On a day-to-day basis I conducted diplomacy with Baghdad’s provincial and municipal governments, facilitated democracy building with Iraq’s political elite, assisted and monitored the conduct of the constitutional referendum and national elections, and supervised reconstruction efforts for Baghdad’s decrepit public services infrastructure. The policy competition and bureaucratic turf wars I witnessed among our government agencies within the Embassy underscored the complexity of the violence boiling just over the walls of the Green Zone and the need for bold and effective solutions to bring progress to war-torn Iraq.
I was chosen to be an inaugural member of the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), a multi-agency team brought together to encourage and facilitate the development of decentralized government in Iraq, and improve the much-needed cooperation between the primary US agencies involved with rebuilding Iraq. Modeled on the PRT initiative undertaken in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, a PRT’s membership consists of elements from the military, the State Department, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Army has assigned its Civil Affairs branch to take the lead on filling the military role on the PRT. My portfolio consisted, among other things, of daily contact with Governor Hussein Ali Al-Tahan, governor of the province of Baghdad, Iraq’s most populous and most turbulent province.
Governor Tahan and I did not get off on the right foot. The first time I met him, in Baghdad’s ‘city hall’, the Amanat, he asked me fairly pointedly- “So what are you going to promise me?” Tahan was one of the least diplomatic and unpredictable politicians of the fifty-odd Iraqi leaders I worked with regularly. A commanding general of the Badr Corps, the disciplined Shia militia group affiliated with the SCIRI party (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), Tahan had a leadership style that reflected his experience leading guerilla attacks against Saddam’s regime. Tahan watched the Badr Corps develop from a loose anti-Saddam fringe into a complex paramilitary organization through years of protection and sponsorship in Iran. I had him over for lunch at the Embassy complex (formerly Saddam’s Republican Palace) one afternoon and as we strolled through the garden, he pointed out a burn mark on the marble under the central dome of the palace. That was one of the rocket hits he scored during a Badr incursion he led in the late 1990’s. He shrugged and said “It was a great attack – too bad Saddam wasn’t home at the time…”
