Transcript: Iraq Results Overview and Benchmarks/Metrics
June 12, 2003
MR. WHERRY: Good morning. My name is Ross Wherry, and I'm the senior reconstruction advisor for the Asia and Near Eastern bureau of Those are the papers that you've received.
The goal of USAID in this reconstruction effort within the larger administration efforts on reconstruction, we're looking for a rapid return to stable conditions. A portion of that is security, a portion of it is governance, a portion of it is social services and basic infrastructure such as electricity and water.
We're looking for participative governance in this particular situation. The reason that we are concerned about that is in most post-conflict situations, you see the rise of someone who has a very strong personality. That person is very often accompanied by a militia. And that goes across almost any culture in the world where you see strong personality-based movements.
Now, a strong personality may represent a large group of people or it may not. Very often, what you see is whoever can grab power--with a strong personality--then tried to do that. The way that we would try and counter that is to try and come from the bottom up, because when you get lots of people together, then they tend to moderate the extreme positions of the few that are above them. We've also found that if you put national assemblies in--for instance, in Afghanistan, the loya jurga--if you broadcast what people are saying, then, again, they moderate their positions and they're unable to respond to, if you will, a baser instinct to just go with brute power.
Part of the reason that we are also looking at participation is we want the Iraqis involved in all of this. The activities that you have in those sheets talk about things that USAID has done. Our relatively small group of contractors and our very small group of direct hires that are working in Iraq could not have accomplished any of this had not the Iraqis taken it in hand and said we want to help, it's our country, we want to build it back, let us be involved. We have welcomed them in, and as we step through the Overview sheet, I can tell you where Iraqis are taking a fairly strong participative role. And we're very glad that they are, because this is not an uneducated country. This was, up until 15 years ago, a power in the Mid-East, with good universities, highly trained people. And they've degraded since, but many of those people are still there.
Our reconstruction effort was mobilized in the middle of April. We were prepared for it, and our mission was there in the middle of March in anticipation of what turned out to be a very swift war. The majority of the contractor force arrived in April. They mobilized into Iraq as quickly as possible out of Kuwait. Major hostilities were declared finished on the 30th of April, so we count May 1 as the first day of reconstruction.
We're looking at activities which are development related, mixed with foreign policy. The foreign policy is related specifically to "can we get a participative, nationally representative government?" So you'll hear me talk about governance a lot. And many of the things that we do from a development point of view are related to how people are involved, how do the people put their own voice out there--bearing in mind that this was a Stalinist country for two decades, and some of these procedures are rather new for them.
We're looking at just a beginning. We're finding our way around this. We estimated what we thought would happen, we prepared for the worst. Many of those things are much better; some of them are as bad as we were afraid. But at the same time, we've only been there for about a month, and as a result there is no success yet. We'd like to share with you progress, and you'll see some things where the progress may not have been sufficient.
Lastly, we need to emphasize again that it has to be an Iraqi process. We know from other countries in which USAID works that if you don't put the national flag on the project, whatever that foreign project is, as soon as the foreigners leave that project will fail. So we are looking at going forward with this in a way that brings the Iraqis into it in a way that the Iraqis take ownership of it, and that we are assisting them with rebuilding a country that was run down by some very bad leadership for a long time.
Looking at this sheet here, which is the one-pager, I'll hit a couple of highlights on there and then I'd be happy to take your questions and to explain a little bit more if there are points in the other documents that you are interested in.
We knew that it was going to be tremendously important to have the port at Umm Qasr opened up so that it would be less expensive to bring food, gasoline, commercial products into the Iraqi port. That port's been closed now for, oh--it was closed all during the Iran-Iraq war and then it was closed during the sanctions to all but very minor sorts of commerce. So it's been almost 20 years. The biggest difficulty is the fact that that port sits at the bottom of a very long river system and silts up regularly.
So we've had to clear the channel, we've had to clear out the port. The port was looted about a week after the conflict ended in that area of Iraq, so we had to go back and rebuild and replace some things. We're now looking, however, at the ability to bring in a major world-class ship, 40,000 tons of loose grain, and unload that ship at the end of this month. What we're aiming for is to put Umm Qasr back in business as a major port so that they don't have to drag everything overland, through Jordan or through Syria or some other place.
One of the things we're also looking at is the ability to offload refined petroleum products, and we're looking to have the commercial side of the port for non-humanitarian sorts of things open as quickly as we can. But that will take a little bit because it requires customs and immigration. And there's a security piece involved there because no one will come to your port if your cargo is going to be robbed when you get there.
Airport work is moving along. We expect to have Baghdad Airport open in the middle of July. I am told that if Iraqi airspace can be open to international traffic, that it will cut about 20 minutes off your travel from London to Singapore and it will save about 3-1/2 tons of jet fuel in that process. That's not something that AID is directly involved in, but everybody's going around Iraq for a long time.
Electricity is the one that we are most concerned about because most everything in Iraq runs on electricity. In the north and in the south, there's enough electrical generation and distribution capacity to run the economy the way it currently stands. Now, as the private sector begins to ramp up and you see manufacturing and other sorts of economic uses, then we have to be careful as to how that capacity keeps up with the rising economy.
Baghdad is an electricity-importing area of the country. The temperatures there are approximately 115 degrees in daytime right now, so anybody who can afford an air conditioner has one. Unfortunately, we are only able to keep the electricity on 3-hours-on and 3-hours-off in Baghdad, for the moment. The difficulty is not the generation capacity, but the fact that there are not sufficient high-tension lines in order to bring electricity to the places where it's necessary. To use a different sort of metaphor, we have a lot of water, but there's too many holes in the hose so that we can't get the water to the place it needs to go. Until we get the 400 KVA line put back and in stable condition, then electrical rationing and electrical outages will continue to be a problem. We're hoping to have that taken care of in July, however, and we'll see how that works.
We are working on bridges--highway bridges or bridges that had water pipes or petroleum pipes underneath them--because not only the pipes have to be put back, but then you need the bridge to be able to get over whatever the river, or the Wadi.
On health so far, we're getting a handle on what needs to be done. Everyone's watching to see whether or not there will be a cholera epidemic. We've heard reports that there is a problem in Basra, we've heard reports that there isn't a problem. We know that there is a likelihood that there will be a problem, so the health people are watching it very closely.
Educational reform--this one touches the Iraqi national flag very, very quickly. Our people are working with the educational ministry, where there's a lot of Iraqi staff that have come back, to figure out how the Iraqis would like to have their children educated. This is not something where we're going to pluck the American education system out and drop it down on them, because they won't like it and they won't use it. We're looking for an Iraqi solution. The biggest piece that we've been able to do so far is to arrange with UNESCO to take the math and science books that they have been printing and distributing in Arabic and Kurdish in the north, and to make those books available nationwide. We expect that those books will certainly be distributed prior to the opening of school in--around about the 1st of October. I don't know the exact date that school opens.
The Iraqis themselves are looking at social sciences and national history and things like that, which, quite frankly, it's better that they take the lead on it because it's their country that they're playing with.
We've put out requests for grants from U.S. and third-country universities to partner with Iraqi universities. We won't know who's going to apply for those grants until the end of this month, but we would expect to make those grants in the end of July. Iraq used to have a really good university system, technical schools as well as liberal arts institutions, and there's no reason why those schools could not be brought back. Again, it's a nationalist peace, so we're looking at a partnership.
On local governance, what we have done is to begin working at the grassroots. We're working with a group of NGOs at the town level. We're working with a contractor that we brought in from the American private sector to do municipalities and district-level operations. We're looking at decentralization of services so that the people who are closest to those services will have a voice in how the services are run. That's just beginning. We've touched about half of Baghdad so far. We're beginning to expand that now into the northern cities, in Mosul and Kirkuk. And it's a bit dicey, because when you walk into the meeting for the first time, you're never sure what kind of a response you're going to get. After all, we do come in as a batch of foreigners.
At the same time, what we're finding is that the Iraqis have very clear ideas about what they want to do. And just like in the United States, you find people saying, well, I know that the national capital wants to do this, but they don't live here; we live here. And we would like to be in charge of us while at the same time participating in the national government. Many of the same sorts of domestic political tensions that we find here among 50 states and Washington we're finding there among 18 governorates and Baghdad.
But the question is, do you resolve those with a gun or do you resolve those discussion and through some sort of compromise? So far, things are looking very peaceful, but we expect the arguments to come.
Lastly, on agriculture and rural economy, we do have a request for proposals that's out on the street. We have a request for proposals out on the street for economic governance, as far as working with the non-agricultural parts of the economy, and then those will be brought in and we expect people to be in the country in August for the non-agricultural pieces, and we hope early September for the agricultural part.
Rather than my attempting to guess what it is that you'd like to know, I'd like to open the microphone to questions. And if you'd identify yourself and take your best shot.
It wasn't that good of a presentation. There has to be something else. Please. [laughter]
QUESTION: Jackie Spinner with the Washington Post. Can you talk a little bit about how your efforts are coordinating with any of the U.N. development contracts that were already in place, many of those efforts that are still going on? That's my first question. I can wait and ask the second question.
MR. WHERRY: Okay. All right.
QUESTION: The second question is can you talk about any surprises that you've encountered. I know that that's probably pretty typical and common in these situations.
MR. WHERRY: Okay. Coordination with the United Nations. We're very comfortable working with the United Nations because World Food Program has quite a large number of procedures and very highly trained people that can handle food distribution, and they were working in Iraq beforehand. So yes, we have coordinated with them. And indeed, our port captain works with their port captain to make sure that the food gets through. They have stood up their food distribution network upon making that function, and that's really quite helpful because if you don't have food, you have riots right away.
We're working with UNICEF, both in education-- a back-to-school campaign was something that UNICEF did with funds that we offered plus other funds that they had. We're working with UNICEF in water and sanitation. UNICEF is the one that bought the 22 million doses of vaccines and is bringing them there. We have to make sure that there's a cold chain so that those vaccines can be safely distributed. But there should be no reason why Iraqi kids get sick from preventable disease, and UNICEF is looking after that with us.
Water and sanitation, UNICEF happens to be the one that bought the chlorine. That chlorine isn't there yet, but it's coming as quickly as they can get it there. Because we knew that if you could get the chemical in, then it could be put to work quickly. Our own contractor isn't fully functional yet, so UNICEF has been doing an awful lot of stuff for us. Many of the relief activities that were undertaken by the Dart team which was in Iraq were coordinated directly with UNICEF and with other NGOs that were there, so that they could make sure that immediate health concerns, as far as basic health care, were taken care of.
WHO is another organization, World Health Organization, that we're working with. And in dealing with WHO, they're looking at service delivery and then what can be done to stand up the public health service there. Our people have very quickly requested to coordinated with the United Nations in those pieces, in part because they were there first and in part because we work with them in so many other places.
Those are the big ones. We were prepared to work with the High Commission for Refugees, but there wasn't a large flow of displaced persons, so the HCR program, which we were prepared to support, turned out not to be necessary.
Surprises. The extent of the looting was a surprise. As I said, we expect there to be instability and all kinds of violence for a short period after any conflict. The speed with which public buildings were stripped--some of them were burned. My favorite example is people who were looting the electrical lines for the metal in the wires. That's part of the difficulty in getting the high tension lines up, because if you can cut the wire, then you can melt it down and you can sell it for scrap. And in one case, somebody actually took almost two tons of copper out of a transformer station. They, of course, destroyed the transformers in order to get that, and it will take about eight months to put that transformer back. The military located the foundry where the scrap was being melted down, and they shut it down. So most of that sort of looting is now over. That was a surprise for us--the cleverness, if you will, and the speed with which everything was taken.
One of the surprises that we had was also how dilapidated lots of the country was. We expected there to be difficulties because we knew that Saddam wasn't investing a lot in the welfare of his people, and we were not entirely prepared for the reality of the way that that man did not take care of the folks that were in his country. And a lot of the difficulties--schools that were not in good shape to begin with, and then were stripped of their doors and windows--it will make our job a little bit harder.
Those were essentially the two biggest surprises that we ran into from an aid point of view.
QUESTION: Mike Humphrey. I'm with the U.S. Grains Council. You did not mention the FAO. Could you share with us anything you know about what they're doing in the agricultural sector and the status of the harvest and what's going to be happening?
MR. WHERRY: Okay, the authority on those questions, really, is USDA. I know that Ambassador Amstutz is headed out there--may have left yesterday. And Lee Schotz [ph] is the person who's been living it. We've worked with Lee since January, and an outstanding professional.
The status of the harvest, my understanding is that there's a fair amount of wheat available in the north. It needs to be purchased. The funds to purchase that wheat have been difficult to get up there and distributed in an equitable manner. The farmers are selling some of it through their traditional marketing channels, and I'm not sure that anyone has purchased a substantial amount of it to be shipped down to Baghdad.
What we're seeing is the difficulty of melding two economies, where Saddam refused to buy wheat that was available--wheat and barley--that was being grown in the north, because he didn't want the Kurds to have the money. As we then came--as the war moved up from the south and then further into the north, the difficulty of figuring out how to remove that artificial barrier and then set up what we hope will be a private-sector mechanism for purchasing that grain and then distributing it south has not happened as fast as we had wanted to do. But USDA has the lead on that, and I have to refer you to them for the details.
QUESTION: Dion Lowe [ph] from the Australian Embassy. I know there was a briefing on electricity and power yesterday; however, I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit on your comments regarding the electricity-sector work that's being done. You've mentioned already that the extent of the looting was a surprise. We know also that the priority is to get what's there up and running and not necessarily develop any new systems, any new infrastructure. But I was wondering if you could just share a few additional thoughts on what the major priorities are now, given that we know what the situation is, we know that security is a problem--or looting is a problem--and what the immediate priorities will be in getting that progress before July that you mentioned.
MR. WHERRY: That's progress related to electricity specifically? Okay. One of the things that makes the developed portions of the world such nice places to live is the fact that all of that infrastructure is there and you just take it for granted--you flip the switch and the lights come on. Iraq had a very well-developed electrical grid. We didn't have a map for you today, but when we do this again there'll be a map that shows where we were working, where the difficulties have been.
In some parts of the country--specifically, near Iran--the electrical towers have been dropped, where they're looking for the wire. And the wire disappears. And you have to build the tower back and string the wire again, and keep someone else from cutting it down to take the wire a second time.
The difficulty in electricity has been how do you get the generation capacity linked up to the people who need it. In Basra and the south, I understand that the electricity is sufficient for the moment. And I can't give you a number of megawatts on that. We haven't had it reported to us. We have gone ahead and put in a lot of backup power for the port. I know that some of the other coalition provisional authority operators are beginning to put in backup generators at hospitals and other things, the same way that we have them in Europe or the United States or Australia, where, just in case something bad happens--a natural disaster of some sort--you don't lose the power. In Iraq, part of that is the power sector is not yet stable to where you can depend on it. You would never plug your computer into the wall socket in that country because things burp a lot.
As far as Baghdad itself, there is not yet sufficient power there. I understand it's in the neighborhood of 1200 megawatts available per day. I can't convert that into kilowatt hours of consumption because I'm not enough of a technician. But we know that it's approximately half of what is necessary for the moment to do the things that people would like to do. We don't have an estimate as to how quickly there will be additional demand for it. The only thing I can say with certainty is we're probably going to be running after it for a long time.
Electrical generation capacity, a generating plant is $700 million to $1 billion now, so we don't expect to be financing any of that. That would have to come through the Iraqi government. They could work it through the World Bank, they could work it through the Ex-Im Bank from the United States. There are a variety of ways that that kind of heavy infrastructure could be returned. What we're looking at is essentially to bring back electrical power to pre-war levels, which would be 5500 megawatts available. If we could beat that, that would be a good thing because then more people who were partially dependent on electricity before the war would then have a dependable source.
But for the moment, the problem, as I said, is one of transport over the wires, rather than generation capacity. If the wires get put back up, then people are going to say, well, how do you generate more? Part of that is lifting natural gas and firing the generation plants, and part of it is enough bunker fuel to run the oil-fired plants.
QUESTION: Larry Myers of Agricultural Development International. Can you help us with the status of the oil-for-food contracts that were pending when the war broke out?
MR. WHERRY: I can't help you very much. USAID is not dealing with that one directly. I understand that those contracts are being reviewed by the provisional authority. They're looking at how many of them are legally binding and therefore must be honored. That's a budget piece. Before you go and spend that money, you have to make sure you've covered your legitimate obligations. And then there were quite a number of contracts which had been negotiated but had not yet been signed. And then there were other contracts which were not yet contracts, but they were orders that were being talked about.
So we know that there are people that have various levels of expectation as to what they would receive, and the question is how much of that could be brought in quickly and put to work and how much of it, if it were to be brought in, then would have to sit for a little while until those products would be put back into service.
The complicating factor on many of those, since they were ordered in the name of the Iraqi government, then you have to have an Iraqi government in order to consummate the contract. And that's part of the pressure that is on Ambassador Bremmer. You have to have an Iraqi organization in order to deal legitimately with the delivery of those goods or to enter into any new contract. So there's--it's not just a matter of politics, it's a matter of very urgent economics to be able to honor contracts and put the commodities to work.
The one place where there isn't a logjam, as far as I know, is on the oil-for-food--I'm sorry, the food contracts within the oil--they call it the oil-for-food program, but it was really the way that Iraqi assets were managed for importations. So some of the--for instance, there were combines that were ordered by one of the state companies, there was oil-field equipment, there were water pumps--any number of hardware pieces that were in different stages of negotiation. But I can't tell you exactly how that would run. I haven't heard anybody talk about yet what the outcome of those analyses are. My belief is that it would probably be announced from Baghdad, because there's a lot of people asking those same questions.
QUESTION: John McCarthy, Budai [ph] Corporation, Kuwait. Can you--is there a list of these contracts around somewhere?
MR. WHERRY: I know that there is a list because the people working in Baghdad apparently have it, got it from the United Nations, are looking at it. We do not have it here in AID.
QUESTION: How would we acquire one, a list? I'll tell you why I'm asking. The port of Umm Qasr, for example. Bechtel put out a contract for survey work of the wrecks and also of the--subsequently there was a contract to come out for the removal of the wrecks. All of a sudden, a Turkish contractor showed up with a 2500-ton crane and said, well, I'm working for the U.N. Nobody saw him coming, nobody knew he was coming, all of a sudden he's there. What's the situation, can you tell me?
And also, what's the situation on berth 10 at Umm Qasr?
MR. WHERRY: I'm sorry, the second--what's the situation with--
QUESTION: Berth 10 at Umm Qasr. Berth 10 is the grain--
MR. WHERRY: That's right, okay. Well, in the category of surprises, this one was not a malicious surprise, but yes, one day we received word that a UNDP-financed dredge was going to show up in the port and, sure enough, two days later, there it was. We spent about two days working with people there to coordinate what was financed by the U.S. government, through Bechtel, and what these people intended to do. Because quite frankly, the job was extremely large and there wasn't a requirement that the U.S. government pay for all of it. So what's happened in that particular case is that the Bechtel dredge continues to work. It's moved about a million cubic yards of mud and is deepening the berths. The Turks have gone ahead and have begun towing off the wrecks that are impeding access to the--I think there are four of them, four berths, that can't be used because there's a sunken ship there.
So they went ahead with their work and your tax dollars and mine don't have to pay for it. We expect, as additional parts of the economy come up, and then as the oil-for-food contracts are eventually adjudicated, that we'll run into more of those situations. And quite frankly, the job is so big that if we don't have to do it because somebody else has arranged for it to be done, that's a good thing.
As far as berth 10, berth 10 is one of my headaches. Because we have a bulk grain ship arriving around about the 25th of June, and it's coming with 40 tons of wheat.
MR. : Forty thousand.
MR. WHERRY: I'm sorry, 40 thousand tons. The biggest ship that we've had in up to now has brought between 13 and 15 thousand tons, primarily bagged cargo, although the last one we did was loose grain that was sucked out of the ship and went directly into trucks because the silos aren't prepared yet to receive a large quantity of bulk grain.
So one of the things that we have had to do is to lay on the additional staff and the additional resources to make sure that that ship will get unloaded. I'm not sure how organized it will be, but we're going to do our very best to have that ship come in and turn around in as short a time as possible. It was taking up to two weeks to get a ship unloaded back when Saddam was in charge. Part of that was port labor, part of that was a bit of corruption, I'm told, that was going on on the side.
If you're going to run a world-class port, you have to get the ships in and out because it's between $8,000 and $15,000 a day to have that ship sit idle at berthside. And somebody pays for that and it simply raises the price of the food, or whatever else it is that you're bringing in. So what we're going to try and do is get that ship unloaded as quickly as we can. A portion of that will be good management and a lot of it, I think, will be good luck as well.
We're bringing in an awful lot of pieces of electrical equipment. Silos are being cleaned. We had a labor problem that had to be dealt with there and has apparently been--there's an equitable solution that's been found. And then it's a management piece as well. And then who owns the grain, how will it be distributed--all the chain of custody sorts of things whenever you have a large quantity that comes in. And then when the second ship comes, whenever that is, and puts its grain on top of the grain that has already been delivered, then you run into the usual grain elevator sorts of concerns over how much of whose grain still sits in that elevator. And we're working towards that. There's an Iraqi grain board that is involved in that, and we're having to work with them as well as with WFP and the port officials to make sure that all of that runs as smoothly as we can.
There will be surprises and there will be bumps, but as we move them into the world economy--this is a country that's been isolated now for over a decade--then how does it work, how can it be made to work well, what did we learn from the Soviet Union 10 years ago, and we need not repeat mistakes that we did then.
So all of those kind of going in to say berth 10's got to be ready, it's got to be 13 meters deep, we've got to be able to suck that grain out in an awful hurry. And that's the management goal. We'll see how well we do.
QUESTION: Ed Price from Texas A&M. I wanted to ask a little bit more about higher education. You commented, and I fully agree, that institutions that are redeveloped in Iraq should be fully owned and accepted by Iraqi citizens and Iraqi culture. At the same time, when people are left to develop their own models, sometimes they look back to what they've known before, which can be autocratic, maybe undemocratic, and not as open as we would like to see. What kind of processes do you see that can nudge institutional development toward liberalizing democratic forms while at the same time satisfying the inclinations of Iraqis to have institutions with which they're familiar? Thanks.
MR. WHERRY: There's a simple answer, and it's not acceptable. And the complex answer I've got to bring down to where it doesn't turn into a lecture. Because I'm not the ultimate expert in those sorts of things.
Essentially, what we've found is that if you walk in the door and say all right, folks, this is yours, you're going to get to run it, we would like you to take a look at these two or three models as you decide how to run it, then that seems to work pretty well. They will always find a hybrid that suits their own culture and their own proclivities. But at the same time, if you just bring them in and do, if you will, a leaderless group or a group that doesn't have any base from which to work, then they'll spend an awful lot of time trying to invent a system that's probably been invented somewhere else in the world.
Irrigation, for example. Irrigation water was controlled by the government. The irrigation chieftain system, which is the old Arabic system, was essentially perverted to a matter of political control. But the farmers are still out there and they still want to grow things on the land, and they don't like it that the land is becoming saline. So how do you get them together on something where you have upstream users and you have the farmers; the farmers have to earn money so that it gets into the economy; and it becomes wonderfully complex all at once.
We've found that open communication, whether you get people together in a room and have them talk to each other, whether you put their voices on a radio--that's worked extraordinarily well in Afghanistan, specifically on agriculture; if you can work through dealers--we do that a lot--because the dealers know who to work with. And the difficulty there is you have to make sure that the equity issue isn't lost. Now, in the United States we also have a very active agricultural extension operation, which helps a lot. And it's not only for agriculture. It does a lot of other rural development sorts of things. We don't use it so much anymore, but when I was growing up, one of the big men in the community was the ag extension agent. Unfortunately, they're not anymore, and that's why I'm here.
But by providing them with different sorts of models and then saying you guys choose which one suits you, and then if you don't like it, we'll modify it as we go along. We're using it in neighborhood councils. Not every neighborhood council behaves the same as the one next door--Chicago and Milwaukee are close, but they behave very differently. We use it in working with the farmers. Water committees all behave differently, but they all know they have to come together on moving water.
As we begin to look at decentralization of schools, we'll see some areas that want a particular cast in the way that they teach their children, and other areas will want a different cast. And we see that here as well. So there is no one best way to do it. But if you sit with the people and you acknowledge that this is going to take 60, 90 days and then they're going to scrap some of it about six months in and do that part differently, knowing that that will happen allows us to go forward and say, All right, we will give you some models. And the NGOs and our contractor, RTI, is doing that in municipal development. We hope that the universities will do that through their partnerships working with the universities. Our people in the Ministry of Education are offering that sort of approach as well. And we expect to see that happening in health, where we go in and say, Here's how it could work, try this on, change it and then you'll find something that you'll feel comfortable with.
It takes a little bit of extra time and it doesn't meet a deadline, necessarily, imposed from abroad, but if you don't take that time then it will all fall apart in two years and you have to do it over again.
QUESTION: This is sort of a follow-up to that. My name is Lynn Nieland [ph], I'm with the Washington Kurdish Institute. I was wondering, since this is reconstruction money generally, of course most of it is going to go to the center and the south where there was mostly the war, but in the north, things are a lot different. I was wondering to what extent any of the money is going into the north, given that most of the fighting was in the center and the south--but that the north needs reconstruction money as well because they were isolated from whatever money Iraq did have during Saddam Hussein's time.
And also, with the education, there are three universities there that have been sort of running in a different--I mean, the north has a whole sort of semi-autonomous system itself, and is the United States also trying to go up there and change that, or are they leaving it be as far as the semi-democratic process that's already working there?
MR. WHERRY: What do you do with the north? The biggest problem that the north faces is the fact that they weren't devastated by anybody, so all of this relief aid, which goes to the people who need it most, the part that gets publicized most, probably isn't going to arrive in the north. Northern power plants are providing half of Baghdad's power at the moment because they have that capacity, and the lines coming down from the norther were not significantly damaged.
The biggest difficulty in dealing with the northern portion of the country, and the central and southern part, is how do you bring it back together as a nation? A portion of this is going to be economic and regulatory. For instance, on telecommunications, the lines were essentially severed between the north and the rest of the country. There are three wireless carriers in the north that can't talk to anybody in the south. As Iraqi telecoms come back up, how do you bring all of those together in some way that does not throw out the good parts but then brings it into some sort of a national system? It doesn't have to be a government system in that particular instance, but it needs to be national.
The same is true for economic distribution. You have to be able to move trucks and rail throughout the country. If they open an international airport at Mosul, then that has to have the same sort of immigration controls that you would have at the national level; but at the same time, it will retain its local flavor.
How do you handle the questions of autonomy and pride, at the same time saying this is a sovereign country and it needs to--in order to take its place in the community of nations, it needs to keep that identity as well. And that's going to be ticklish, because many of the programs that AID will run over the next six months will probably be in center and south. As we begin to convert towards what for us is a more generic assistance program, then we would be assisting the entire country rather than just a piece of it, where there was a particular need.
Because the infrastructure is not as destroyed in the north, we haven't spent as much money up there. Unfortunately, there was a fair amount of looting along the edge of the Kurdish areas, and those schools and those hospitals will receive attention as well. So even though we got to Basra first, it doesn't mean that we would leave the north out. Many of the issues that we will deal with in the north are matters of how do you integrate those governorates into the rest of the national identity without giving up the ethnic identity or the autonomy that, quite frankly, serves as a really good example for how the rest of the country might be able to run.
It's a tough question. We don't have a clear answer to it yet.
QUESTION: What are the plans for Basra and for Az Zubayr? Any?
MR. WHERRY: The ports down there?
QUESTION: Right.
MR. WHERRY: The biggest difficulty with the port of Basra, speaking from the United States point of view, is there's a very long litoral with Iran. And I think it was two weeks ago we had a boatload of people that were detained temporarily because they got too close to one shore. That particular waterway is problematic simply because of who sits on either side of it. The brush-off answer would be to say, well, it's going to be just like two other sovereign nations and they'll negotiate it. The emotions involved in that won't allow that to happen quickly.
For the moment, we're looking at only using Umm Qasr because, for us, we had to concentrate resources in a single place in order to get one port up and running. As other resources become available from Iraqi sources and used according to their priorities, then I expect that they would go ahead and redevelop those. Because there isn't any reason why those ports couldn't be brought back up to the importance they had back in the '70s. For the moment, though, USAID doesn't have any plans to do that.
I'd like to thank you all for showing up. I don't have a scandal to offer you, so the room isn't entirely full, but at the same time, we'd like to be able to say that this is what we did, this is where we are going, and we would expect to do this again in about a months and say after two months this is where we thought we were going and this is how far we've gotten. Did we get the grain ship in and unloaded? Are we able to handle the rest of Baghdad for community councils? How well is that expanding? What have we been able to do with hospitals? Where are we on the schoolbooks? All of those sorts of things because, essentially, all of you are paying for this, and we would like you to know.
And we would like you to tell other people about what's going on here, because it's something that we as a development agency as well as a participant in the execution of foreign policy, we believe that these sorts of things demonstrate that the United States is not interested in occupying that country. We are not interested in playing into the hands of those who would accuse us of some nefarious purpose. What we are about is the Iraqi people and how they can take a step forward now that the very bad leadership that got in charge of them has been removed.
Thank you very much.
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