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In time, the U.S. may adopt a formal system for determining who can serve in the new government. According to an American consultant on Garner's team, the U.S. is considering a plan to purge the top three tiers of Baathist leadership--involving at least 30,000 people. Another proposal would require all government employees to forswear loyalty to the Baath Party. Of course, people desperate for work are likely to sign anything.
Until it adopts a set of criteria for allotting official posts, the U.S. is relying on the advice of Iraqi exiles like Talabani. A member of Garner's staff in Kuwait before the war, Talabani gave the Americans a report on Iraq's health officials and their connections to the Baath Party. The most high-profile vetter is Iraqi businessman Saad al-Janabi, who fled the country in 1995 after falling out with Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay. Al-Janabi, who still has close ties with remnants of the old regime, has returned from Hemet, Calif. (where his wife Lori Van Arsdale is mayor), to his family home, now frequently visited by Americans, in the Mansour area of Baghdad. Al-Janabi, a well-heeled Arab with a pencil-thin mustache and an affinity for American slang, describes Garner as "my homie."
Al-Janabi says that over the past two weeks, he has held meetings at each Iraqi ministry to discuss which officials would be suitable to bring back. At the same time, he hopes to assuage fears among "acceptable" Baathists who are reluctant to work with the Americans. "After 35 years of dictatorship," says al-Janabi, "they cannot believe nothing will happen to them." He may have underestimated popular objections to some of the officials he is willing to rehabilitate. The Health Ministry's controversial Ali Shnan al-Janabi (no relation), for instance, was one of his recommendations.
But Iraqi objections to Ali Shnan al-Janabi and his ilk are precisely the kind of feedback the Americans say they need in order to rout out the irredeemable. "There will be a vetting process," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "People will say, 'Well, wait a minute--those people were part of the senior Baath Party,' in which case they'll be taken out." The Garner camp has another fear: that some Iraqis may try to use the de-Baathification process to settle old scores, demanding that a boss be sacked for personal rather than political reasons. But generally U.S. officials are optimistic that the system can work. Says a Pentagon official: "We are bound to appoint some wrong people, but we are determined to correct any mistakes."