A Postwar Who’s Who

s U.S. soldiers and Marines moved into Iraq in March, a second wave mustered in Kuwait City. The small cadre of 50-year-old ex-generals and diplomats, organized into the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, was created to form the nucleus of an interim government for post-Saddam Iraq.

The exact nature and staff of the office still were taking shape in early April. But the following people appeared likely to play key roles.

JAY GARNER

Jay Garner, 64, a retired Army lieutenant general, heads the organization, reporting to the Pentagon through Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks. In July 1991, then-Maj. Gen. Garner spent three months feeding and protecting Kurdish refugees in Northern Iraq, winning the broad support of the people in the region.

Garner's 1991 mission was a hastily mounted response to the chaos of post-Desert Storm Iraq. Its success made possible the creation of a semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave in the North-which today, for all its troubles, is far more prosperous and free than the rest of Iraq. And experts in stabilizing strife-torn regions hold up Garner's 1991 Operation Provide Comfort as a model.

BARBARA BODINE

Foreign Service veteran Barbara Bodine, 55, is reportedly under consideration to coordinate Central Iraqi affairs for Garner's office. After tours of duty in Hong Kong and Bangkok, she relocated to the Middle East, where she learned Arabic and worked her way through the U.S. embassies in Iraq, Kuwait and Yemen. Then she steadily rose through the ranks of the State Department in Washington.

Bodine returned overseas in 1997 as ambassador to Yemen. Nearly three years later, she was in the spotlight after 17 U.S. service members died in the bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen. During the investigation of the bombing, she clashed repeatedly and publicly with the FBI's lead investigator, John O'Neill, eventually barring him from the country.

LEWIS LUCKE

Lewis Lucke, 52, began his first stint in the Middle East in 1990, arriving in Tunisia the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Six months later, he and his family were evacuated to the United States.

Now, 12 and one-half years later, Lucke is in his third stint in the Middle East. The well-respected AID veteran has been working in Kuwait since early January. Former colleagues consistently praise Lucke's management skills, saying that he's good at delegating authority. During his 24-year government tenure, Lucke received the presidential rank award for his work in Jordan as well as AID's distinguished career award.

LT. GEN. JOHN ABIZAID

John Abizaid, 51, is the leading edge of a new generation of U.S. generals. He graduated from West Point in 1973, just as the U.S. began to withdraw from Vietnam. He learned his trade in hot spots around the world: in Lebanon, Grenada and Bosnia, and in Northern Iraq in 1991, where he worked for Garner.

As a young officer, Abizaid left the elite Rangers to take a military scholarship at the University of Jordan. He traveled throughout the Middle East, including then-obscure Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was rising to power. In 1985, Abizaid joined the U.N. monitoring mission in his ancestral Lebanon. He brought the same diplomacy to Northern Iraq in 1991, when he peacefully eased Iraqi regulars out of Kurdish areas, once by bombarding them with loud rock music. He returned to the region this January, when he was named one of two deputies to Franks.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD

As the White House liaison to Iraqi opposition groups, Zalmay Khalilzad has presided over the tumultuous efforts to impose order on the different factions battling for primacy in postwar Iraq. A conference he organized among opposition leaders last September had to be canceled when the squabbling factions could not agree on even the most general outlines of a plan for after the war.

Khalilzad, who is in his early 50s, was born in Afghanistan and was a staffer on the Bush White House's National Security Council, in charge of helping set up a new government in his home country after defeat of the Taliban.

GEORGE WARD

After Sept. 11, George Ward, 58, the director of training with the U.S. Institute of Peace and a former Marine, signed up to become an auxiliary police officer. But it's his Foreign Service experience that most qualifies him for his upcoming job, reportedly as coordinator of humanitarian aid throughout Iraq.

After serving in Vietnam as an officer, Ward embarked on a 30-year Foreign Service career in European security and multilateral policy issues. From 1989 to 1992, he was deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Bonn. In 1996, Ward was appointed U.S. ambassador to Namibia, where he managed a humanitarian program to remove land mines and initiated a campaign to reduce violence against women.

MICHAEL MOBBS

A 54-year-old former nuclear arms negotiator in the Reagan administration, Michael Mobbs has spent most of his career as an international corporate lawyer, including several years in Moscow helping U.S. companies seeking business in Russia.

Kenneth Adelman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, says Mobbs was a tough-minded and unflappable negotiator when he managed the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in the early 1980s. Adelman says Mobbs would be up to the task of rooting out Saddam Hussein's loyalists. Most recently, Mobbs was a key aide to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith in preparing for a post-Saddam Iraq.

- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.,
Corine Hegland, and John Maggs