As soldiers and marines close in on Baghdad, a second wave is mustering in Kuwait City. A small cadre of 50-year-old ex-generals and diplomats will take up the task that tens of thousands of 20-year-old privates have begun. After armed force rips the parasitic regime out of Iraq, these civilians will try to keep the weakened patient from dying on the operating table.

The organization officially called the "Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance" will form, in effect, the nucleus of an interim government for post-Saddam Iraq. Its role is not to replace the existing bureaucracy, let alone run the entire country, but to oversee the Iraqi functionaries who survive Saddam, foster the indigenous leaders who arise and the expatriate politicians who return after the dictator falls, and coordinate the U.N. and private aid groups that flood in to help.

Just how this will happen is not entirely clear -- probably not even to the Bush administration. Not yet resolved, for example, are basic questions of how much influence Iraqi exiles and the United Nations will have, and when -- as well as the details of who has what title. At the head of the emerging administration is retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, reporting to the Pentagon through Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks and Franks's Arabic-speaking deputy, Lt. Gen. John Abizaid. Garner, in turn, will oversee three bureaus that will coordinate specific functions -- humanitarian relief, reconstruction, and civil government -- throughout Iraq. An array of specialists and private contractors, including more than a hundred U.S.-trained Iraqi exiles, will graft themselves onto the existing Iraqi bureaucracy to guide day-to-day reform and reconstruction.

The Bush administration has backed off an earlier plan to name individual coordinators for the northern, southern, and central regions of Iraq, apparently in deference both to world opinion and to the Iraqi opposition (especially the well-organized and well-armed Kurds), which is exquisitely sensitive to the idea of foreign governors. With the situation in Iraq changing hourly, and with the relief effort already flowing in behind the front lines, such adjustments represent necessary "flexibility," not "indecision," one senior Defense official emphasized to National Journal. "As the circumstances change, as the organization develops relationships within the country, with Central Command, responsibilities will change."

But even though roles and titles are in flux, it's clear that certain Americans will play key roles in the new Iraq. Based on lists compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on media reports, and on research by a team of National Journal reporters, this article profiles eight of these individuals at length, and another 10 in brief.

The list already inspires both admiration and anxiety. While the individuals, as individuals, are generally well respected in their fields, the reconstruction team so far is overwhelmingly American and predominantly either ex-military or ex-Foreign Service. Moreover, the team will be led by a U.S. general, not a U.N. civilian. That fact is sure to complicate relations with the various Iraqi factions and with the wide array of U.N. and nongovernment aid groups that the administration has pledged to rely on for handling day-to-day reconstruction tasks.

Experience elsewhere has shown that coordinating the independent-minded local and international players trying to rebuild a war-torn country is like herding cats, and the head of such an effort has to be "the supreme cat shepherd," said Chris Seiple of the Institute for Global Engagement. Seiple, a former marine, interviewed Garner for a book on how the military works with aid groups. "Jay Garner is exactly the guy you want to head this office [for] the Pentagon," Seiple said. "It's just that you don't want the Pentagon in charge at the end of the day."

The Pentagon agrees. The continuing NATO commitments to Bosnia and Kosovo show the danger of fostering "too much dependence on coalition forces," said the senior Defense official. "We're going there to do this mission and help the Iraqis do this on their own, [creating conditions] where the Iraqis can govern themselves."

But force is the final arbiter, and only the U.S. military has the might to fill the dangerous vacuum that will be created by Saddam's fall. So putting Garner's team under the military chain of command reflects a brutal reality. The true measure of the team's success will be how fast that reality can change.

Jay Garner
Head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

The last time Jay Garner managed part of Iraq, the people didn't want him to leave. In July 1991, after three months of feeding and protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, then-Maj. Gen. Garner was pulling out his troops when several thousand Kurdish protesters briefly held up the withdrawal. Some of the demonstrators scuffled with U.S. troops, but others hoisted Garner on their shoulders. One banner read, "Thank you, but the job is only half done." Farhad Barzani, the Kurdistan Democratic Party's representative in Washington, told National Journal simply, "We love him, because we know him."

Garner felt just as strongly about his mission. "When Jay came back" to the Pentagon, recalled now-retired Lt. Gen. Ted Stroup, "when you went into his office, one of the things that he was proudest of were some hand-drawn thank-you notes, in crayon, from Kurdish children."

Garner's 1991 mission was a hastily mounted response to the chaos of post-Desert Storm Iraq. Its success made possible the creation of a semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave in the north -- which today, for all its troubles, is far more prosperous and free than the rest of Iraq. And experts in stabilizing strife-torn regions hold up Garner's 1991 Operation Provide Comfort as a model of how to do it right. Said Chris Seiple of the Institute for Global Engagement, "Garner's greatest strength was that he let the experts do their job."

While Garner, now 64, has a reputation for calm collaboration in the field, he has also held his own in Washington policy battles. When he was in charge of missile defense programs as head of what was then called the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command, he walked a delicate line between Republican "Star Wars" supporters in Congress and his skeptical bosses in the Clinton administration. Later, as assistant vice chief of staff, he was the regular Army's point man in the bitter budget battles of the late 1990s, pitted against even his own service's National Guard. "We all had our backs against the wall," recalled Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, now retired, who worked for Garner. "He was tenacious, but there was never any duplicity in anything he ever did."

Garner, after retiring in 1997 at the rank of lieutenant general, served on a presidential panel on space and missile threats -- a group chaired by once-and-future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "He and Garner hit it off because they are very much alike: two very bright guys with strong opinions," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, who likened his friend Garner to "a bulldozer -- but a very bright bulldozer, and exactly the right choice for this job."

Barbara Bodine
Senior staffer, Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

When Barbara Bodine returned home safely in 1990 after a stint at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, her father made known his preference for her next assignment: "I hope that next time, she lands in Switzerland, or Holland, or someplace like that."

Baghdad certainly wasn't on his list. But Bodine, 55, who is reportedly under consideration to coordinate central Iraqi affairs for Jay Garner's office, could be heading there. For Bodine, serving as deputy chief of mission in Kuwait in 1990 wasn't exactly preparation for a cushy European posting anyway: During the three-and-a-half month siege of the embassy by the Iraqi army, she and the staff dined on tuna fish, not caviar.

For the past two years, Bodine has been ambassador-in-residence at the University of California (Santa Barbara). Mark Juergensmeyer, who directs the global studies program at the university and has been teaching courses with Bodine, said that she's "very professional and pleasant, but also very practical and no-nonsense." When the State Department called her back to work with Garner, Juergensmeyer says, she found lodging for her cats and promised to be back within a year.

Bodine began her Foreign Service career as a Chinese-speaking specialist in Southeast Asian affairs. After tours of duty in Hong Kong and Bangkok, she relocated to the Middle East, where she learned Arabic and worked her way through the U.S. embassies in Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen. After the Kuwait siege, she was steadily promoted through the ranks of the State Department, serving stints as acting coordinator for counter-terrorism and as dean of professional studies at the Foreign Service Institute. In 1997, she returned overseas as ambassador to Yemen.

Nearly three years later, 17 U.S. service members died in the bombing of the USS Cole in a Yemeni port.

Bodine's role in the ensuing investigation raised her profile, and some hackles, back in Washington. She clashed repeatedly and publicly with the FBI's lead investigator, John O'Neill. Their disputes -- over tactics, personnel, and politics -- escalated for months and culminated in her decision to bar him from the country in 2000.

O'Neill's supporters bitterly fault Bodine's attention to local politics over international terrorism. "Her tenure in Yemen was a debacle," one Mideast-watcher said bluntly. (O'Neill resigned from the FBI to become director of security at the World Trade Center, where he died in the September 11 attack.)

But former diplomats who've spoken with Bodine about her relationship with O'Neill say that clashes between an ambassador and an investigator were almost inevitable. "Does the FBI have friction with local law enforcement officials when investigating a case in Little Rock? Yep. With ambassadors? Absolutely," said David Mack, former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. "They don't always understand the lines of authority and local peculiarities."

George Ward
Senior staffer, Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

After September 11, George Ward, the director of training with the U.S. Institute of Peace and a former marine, decided that he wanted to do something. So he signed up to become an auxiliary police officer. He studied proper gun use and evasive driving techniques and recently graduated to get his uniform.

Given the likely security nightmare facing U.S. authorities after Saddam is gone, Jay Garner's office might very well benefit from having an extra police officer on call. But it's Ward's Foreign Service experience that most qualifies him for his upcoming stint with Garner, reportedly as coordinator of humanitarian aid throughout Iraq.

After serving in Vietnam as an officer, Ward embarked on a 30-year Foreign Service career in European security and multilateral policy issues. From 1989 to 1992, he was deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Bonn, where he handled much of the detailed negotiations on German reunification and then spent four years in Washington as the principal deputy assistant secretary of State for international organization affairs. In 1996, Ward was appointed U.S. ambassador to Namibia, where he managed a humanitarian program to remove land mines and initiated a campaign to reduce violence against women.

Upon retiring from the Foreign Service after his tour in Namibia, Ward joined the U.S. Institute of Peace to direct its then-nascent training program. "He's extremely well organized, able to do planning, and skilled at listening and getting people to talk," said Harriet Hentges, institute executive vice president. "But one of the surprising things to me was how entrepreneurial he is in developing programs."

During his tenure at the peace institute, Ward, 58, has been responsible for training senior staff from foreign governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the military, in consensus, mediation, and conflict resolution -- just about every skill that he would need in Iraq.

Daniel Serwer, director of the institute's Balkans Initiative, first met Ward 25 years ago, when both men worked at the U.S. Embassy in Italy. More recently, they've done extensive work together in the former Yugoslavia. Like Hentges, Serwer praises Ward's meticulousness and creativity. During the Kosovo war, the U.S. Army called in the Institute of Peace to train the Serbs and Albanians. "Some people would have said, 'Are you nuts? You can't even call these people on the phone,' " Serwer said, pointing out that communication with the two groups was virtually non-existent at the time. But beginning with third-party negotiations through the Army, followed by e-mail and telephone discussions, Serwer and Ward got into Kosovo, where they successfully brought the Serbs and Albanians together in joint dialogues.

Hentges says that the institute was not happy about releasing Ward for the full four months requested, but that he very much believed that his skills would be needed. "He knew it would be difficult for the institute to be without him," she said. "But he really felt like it was his patriotic duty to do it."

Michael H. Mobbs
Senior staffer, Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

A 54-year-old international lawyer and former nuclear arms negotiator in the Reagan administration, Michael Mobbs doesn't have much experience managing large institutions, but he has benefited from a close relationship with the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, with whom he practiced law. He has spent most of his career outside the courtroom as a corporate lawyer, including several years in Moscow helping U.S. companies seeking business in Russia.

Kenneth Adelman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, said Mobbs was a tough-minded and unflappable negotiator when he managed the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in the early 1980s. Adelman said he believed Mobbs would be up to the task of rooting out Saddam Hussein's loyalists and others in the Iraqi bureaucracy who might threaten a pro-American regime. Most recently, Mobbs was a key aide to Feith in preparing for a post-Saddam Iraq, as head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Planning.

If there is one name behind the Bush administration's controversial suspension of judicial rights in the war on terrorism, it belongs to Mobbs. Although Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has been the most vocal defender of that policy, it was the Defense Department that insisted on a wartime standard of justice for the 660 men detained at a U.S. base in Cuba and for two American citizens held incommunicado in the United States. And when the government needed to justify the detention of one of those men, it issued a nine-paragraph statement signed by Mobbs, then a legal consultant at the Pentagon. The declaration did not specify what Yasser Esam Hamdi had allegedly done. "Due process requires something other than a basic assertion by someone named Mobbs," said the judge, before rejecting what he called "The Mobbs Declaration."

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said she found it "troubling" that Mobbs would be considered to coordinate civil administration in post-Saddam Iraq, a job that would give him much authority over Iraqi citizens. While the U.S. military is likely to retain control over law enforcement and the prosecution of Saddam loyalists, it is still not clear what standard of justice will be employed in postwar Iraq. "I am concerned that he was involved in closing down any inquiry into facts of the Hamdi case," Massimino said, "and denying [Hamdi] access to a lawyer, which is one of the fundamental rights" of the accused.

Unlike Feith and other neoconservatives, Mobbs had not been publicly active in pushing for a U.S. confrontation with Iraq. "He's pretty quiet, doesn't express his opinions that freely," said Phillip Robinson, another former law partner. Adelman said, "He's a good advocate, but he was also good about considering all sides. He's a capable man."

Lewis Lucke
Senior staffer, Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

Lewis Lucke began his first stint in the Middle East -- a region where he'd wanted to work since college -- in 1990, on the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In an unfortunate coincidence, Lucke and his family had chosen that date to arrive in Tunisia, where he was to be deputy mission director for the United States Agency for International Development. Six months later, they were evacuated back to the states.

Now, 12 and a half years on, Lucke is in his third Middle Eastern stint, this time helping to prepare for a post-Saddam Iraq. The well-respected USAID veteran has been working on contingency and reconstruction planning in Kuwait since early January.

Former colleagues consistently praise Lucke's management skills, saying that he's good at delegating authority and trusting staff. During his 24-year government tenure, Lucke received the presidential merit service award for his work in Jordan as well as USAID's distinguished career award.

Lucke, 52, was born in North Carolina, and he got his first real taste of international affairs during a junior year abroad in Lyon, France. Shortly after college, he went to Israel to work on an archeological dig, which hooked him on the Middle East for the rest of his career.

He began his USAID work through the agency's young professionals program, serving initially as a junior program officer in Mali. He then did tours of duty in Senegal and Costa Rica, before his 1990 posting to Tunisia.

After Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Lucke moved to Washington, where he worked on Eastern European initiatives for a couple of years before he was named acting director of the USAID mission in Bolivia. Five years later, he got his second chance at the Middle East, and he moved, with his family, to Jordan, where he spent four years as the USAID mission director.

Lucke retired from the government in 2001 and spent a year working for Carana, an economic development company. After September 11, though, he realized that his interests were still in the public sector and in the Middle East-and a year later, he got a chance to do something about it.

Lt. Gen. John Abizaid
Deputy Commander, Central Command

John Abizaid is a different kind of general. He is often cited as the highest-ranking Arab-American in U.S. history. But he is also the leading edge of a new generation. While both Tommy Franks and Jay Garner were blooded as young officers in Vietnam, Abizaid, 51, graduated from West Point in 1973, just as the U.S. withdrew from that war. He learned his trade, instead, in brushfires around the world: in Lebanon, Grenada, and Bosnia, and in northern Iraq in 1991, where he worked for Garner. A TV-savvy briefer whose Grenada exploits using a hotwired bulldozer under fire were fictionalized in a 1986 Clint Eastwood movie called Heartbreak Ridge, Abizaid has been the subject of countless flattering newspaper profiles -- the kind of attention that can derail a career in the fervently self-effacing Army. But if he has enemies, they're keeping quiet. Said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, "he is one of the very few emerging Army personalities about whom one only hears good things."

Yet Abizaid has hardly shunned risks. As a young officer, he left the elite Rangers to take a military scholarship at the University of Jordan. During his officially academic tour in Amman, Abizaid strayed off campus to train with Jordanian commandos and travel in the Middle East, including then-obscure Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was rising to power. Said Killebrew, "Abizaid bucked the usual assignment ladder and became an Arabic specialist at a time when that wasn't always a good career move, purely because he intellectually believed the Army would need Arabic specialists. Well, he was right."

Abizaid's investment paid off in 1985, when he joined the U.N. monitoring mission in his ancestral Lebanon. "He had a tremendous reputation," recalled another Lebanon peacekeeper, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, and "got along well with Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis." Abizaid brought the same diplomacy to northern Iraq in 1991, when he peacefully eased Iraqi regulars out of Kurdish areas, once by bombarding them with loud rock music. He returned to the region this January when he was named one of two deputies to Franks, who -- managing 24 other countries in his theater of operations -- is likely to delegate day-to-day work on postwar Iraq to Abizaid.

Mideast specialist though he is, Abizaid is also at home in the Pentagon. His last assignment before Central Command was as director of the Joint Staff, an obscure but powerful back-office position charged with coordinating the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines. In a letter leaked last fall, Abizaid blasted bureaucrats for evading "the fundamental issue that the Department of Defense is not effectively structured to effect the organizing, training, and equipping of joint forces" -- impolitic words for the Pentagon, but music to the ears of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has also been known to rail against service rivalries.

Zalmay Khalilzad
U.S. Special Envoy to Iraqi Opposition

As the White House liaison to Iraqi opposition groups, Zalmay Khalilzad has presided over the tumultuous efforts to impose order on the different factions battling for primacy in postwar Iraq. That process has not gone smoothly, though it is hard to say how much of the blame goes to Khalilzad. A conference he organized among opposition leaders last September had to be canceled when the squabbling factions couldn't agree on even the most general outlines of a plan for after the war. Khalilzad is close to one prominent factional leader, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, and may bear some responsibility for a perception among other opposition groups that the Bush administration will give the INC control over a new Iraqi regime.

Khalilzad, who is in his early 50s, was born in Afghanistan and had been a staffer on the Bush White House's National Security Council, in charge of helping set up a new government in his home country after defeat of the Taliban. Previously as an academic, he advocated the overthrow of the Taliban long before the September 11 attacks, even arguing for a partnership with warlords in the Northern Alliance to bring down the government. Before that, however, he had been paid by oil company Unocal to lobby for U.S. aid to the Taliban regime. "The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran," Khalilzad wrote in a 1996 Washington Post op-ed (in which he did not mention his relations with Unocal).

Khalilzad is a charter member of the neoconservative group that has been pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. With Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy secretary of Defense, he co-wrote the 1997 Weekly Standard article "Overthrow Him" that was the rallying cry for the bring-down-Saddam cause and an early blueprint for the Bush doctrine of pre-emption. As a Pentagon aide to Wolfowitz during the administration of George H.W. Bush, Khalilzad was among those pushing for a march to Baghdad during the first Persian Gulf War. In 1988, in the final months of the Reagan administration, Khalilzad had urged Secretary of State George Shultz to explore rapprochement with Iran as a way to counter the growing influence of Iraq. Shultz, with memories of the Iran-Contra scandal still fresh, rejected the idea, but it caught on and was pursued with zeal by the Clinton administration.

After 1992, Khalilzad worked as a policy analyst for Rand and continued to hold forth on foreign affairs in scholarly and popular publications. In The Wall Street Journal, he called for NATO expansion, a go-slow approach to independence for East Timor, and the arming of rebel forces in Kosovo. In The Washington Quarterly, he wrote a lengthy history of America's modern relations with Afghanistan and laid out a vision of a democratic state there that may well be coming to pass.

Douglas J. Feith
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy

While Jay Garner wrangles with Iraqis and aid workers, Douglas Feith will run interference with the skeptics in the American and worldwide press, in Congress, and in the executive branch's own bureaucracy. It's an arena very different from Iraq, and it requires a different kind of warrior. In stark contrast to the publicity-shy soldiers and civil servants who will staff the effort in Iraq, Feith, 49, is a Reaganite-turned-lawyer/lobbyist who has churned up a wide and controversial wake in Washington.

Feith is playing two roles. His external mission is to make the Bush administration's intellectual case, not so much directly to the American public (a job for Bush and Rumsfeld) but to the policy elite inside Washington. That role is documented in Feith's appearances so far in countless press conferences, interviews, and Capitol Hill hearings.

Less obviously, Feith carries the ideological torch deep into the labyrinth of the career bureaucracy, which is always somewhat resistant to Defense political appointees -- and especially so when they push policies as daring as the pre-emptive invasion and reconstruction of an entire country. So when the regular intelligence channels, especially in the CIA, were reporting no links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Feith assembled his own small shop of analysts to arm Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with counterpoints for interagency debates. More recently, Feith has been overseeing the creation of Garner's team to administer postwar Iraq.

Those are controversial tasks. And it is hard to overstate how utterly Feith is reviled in certain circles. Depending on the source, he is variously portrayed as an incompetent martinet who holds up crucial decisions so he can correct the grammar on paperwork, an omnipotent hawk who stifled dissent over Iraq among intelligence analysts, and an agent of world Zionism manipulating U.S. policy in the interests of Israel.

Interpretations aside, the hard facts of Feith's record do reflect an uncompromising ideological crusader. He publicly criticized the first Bush administration for going soft on Syria and for negotiating a global accord against chemical weapons, a pact he argued was unverifiable. He briefly advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before breaking with him for being soft on the Palestinians: Feith wrote that Israel should reject the Oslo peace process as a failure and be ready to disarm the Palestinian Authority by force. He advocated limited use of U.S. force to overthrow Saddam back in the '90s. And while Feith is not an old Nixon/Ford administration hand like Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld, he worked for their ally and adviser Richard Perle in the Reagan administration. It is the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Perle faction that fought for the current policy to redeem Iraq by force. It is their vision for which Feith fights now.

Other Key Figures

In addition to those profiled above, other senior advisers, diplomats, and consultants are heavily involved in preparations for an interim government in Iraq.

Andrew Natsios, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, will have tremendous influence on what Jay Garner's team can do on the ground in Iraq. Natsios is a veteran of USAID from the first Bush administration, when his Army civil-affairs unit was mobilized to rebuild liberated Kuwait. A former vice president of the Christian relief group World Vision, Natsios also headed Massachusetts's "Big Dig" highway project.

USAID's Michael Marx will lead the interagency Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART, into Iraq to coordinate immediate aid from the United States, the United Nations, and relief groups. Marx, a former Army officer, headed the DART for Afghanistan as well.

Veteran diplomat William Eagleton is expected to help the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance with transition planning for the northern part of Iraq. Eagleton did his first tour of duty in Iraq under the pre-1958 Iraqi monarchy as a State Department public-affairs officer in Kirkuk, and his second tour under Baath Party rule as chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Baghdad from 1980 to 1984. The 77-year-old Arabist is fluent in Arabic and Kurdish.

Kenton Keith, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is a public-diplomacy and communications specialist who has agreed to serve on Garner's team. Currently the vice president for programs at the nonprofit group Meridian International, he returned briefly to diplomacy after September 11 to help set up the Coalition Information Center in Pakistan.

Robin Raphel, former U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, is currently senior vice president at the National Defense University in Washington. She has an extensive background in economics and South Asian political affairs. She told colleagues this week that she would be working with Garner in Kuwait.

Timothy Carney is a former U.S. ambassador to Sudan who is also expected to join Garner's operation.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ron Adams, who commanded stabilization forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is currently serving as Jay Garner's deputy.

Jerry Bates, another retired Army three-star, reportedly will lead the logistical and administrative support operation for his old comrade Garner. Bates also worked on the Clinton administration's intervention in Haiti.

Col. George Oliver headed the Army War College's Peacekeeping Institute-now being closed down-before joining Garner's staff in early March.

Retired Army Col. Richard Naab, who commanded the allied forces during the 1991 Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq, is now in Kuwait working with Garner. Like Garner, he is known and trusted by the Kurds.

---

Direct Link:

---