel experiment in nation-building. Organized and financed by the State Department, participants in the Future of Iraq project are attempting to address the myriad challenges of rebuilding a country many of them have not visited in decades.

“The idea was to develop cadres of experts that would be available for a post-Saddam world, as advisors to a new government,” said Middle East Institute Vice President David Mack, a former State Department official who helped launch the $5-million project. “It’s never been done before.”

For the most part, these are not the noisy opposition leaders whose public feuds have rattled U.S. officials and alienated many Iraqis. In fact, some officials hope that these experts will coalesce into a network capable of providing more effective guidance than the opposition leaders who seem more concerned with acquiring power than with empowering other Iraqis.

“These are the best of the best of the Iraqi exiles in their specialties and their expertise,” said Al-Attar, who was expelled from Iraq at the age of 17.

In 1980, Al-Attar arrived home from high school in Baghdad to find three of President Hussein’s secret police officers waiting for him. He was bused across the desert and dumped at the Iranian border, along with members of 400 other prominent Shiite Muslim families whose loyalty was questioned by Hussein’s regime.

They walked for hours to reach the nearest town. Al-Attar helped set up tents in a refugee camp where the temperature breached 110 by day and fell below freezing at night. Some of the outcasts fell ill. Some died. Some never left. “I know people who were as affluent as we were, but they lost everything,” he said. “They are still living in a tent in Iran. It ruined their lives.”

Some Have Doubts

Interviews with more than a dozen Future of Iraq participants reveal that some harbor doubts about the depth of the Bush administration’s commitment to their plans, particularly their insistence on a representative democracy. But most say they remain enthusiastic about the project. They note that all but a few of the 16 working groups are tackling problems that would confront Iraq no matter what form a new government might take.

“I have spent hundreds of hours on this,” said Feisal Istrabadi, a Chicago attorney. “I’ve done so not because of some notion that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, there’s going to be democracy in Iraq. I’ve done it because this is Iraq’s best hope. There’s no other game in town.”

Foreign policy experts generally agree that the legacy of any U.S. military action would depend in part on the involvement of Iraqis in the postwar decision-making process. “If we’ve learned anything from the Balkans, it’s that top-down solutions -- just add water and George Washington will spring up on his horse -- are probably not the way to go,” said policy analyst John Hulsman at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “In the long run, a bottom-up approach is really the only way you can make this work.”

In Iraq, the view from the bottom is not pretty.

Nijyar H. Shemdin, a native of northern Iraq who left the region in 1975 after a failed Kurdish uprising, realized how bad things had become when he returned in 1994 to bury his mother next to his father’s grave in the city of Zakhu.

Garbage trucks could not collect trash because their tires were worn out. Fire engines were idled because of a lack of spare parts. Ambulances could not make their runs, streets were riddled with potholes, water mains were broken and the electrical system had been disconnected from the national grid.

“It was the Iraqi government’s way of saying, ‘We don’t want you,’ ” said Shemdin, the Kurdistan regional government’s representative in Washington. “It was pathetic.”

Hatem Mukhlis, an emergency room surgeon in Binghamton, N.Y., knows what the initial priorities would be: blood supplies and intravenous fluids. Antiseptics and antibiotics. Clean food and purified water. Sewage and water treatment repairs.

Mukhlis is participating with Al-Attar on the public health working group. The surgeon too is willing to go to Iraq to take part in the reconstruction and help unite the population.

“My family name is well known, and I am well connected with Iraq as a whole,” said Mukhlis, whose grandfather fought to free Iraq from Ottoman and British rule and whose father served as a military officer, ambassador and member of parliament.

Mukhlis has a dream. He wants to build a monument honoring victims of government oppression, something that lists their names like the black granite wall in Washington honoring Vietnam veterans.

It would be located near Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison. That’s where Mukhlis’ father, Jasim, was executed in 1993, along with an uncle and a cousin. “I want parks and flowers and grass and fountains and names on a monument,” he said. “I envision a place for Iraqis to have fun and remember and pray for those who have died.”

Los Angeles attorney Sermid Al-Sarraf got an early glimpse of where things were headed under Hussein. In 1978, Al-Sarraf said, classmate Uday Hussein shot and killed another young Iraqi in what was reportedly a drunken brawl. Uday’s father, Saddam Hussein, was Iraq’s vice president at the time.

Instead of holding the young man accountable, Al-Sarraf said, the government expanded Uday’s contingent of bodyguards and began transporting his desk to and from school to prevent possible sabotage.

“It was clear the guy was a criminal at 14,” Al-Sarraf said. “There was no issue of him being brought to trial. It was total impunity.”

Al-Sarraf’s interest in human rights led to his participation in the transitional justice working group. The panel has drafted guidelines for determining which officials of Iraq’s ruling Baath Party should face prosecution for their actions.

“Iraqis are not familiar with questioning authority,” he said. “They’re not used to a law that encompasses everyone, where everyone is accountable. Those elements need to be written into everything from the constitution to the penal code.”

Rubar S. Sandi, who founded the U.S.-Iraq Business Council, wants to use his expertise as an international investment banker to recruit American companies and capital to rebuild Iraq. But first, he said, Iraq must get its financial house in order. One of Sandi’s big concerns is Iraq’s currency, the dinar. Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a dinar was officially worth about $3. It has since plunged as low as 3,000 dinars to the dollar. Not only that, every dinar printed in Iraq bears the likeness of the president.

“That’s just not going to work,” said Sandi, a Kurd who left Iraq after a failed 1974 uprising.

He wants to replace the dinars with a new currency, perhaps honoring famous Iraqi writers, artists, scholars and politicians.

Unfinished Business

Muhammad Ali Zainy was finishing his PhD at the Colorado School of Mines in 1980 when two nephews, a young doctor and a dental student, were executed by Hussein’s government for joining an Islamic opposition group.

Zainy returned to Baghdad and became a top advisor to the Iraqi oil minister. Over the next two years, however, he became increasingly fearful for himself, his wife and four children.

“You’re constantly worried you must have said something that didn’t please the government, and [that] they would come to your house at 3 o’clock in the morning and sweep you and your family away to prison in your pajamas,” he said.

In 1982, Zainy sent his wife and children to London. When the government sent him to Vienna several weeks later to represent Iraq at an OPEC conference, he hopped on another flight and defected.

Zainy works at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. He is a member of the oil and energy working group, which is devising plans to keep Iraq’s wells and refineries operating during and after a military offensive.

Azzam Alwash fled Iraq after he was told in 1978 that he would have to join a student organization affiliated with the Baath Party to receive a scholarship. Now 44, he is a principal in Pacific Soils Engineering in Tustin, Calif.

As a member of the water, agriculture and environment working group, he is promoting a truly monumental reclamation project: restoring the vast marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq.

The swampy area was drained in the 1990s because it had become a refuge for Shiite opposition groups. The marshes gradually dried up, leaving behind a thick layer of salt and pollutants.

Alwash, who as a child traversed the area in a boat with his father, has spent several years researching Iraq’s environmental debacle. With his wife, Suzie, a geologist, he has developed a plan for restoring the marshes and hopes to see it adopted if the U.S. succeeds in toppling Hussein.

Like Al-Attar, he would like to put his professional expertise to work in Iraq. But as long as Hussein remains in power, there is no chance of that happening.

“I’m on the black list,” he said. “I could go back, but it would be a very short trip. It would end up with my decapitation, I suppose.”