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.

Their focus was on nuts and bolts:  they needed money, fuel for ministry cars, contact with Iraqi missions abroad, electricity and security.  They recruited students from the diplomatic academy to become the secretariat for their steering committee meetings.  Despite misgivings, they implemented Gerry Bremer’s de-Ba’athification order, depriving the Foreign Ministry of a lot of experience.  They got the Americans to begin guarding the ministry, in place of militias.  They vetted and reinstalled some ex-employees fired by Saddam Hussein.  They instructed overseas posts to cease diplomatic activities and secure their premises and their contents, an order observed at some embassies in the breach.  They paid the staff.

Professionals working together in good faith can get a lot of essential things done, even if the legal situation is murky and the environment chaotic.  That is the main point of this book, despite its detours into the intricacies of interpersonal tensions, occasional outings to local restaurants and difficulties securing even the most minimal requirements to make life tolerable.  Ghassan is more reserved in his chapters about the obstacles than David, but both make it clear that managing a post-war occupation, while no picnic, can bring out hidden talents and resourcefulness.  Not to mention the roller coaster of challenge and excitement seeing a country emerge from dictatorship, only to be suffocated in post-war spasms of civil disorder and cruel violence.

David is back in Tucson enjoying his retirement.  Ghassan, also retired and has moved to Bahrain, de-Ba’athified from the Foreign Ministry by a post-occupation government even though he was never a member of the Ba’ath party.  Go figure.  Though I would regard Iraq as better off than under Saddam Hussein, many Americans and Iraqis don’t.  America is certainly not better off.  It spent a great deal of blood and treasure in Iraq and is still almost as ill-prepared to take on state-building tasks as it was in 2003.  That should not be.  But we can be pleased to learn that human ingenuity and professionalism sometimes rises to the challenge.