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Agencies Tangle on Efforts to Help Iraq
At a government store in Fallujah, Iraqis pick up basic items such as wheat, rice, sugar and cereal -- rations that many of them have depended on for years.
(2004 Photo By Mohammed Khodor -- Associated Press)
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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.
