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Waiting in Kuwait: Jay Garner and the rest of the postwar puppet show. In Kuwait, defense contractors are planning Phase Two of the war: the bureaucratic invasion of Iraq. The postwar leadership wannabes are lined up in their beachfront villas, ready to assume control of the country bought for them with borrowed money and American and British blood (New York Times):

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 Persian Gulf.

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.

[...]


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 retired Army Lt. Gen. 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.

A stocky 64-year-old, on leave from a top post at the defense contractor L-3 Communications, General 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.

[...]


Mr. 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.

[...]

Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, has made it clear that he would not be satisfied with just an advisory position. The State Department has made clear it would prefer a diminished role for Mr. Chalabi. In recent days Mr. Chalabi has said through spokesmen that he wants the formation of a provisional government in which he would be a leading figure. In this he has backing in the Pentagon.

"The decision on the new political class in Iraq is very hot. It has yet to be made in Washington," said one member of the Garner team here.

It all sounds so cozy — laptops at the beach, a Star Wars and missile defense contractor at the helm, a convicted embezzler who insists he will not be satisfied with "just" an advisory position.

Jay Garner's L-3 Communications is one of the 100 Fastest Growing US Companies, thanks in no small part to Garner's friendship with Donald Rumsfeld and the company's devotion to US military contracts:

L-3 Communications makes secure and specialized systems for satellite, avionics, and marine communications. The US government (primarily the military) accounts for nearly 70% of the company's business, but L-3 is using acquisitions to expand its commercial offerings. Commercial products include flight recorders (black boxes), display systems, and wireless telecom gear. L-3 has added aircraft repair and overhaul services to its offerings with the purchase of Spar Aerospace and what is now L-3 Communications Integrated Systems.

"Star Wars" defense system guru Jay Garner has also been accused of double-dipping (scroll down):

Biff Baker, of Colorado Springs, is running for Congress against Joel Hefley on the strength of his reputation as the whistleblower who recently shed light on Department of Defense contractual double-dipping and corporate favoritism.

Baker, who received the Libertarian nomination for the Sixth Congressional District in May, has publicly accused two Army buddies-U.S. Army General John W. Holly, a former vice chief of staff with the Army, and retired three-star General Jay Garner-of arranging duplicate contracts with Boeing and SY Technology, a division of L-3 Communications which employs Garner as president. The redundant contracts were for computer training of Army personnel.

Baker, a West Point graduate, retired Army Space Command lieutenant colonel and a former Airborne Ranger, believes he was fired without cause from his job as a contract auditor for DOD sub-contractor COLSA's Independent Assessment Team. By doing his job correctly, Baker discovered that SY Technology had been awarded a $48-million, five-year contract which duplicated work already assigned to Boeing on a sole-source, $1.6-billion contract.

Here's another story about Baker, the Garner whistleblower.

Here is Garner's official L-3 biography (in the middle of a lengthy page). More troubling aspects of Garner appear in Business Week:

While Garner is widely admired for his work with the Kurds, he has his critics. Michael Young, a leading columnist in Lebanon who writes often about Islamic issues, says Muslims are suspicious of Garner because of his strong ties to Israel. It's easy to see why. In 2000, Garner signed a statement by the conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, praising Israel for its handling of the Palestinian intifada. And as president of SY Technology, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., Garner worked closely with Israeli security to develop its Arrow missile-defense system. "There is the problem of credibility if you have someone who can be tagged as [Zionist]," says Young.

Here is a view of Garner from Lebanon's Daily Star, pointing out that "Franks should feel at ease with three former generals working alongside him."

Garner, Bodine, Chalabi — these choices of postwar administrators are as uninspired as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle were as war architects.

Garner photo from the Christian Science Monitor. Here are previous posts about Barbara Bodine and Ahmed Chalabi.

4/17/03 UPDATE: CBS News provides a Jay Garner biography, for all you Googlers who come here looking for that.

4/28/03 UPDATE: And here's an interesting "About Jay Garner" page for the curious at heart. Note also that, to usher in the new era of Iraqi democracy, Jay Garner has chosen as his headquarters one of Saddam Hussein's palace compounds. Yet another culturally sensitive exercise in nation-building from the George W. Bush administration.

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