Nucleus of a postwar government forms in Kuwait

KUWAIT Along a promenade of beachside villas, several hundred American government officials - from well-worn former generals to fresh young aid workers - are working at their laptops, inventing flow charts and examining maps of Iraq in what has become Potomac on the Gulf.
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This is the nucleus of the Bush administration's new Iraqi government. One of the faraway masters, in the minds of many here, is someone known fondly - or not so fondly, depending on one's political orientation - as Wolfowitz of Arabia.
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The reference, of course, is to Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, who has dispatched some of his prot�g�s here to prepare key Baghdad ministries for American management.
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Wolfowitz is also passing judgment on others assigned here, making the transitory Potomac here as divisive and political as the permanent one at home, some participants say.
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The overall boss of this Iraqi government-in-waiting, an operation that has been endowed with the Washington-speak title "Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance," is a retired army lieutenant general, Jay Garner. When he gets to Baghdad, he will be in charge of everything the American military is not: feeding the country, fixing the infrastructure and creating what the Bush administration has said will be a democratic government.
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A stocky 64-year-old, on leave from a top post at the defense contractor L-3 Communications, Garner was responsible for protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq after the first Gulf War, a smaller task than the one at hand but one that gave him a taste for the country, a colleague said.
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Arrayed below Garner is a group of former army officers, former and present American ambassadors, aid bureaucrats who give themselves away by their many-pocketed khaki jackets, a smattering of State Department officials, several British officials and a cluster known as the "true believers."
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These are the people, like Robert Reilly, a former head of the Voice of America, who in the shorthand for Wolfowitz are known as "Wolfie's" people. They are thought to be particularly fervent about trying to remake Iraq as a beacon of democracy and a country with a tilt toward Israel. Reilly is working with Iraqi exiles to create radio broadcasts for use in the post-Saddam Iraq.
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Garner reports to the chief of Central Command, General Tommy Franks, a fact that makes the civilian government-in-waiting an operation of the Pentagon.
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Fairly predictably, State Department officials say, the Pentagon deemed the most senior State Department appointees as unsuitable for the enterprise, even though one of them, Timothy Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan, was personally invited by Wolfowitz to come here.
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Carney is preparing to run the Baghdad Ministry of Industry. Another person the Pentagon is resisting, at least temporarily, is the former ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine. But she has also arrived, established an office in one of the villas, and is informally known on the campus as the mayor of Baghdad.
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Others who have been held up back in Washington include Robin Raphel, former ambassador to Tunisia, who is slated to run the Ministry of Trade; and Kenton Keith, a former ambassador to Qatar, who is supposed to head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Not all of the 23 ministries in the present Iraqi government will be reopened, a member of the Garner team said. The important Ministry of Information will definitely be kept, although who will run it remains unresolved. James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence in the Clinton administration, is a favorite of the Pentagon for that job, people here said....