US envoy to Morocco to head up post-war public relations effort in Iraq

WASHINGTON (AFP) Apr 14, 2003
US ambassador to Morocco Margaret Tutwiler has been tapped to run public relations efforts in post-war Iraq under the Pentagon-led team headed by retired general Jay Garner, the State Department said Monday.

"Ambassador Margaret Tutwiler is going to depart Morocco soon and serve temporarily as a special envoy of President (George W.) Bush, assisting the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq," deputy State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said.

"She's going to help coordinate the public communications efforts there of that office," he told reporters.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told Moroccan King Mohamed VI of the decision on Saturday and assured the monarch that Tutwiler would return and that the move would not affect ties between Washington and Rabat, Reeker said.

"She remains the US ambassador to Morocco," he said. "She'll return following this temporary assignment to Morocco."

Earlier, State Department officials told AFP that Tutwiler, who served as spokeswoman for former secretary of state James Baker during the 1991 Gulf War, would assume her new post within the week.

A second official said Tutwiler, who was to leave Rabat later Monday to link up with Garner's team in Kuwait, would be working out of a new, temporary embassy the United States is to set up in a Baghdad hotel.

Tutwiler is still President George W. Bush's choice to replace Charlotte Beers as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, the officials said.

Beers, who was hired in 2001 after the September 11 terrorist attacks to improve the United States' image particularly in the Muslim world, resigned last month for health reasons.

It was not immediately clear when or if Tutwiler would take up Beers' position, as Reeker made clear she would return to Morocco after the stint in Iraq which is expected to last several weeks.

In addition to her tenure as State Department spokeswoman from 1988 to 1992, Tutwiler has served in two other presidential administrations and began her government career in 1974 in then-president Gerald Ford's unsuccessful reelection campaign.

During former president Ronald Reagan's first term from 1981 to 1985, she served as an assistant to Baker who was then the White House chief of staff. In Reagan's second term from 1985 to 1989, Tutwiler was assistant secretary of the treasury for public affairs.

Tutwiler, from the southern US state of Alabama, has also been an adjunct professor of communications at her alma mater, the University of Alabama.

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