It may be messy at first, but we can remake Iraq

THE retired US general who will run post-war Iraq for the Bush administration flew to Iraq yesterday on a mission to remake the country’s politics - a process, he predicted, that would be messy and contentious.

But General Jay Garner insisted that United States-style democracy could sprout on the shards of Saddam Hussein’s government.

"I don’t think they had a love-in when they had Philadelphia in 1787," he said before he left. "Anytime you start the process it’s fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be."

Iraq, he suggested, could be the richest country in the Middle East within a few years.

For Gen Garner, who spent his 65th birthday in An Nasiriyah, greeting and cajoling Iraqis he has never met before, the politics of Iraq is just one of the tasks ahead.

Gen Garner will oversee how $2.4 billion (1.4 billion) authorised by Congress last week will be spent in Iraq. He will pass judgment on problems like setting up television stations and selecting a police force for a population of 24 million in 17 provinces.

His voice will be important when Washington decides how to revive the Iraqi oil industry and how quickly it will seek to lift United Nations sanctions. One of his deputies, Lewis Lucke, a former official of the US Agency for International Development, is in charge of the bidding process for reconstruction contracts.

The major irritation among the general’s staff seems to be that the Central Command, citing security concerns, was keeping him in Kuwait instead of letting him go to Baghdad. After presiding over the conference yesterday, the general was due to return to Kuwait.

Once he gets to Baghdad, the general acknowledged, "there will be a lot of problems" - law enforcement, getting services working, and preventing revenge killings, particularly "if severe Baathists try to return to communities".

The general appeared confident that, with help from Iraqis, he would succeed. "Arabs are very proud people," he said. "Proud as we are."

He claimed the Iraqis are "pretty sophisticated" and have "a lot of wealth, it’s just not been shared among them".

He added: "There’s an intelligentsia. The Arabs are great traders; they’re organised."

He also believes that the Iraqis are "motivated, even though they’ve lived under a mushroom for 25 years".

He is prepared for resentment at the US presence. "The way you get over that is by your actions," he said, "by showing that things will get better; that we will give it back to them as rapidly as we can."

Within 90 to 120 days, he said, he would like to "transition elements back to the Iraqis".

He added: "In my heart of hearts, I think it will go fairly rapidly."

The role of the UN has not figured much in the general’s planning for Iraq, according to some of the several hundred retired generals and officers, diplomats and aid experts who are with him.

But Gen Garner said he was in favour of a Security Council resolution that would allow the revenues from Iraq’s rejuvenated oil production to be used for "reconstruction of the country and the betterment of the citizens of Iraq".

Those revenues, he said, should be "managed by a neutral agency, like the World Bank", where it could be properly audited and "transparent".

But there is little question, the general said, that oil will be the basis of new wealth in Iraq. "They may become the richest country in the Middle East," he said.

The general said he believed that Iraq needed a new currency, and advisers from the treasury department, who went to Kuwait with him, are considering the question.

By getting out of Iraq fast, the general said, the US can avoid repeating past mistakes. "We’re notorious for telling people what to do," he said. When pressed for an example, he added: "Start with Vietnam and the strategic hamlet concept."

Gen Garner served two tours in Vietnam, first in 1967-68 as an infantry adviser in the central highlands, and as a district senior adviser in 1971-72 in the strategic hamlet program, which involved relocating Vietnamese in remote villages into areas heavily defended by American forces, he said.

Overall, he added , the war in Vietnam was a failure because the US had the "wrong military objective".

"It took too long," he said. "We should have taken the war north instead of waiting in the south. Just like here. If President Bush had been president, we would have won."