K Street on the Tigris

[Say_What]

<clips>

The man who ran President Bush's last campaign has a new job, but he won't be checking poll numbers or arranging fundraisers. Instead, Joe Allbaugh, who left the Bush administration just weeks before the White House launched the war on Iraq, has opened up a lobbying firm with offices in Baghdad.

"It's beneficial to clients that I know who the players are and I know who the decision makers are," says Allbaugh, who was national campaign manager for Bush-Cheney 2000 and then became director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This summer, Allbaugh joined with Ed Rogers, a former White House aide to Bush's father, to found New Bridge Strategies, a lobbying firm that connects Western businesses with the American and Iraqi power brokers overseeing the reconstruction. The firm has already attracted companies looking to sell Iraq everything from new phone lines to catering services.

Allbaugh is not the only former official pitching his expertise to companies eager to cash in on the reconstruction of Iraq. The total cost of rebuilding the country is estimated at between $100 billion and $500 billion, with potential business opportunities reaching far beyond the much-publicized contracts held by Bechtel and Halliburton. "What you see on the surface is not really what is going on," says Timothy Mills, a partner at Patton Boggs, one of several K Street firms that have launched a practice dedicated to Iraq. Mills advises clients to look beyond the continuing violence in Iraq and toward the long-term payoff for multinational corporations. "Western companies, if they make the right connections early enough," he says, "have the potential of being swept into the mainstream of Iraqi commerce."

At least for now, those connections begin stateside. "The way to Baghdad is through Washington," says Bart Fisher, a lawyer at the firm Dorsey & Whitney and co-founder of the U.S. Iraq Business Council. And it's not only Bush administration alumni who are seeking to get in on the game. For example, Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Cohen, a critic of Bush's foreign policy, has also begun marketing himself as an expert on reconstruction; his firm includes his former Pentagon deputy, Paul R.S. Gebhard, who also worked for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In September, Cohen helped Nour USA, which was founded a few months earlier with the express purpose of winning contracts in Iraq, land an $80 million security contract for Iraq's oil fields. Building on that success, Cohen has teamed with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, both of whom work at the K Street powerhouse Piper Rudnick, to form an "Iraq Task Force"; according to Piper's website, the task force offers clients access to "relevant decision makers in the United States and the region." Among the group's first clients is General Motors, which has retained Piper lobbyist John Zentay, a former Senate representative from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversees most Iraq reconstruction contracts. "We have to keep close liaison with the U.S. government to have ingress there," explains Chris Preuss, the Washington spokesman for General Motors, which has already begun selling vehicles to aid agencies in Baghdad.

http://www.mojones.com/news/outfront/2003/40/ma_556_01.html