BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 26 — With an advanced degree in engineering and a high technology career behind him in Britain, Hayder Awad Aabadi, Iraq's new minister of communications, smiles when asked whether Iraqis are ready to run their country again.
He will get the telephones working in Baghdad by the end of November, he says. He will build a state-owned mobile telephone network by piggybacking on existing infrastructure. He will thwart saboteurs who have been cutting the fiber optic lines around the capital.
"Iraqis are a very proud people," Mr. Aabadi said in an interview in his spare office, which is situated away from the front of the building to protect him from car bombs. "They will not be motivated in a situation where things are run by a foreign occupying power."
Impatience is beginning to grow here as Iraqi officials chafe at the strictures of an American occupation, which, they say, has in some cases slowed reconstruction because power is centralized in the hands of the military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and the civilian occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer III.
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http://nytimes.com/2003/09/27/international/middleeast/27COUN.html?hp