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Human ingenuity rises to the challenge

David Dunford and Ghassan Muhsin’s Talking to Strangers: The Struggle to Rebuild Iraq’s Foreign Ministry tells an important tale:  how people from different cultures and life experiences can come together to reconstruct a state collapsed by autocracy and war.  It isn’t easy.  The first several chapters are devoted to David’s tussles with American bureaucracy and bad manners as well as Ghassan’s with Saddam Hussein’s bureaucracy and thuggish habits.  It is notable, a perhaps unintended irony of their title, that the two often had an easier time talking to each other than to their own compatriots.

The two former foreign service officers, one American and the other Iraqi, got together in Baghad  in the spring of 2003 to rebuild Iraq’s foreign ministry.  It is then that the ill-fated retired general Jay Garner, head of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), realized that the most important part of his mission, civil administration, was left out of the office’s name.  Dunford, who worked for Garner, and Ghassan nonetheless got busy, with a minimum of guidance and resources.  Even a place to sit and internet connections were problematic.  Communications difficulties plagued their courageous efforts. Read more