Bush mob in disarrary: Cabinet agencies battling over aid to Iraq; operating mainly on ignorance
- From: "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names" <PopUlist349@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 11 Mar 2007 00:33:30 -0800
Agencies Tangle on Efforts to Help Iraq
Staffers Say Spats Displace Priorities
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007; A01
As violence in Iraq crescendoed last year, President Bush summoned his
secretaries of agriculture, commerce and energy to Camp David in June
to meet with his national security team. During a two-hour afternoon
discussion in the main lodge, the president urged the three
secretaries to become more involved in the Iraq reconstruction effort.
When Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez got back to his office, he
asked his staff members to develop a list of Iraq-related projects for
the agency. They did, and two months later, they shared it with the
U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, expecting that diplomats on the ground would
welcome a little help from Washington.
Instead, the document, "Secretary Gutierrez's Five Priority Areas for
Economic Reform in Iraq," set off a bureaucratic grenade in Baghdad's
Green Zone. The second item on the list called for the United States
to pressure Iraq's government to cease providing people with monthly
food rations, which more than half of Iraq's population relies on for
sustenance.
Embassy officials were incensed. Although the embassy's economists
favored changes to the ration system, they believed that dismantling
it as Commerce was proposing could spark riots that might topple the
Iraqi government.
"Commerce was stunningly naive," said a senior State Department
official involved in Iraq policy. "They were way out of their lane."
The dispute between Commerce and State illuminates the rivalries that
have cropped up within the U.S. government as the White House seeks to
involve more parts of the federal bureaucracy in the reconstruction of
Iraq. Instead of collaborating, agencies have often found themselves
split by the gulf between idealistic officials in Washington, some of
whom have never been to Iraq, and embassy staffers whose ambition to
promote change has been attenuated by the violence and dysfunction
they witness every day.
The disagreements often center on arcane subjects -- such as tariff
policy or the rehabilitation of state-owned enterprises -- but the
impact can be profound, according to people on both sides of the
fights. Embassy staffers said they have wasted countless hours
squabbling with Washington instead of focusing on more urgent
initiatives to stabilize Iraq. In one incident, as the bickering
between Commerce and State intensified, the embassy blocked a team of
Commerce officials from entering the country.
Some at Commerce regard embassy staffers and their bosses at the State
Department as ungrateful and unwilling to embrace others' ideas --
even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pleads with other federal
agencies to send more people to Iraq. "We were willing to help, as the
president asked us to do, but the State Department feels that it has
control of the situation," said a senior Commerce official involved in
the food-ration policy.
Officials at State contend that they do want other federal departments
to assist in Iraq, but they said they are less interested in policies
that are developed by those agencies in Washington and imposed on
Baghdad.
"The problem stems from this view at the White House that the whole
Cabinet has to be involved," the senior State Department official
said.
The result, an embassy official with direct knowledge of the food-
ration debate said, is that "there are too many cooks in the kitchen."
* * *
Staffers in the embassy's economic section called Commerce's plan to
end the rations a "zombie idea."
"It was one of those bad ideas that you think is dead, but it keeps
coming up every nine to 12 months," the embassy official said. "And
each time it comes up, the plan gets worse."
The proposal surfaced in late 2003, when L. Paul Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority was running Iraq. Bremer's economic team
believed that the monthly handouts embodied socialism at its worst,
that they promoted corruption, wasted government money, discouraged
domestic agriculture and interfered with the CPA's plans to promote
capitalism.
Every Iraqi, regardless of need, has been eligible for the basic
rations, which Saddam Hussein's government started doling out after
the United Nations imposed trade sanctions following Iraq's 1990
invasion of Kuwait. The rations, almost all of which are imported,
include wheat, rice, sugar, vegetable oil, salt, tea, cereal, soap and
detergent.
It costs Iraq about $4 billion a year -- more than the U.N. World Food
Program's global budget. And instead of providing vouchers for people
to buy staples on the open market, the Iraqi government buys and hands
out the food itself. Each year, more than 2 million metric tons of
wheat are distributed by truck across the nation.
Bremer's team wanted to cut off the rich and provide poor Iraqis with
cash so they could buy the food they needed. The plan suggested giving
Iraqis microchip-embedded "smart cards," even though most Iraqis had
never used a credit card. Others in the CPA, including representatives
from Britain, and the U.S. military objected, said people involved in
the discussions. They argued that the risk of social unrest over
problems with the transition was too great. Eventually, in the spring
of 2004, the plan was scuttled.
In 2005, economists working for the embassy once again raised the
idea. Once again, it was shot down by the military. By early last
year, embassy officials assumed that the issue was dead.
Then, in August, they received the list of Gutierrez's priorities.
Priority Two was to "dismantle the public food distribution system."
"The system is wasteful and creates a disincentive to produce," the
document stated. Iraq's government "should press forward with a
program to transfer the supply and distribution to the private
sector."
The document was less detailed than the original CPA proposal and did
not specify a deadline by which the change should occur, but it
acknowledged that the effort would be "politically sensitive" among
Iraqis.
It also proved to be sensitive among Americans in Iraq.
"Commerce was off the reservation," said a second embassy official
with direct knowledge of the issue. The two embassy officials
discussed the dispute in detail on the condition of anonymity because
they were speaking without authorization.
The embassy's economic section fired off a classified cable to
Washington stating that Commerce's priorities did not mesh with the
economic section's priorities, the two officials said. "It was along
the lines of, 'Thank you very much for your interest in this issue,
however we think Commerce is best positioned to work on other areas,'
" the first embassy official said.
But Commerce officials were undaunted. They believed their involvement
had the support of Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who
welcomed Gutierrez when he visited Baghdad in July. And Bush himself
had asked the Commerce Department to help with reconstruction.
"There were discussions at a high level between Washington and
Baghdad," the senior Commerce official said. "The top level seemed to
be in agreement with the economic priorities that the secretary had
identified."
Commerce believed it was best suited to incubating private-sector food
producers and distributors -- a key prerequisite to dismantling the
ration system. "We are the agency that interacts the most with the
private sector [in other countries], and certainly the private sector
is key to any reconstruction and stabilization effort in Iraq," the
Commerce official said.
The official said the document stating that Gutierrez wanted to
"dismantle" the ration system was an "early draft." Now, the official
said, the department simply wants to "reform" the system. But the two
embassy officials said they never received follow-up documents from
Commerce stating that the goal had changed.
* * *
In November, Susan Hamrock, the director of Commerce's Iraq task
force, and one of her subordinates, Stephen L. Green, asked the
embassy for permission to visit Baghdad. They wanted to meet the Iraqi
minister of trade, whose department is responsible for the ration
system.
In a highly unusual move, the embassy refused to grant them clearance
to visit the Green Zone, the two embassy officials said. The senior
Commerce official called the refusal "temporary" and said it was based
on a lack of staffing at the embassy. The embassy officials said the
clearance was denied because the economic section did not want
Commerce officials meeting with Iraqi officials about the ration
system.
But that did not dissuade Hamrock and Green. Within a few days, they
learned that the minister and his deputy would be traveling to
Brussels to meet with European Union officials. Hamrock and Green flew
to Brussels to see the Iraqis. According to Hamrock's written summary
of the meeting, they discussed changes in the ration system.
Since then, the Commerce official said, Hamrock and other Commerce
officials have continued to discuss the ration system with Iraqi
officials over the phone and by e-mail.
The minister and other Iraqi officials "fully support our efforts,"
the Commerce official said.
The trade minister, Abdul Falah al-Sudani, could not be reached for a
comment.
Hamrock's boss, Franklin L. Lavin, the undersecretary for
international trade, said in an interview that his department prefers
"free-market solutions." Any tension between his department and the
embassy, he said, "was part of a normal policy formulation process."
"It's natural to have a range of views," Lavin said.
* * *
Commerce was not the embassy economic section's only concern when it
came to rations. Last fall, the embassy's Joint Strategic Planning and
Assessment Office, headed by a Rand Corp. analyst on contract with the
embassy, created its own plan to restructure the ration system. It was
even more aggressive than Commerce's. It called for eliminating the
rations in 38 weeks.
Once again, the economic section sounded the alarm, the embassy
officials said. Because the strategic planning office had the ear of
Khalilzad, the economic officers reasoned, they could not ignore the
proposal. They had to fight it out.
The officers convened a working group composed of representatives from
the economic section, the planning office, the U.S. Agency for
International Development, the U.S. military command and the State
Department's Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office. No Iraqis were
invited, according to the two embassy officials.
Over the course of several meetings last fall, the participants who
were not from the strategic planning office chipped away at the 38-
week proposal. They eventually reached a compromise: The ration system
would cease by the end of 2008 -- in more than 100 weeks.
To the embassy's economists, saying they wanted to kill the program in
two years was an elaborate ploy, the embassy officials said. It would
get them on the record as favoring major changes, but the timeframe
almost certainly meant it would not happen. "Things in Iraq change
every six months," the first embassy official said. "If you say you
plan to do something in two years, it means you'll never do it."
Although embassy economists thought they had won that round, they
found themselves in other battles. There was a tiff between the Office
of the U.S. Trade Representative and USAID over the advice that U.S.
contractors were providing to the Iraqis about setting tariff rates.
More significant, however, was a dispute with Pentagon official Paul
A. Brinkley over his plans to resuscitate shuttered government-owned
businesses.
Brinkley wanted to get thousands of Iraqis back to work, on the
assumption that keeping them busy would keep them from engaging in
violence. But staffers in the economic section deemed it bad economic
policy.
"We feel that private enterprise is a superior way to develop the
economy of Iraq," one of the embassy's economic officers said. "We
shouldn't be resurrecting these dinosaurs."
Brinkley, who was traveling in Iraq last week and could not be reached
for a comment, has argued that investing in state-owned enterprises
has the potential of helping to improve security in Iraq -- the most
important goal of the U.S. government.
In the end, the embassy could not stop Brinkley. He had the support of
senior Pentagon officials and top military commanders in Iraq. But the
embassy is not bending over backward to help him, the economic officer
said.
"We're letting him do his own thing," the officer said.
* * *
The ration working group outlined its policy in a two-page document
sent to Khalilzad on Nov. 15. His deputy, Daniel Speckhard, raised the
issue later that month with Barham Salih, one of Iraq's deputy prime
ministers.
Iraqi government officials have told the Americans that they favor
restructuring the ration system but that they do not intend to make
big shifts anytime soon. Indeed, the only reform the Iraqi government
has been willing to undertake has been to exclude senior government
officials from receiving rations.
"It needs to be changed, but change has to be done after the security
situation stabilizes," Abdul Hadi al-Hamiri, the deputy trade
minister, said in a telephone interview.
But that has not stopped Commerce from pushing for reforms. Last
month, Lavin traveled to Iraq to meet with trade ministry officials.
His PowerPoint presentation included an exhortation to revise the
ration system by providing handouts only to the needy.
The Iraqi officials present nodded in agreement. But that is about all
they have done, embassy officials said.
"No Iraqi politician wants to get rid of free food. It's political
suicide. They're not going to do it," said a former embassy official
who worked on ration-related issues. "These grand schemes are
irrelevant. I can't tell you how many hundreds of hours everyone has
wasted on this issue, when there were all sorts of more productive
things they could have been doing with their time."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/10/AR2007031001442.html
Remember -- this is the administration that prides itself on staying
on message and on tight internal discipline.
.
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