General Garner is set to head the new interim government in post-war Iraq

LONDON, April 6 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Acting on a memorandum drafted by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration is ready to proceed with regime change in Iraq by installing an embryonic “proxy” government as early as Tuesday, April 8, while fierce fighting still rages across the country, reported a leading British newspaper Sunday, April 6.

“The administration is determined to impose the Rumsfeld plan,” U.S. officials told The Observer.

According to U.S. officials in Doha, elements of the new interim government will be established in the southern port of Umm Qasr, captured by the Anglo-American forces.

It will be installed by former U.S. army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, Head of the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

The U.S. “viceroy” of the southern Iraq will be retired General Buck Walters; one of three governors slated to minister the new Iraqi provinces.

The two others are General Bruce Moore in the largely Kurdish north and former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine based in Baghdad, governing the central region.

“What we are going to start trying to do, even before the fighting is over in Iraq, is to move to the areas in Iraq that are relatively peaceful, places like Umm Qasr, and to start moving [the office of reconstruction] into Iraq,” the officials said.

“It is a fair assessment to say that this is the first step to set up a civil administration in Iraq,”  they claimed.

Rumsfeld presented two memoranda to the White House last week, urging Bush to begin setting up government institutions in areas under U.S. control.

He said the new organs could install Iraqis returning from exile under the tutelage of American civilians answerable to General Garner.

In fact, several hundred Americans — retired military officers, diplomats, and aid experts — meet every day under the leadership of General Garner to shape the new government.

They are joined by a few Iraqi exiles handpicked by the Bush administration, and by a small number of British officials, the New York Times reported Sunday.

General Garner has declined all requests for interviews, although he announced Sunday plans to hold a news conference on Monday, April 7, in a Kuwaiti hotel.

No Use For U.N. Role

Top U.S. officials, including President George Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, are on board that the United Nations should not play any role in post-Saddam Iraq.

“They see no use for a U.N. role, describing the international body as 'irrelevant',” U.S. officials told The Observer.

By brushing the U.N. aside at such an early stage, the move also places British Prime Minister Tony Blair - whose own preference is for a U.N. role - in a difficult situation ahead of his meeting with Bush this week in Belfast.

America's readiness to establish the first stages of an administration to run post-war Iraq comes at lightning speed and constitutes a rebuff to European ambitions to stall the process until some kind of role for the United Nations is agreed.

France reiterated that the U.N. should be “at the heart of the reconstruction and administration of Iraq.”

The United States and the European Union locked horns Thursday, April 3, over the role of the U.N. in post-war Iraq, with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell insisting the U.N. would only have a role as a "partner" in the process.

However, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin emphasized a "very broad consensus" among E.U. and NATO members on giving the U.N. a central role in post-war Iraq.

In Washington, officials of the United States Agency for International Development have argued strenuously for the United Nations to carry out its traditional role in distributing food, water and medical services.

Without the United Nations, the American effort would be "dead in the water," a senior aid official said.

This official said this was because the United States relied on nongovernmental organizations — like CARE or the International Rescue Committee — to do aid work on the ground.

These groups cannot work without the heft of the United Nations aid machinery, chiefly the World Food Program, which delivers food to ports and trucks it around whichever country needs the help.

On the more delicate, but equally important questions, like the future of the oil industry and who will do much of the reconstruction of Iraq's ailing infrastructure, the United Nations is treated as a non-player, several members in the planning process said.

Under the fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with the question of an occupation, an occupying power must protect the interests of the civilians under its control.

The occupying power does not have the right to make radical changes in existing institutions in ways that could be deemed to harm the people.