The Candidate

Iyad Allawi says he's the tough leader Iraq needs. Do voters believe him?

By Johanna Mcgeary/Baghdad Monday, Jan. 31, 2005
    • GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD / EPA / POOL

    CAMPAIGNING: Allawi presses the flesh with senior religious leaders in Baghdad

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    But Allawi's promises may not be enough. Without a base among the Shi'ite masses, Allawi hopes to pick up votes from grateful government employees and security forces who owe him for their jobs, as well as from former Baathists with whom he has kept up ties. He is counting most on his flinty reputation to win votes. Many Iraqis buy his slogan, "A powerful government leads to a safe state." Despite the failings of his Cabinet to deliver basic services, Allawi could survive on image alone. "Most of us will vote for Allawi because he is tough with terrorists," says a shopkeeper selling cell phones in a town near Nasiriyah. Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, says, "His pitch to the middle class--you're not bothered about democracy; what you want is stability, and I'm the man to get it for you--may well be working to pick up secular votes that don't want a Shi'ite landslide."

    But it's just as likely that Allawi will lose. And if he does, his fall will be a poignant coda to a year in which mainstream Iraqi opinion turned against the U.S. and those viewed as its clients. In Washington, where Allawi's backers gamely suggest he may yet keep his job, a Pentagon Middle East hand says, "It is a joke to think Allawi will be the next Prime Minister." This official says the U.S. has "no control" over the political process now. "I see Allawi like a piece of paper blowing in the wind," says Kenneth Katzman, senior analyst at Washington's Congressional Research Center. "His relevance to any outcome is really quite small." Some Iraqis view their accidental Prime Minister in slightly stronger terms. "This," says a man in a Baghdad street while beheading a sheep with a knife in the traditional 'Id al-Adha ritual, "is what we want to do to Allawi and the Americans."

    In some respects, Allawi is an unlikely object of such vituperation. In person, he comes across as surprisingly gentle. When he meets someone for the first time, he is humble and soft-spoken, as if to lessen the impact of his imposing frame. When he meets an old friend, his eyes light up with a warm twinkle. When he offers the customary hug and kiss, says one of his friends, he shows "genuine affection." Even his handlers at the CIA, who enlisted Allawi in their attempts to overthrow Saddam in the 1990s, refer to him as "nice."

    But there is an unshakable toughness in Allawi that forms the core of his character. He can wipe that twinkle from his eye in an instant. "He is the only Iraqi I have ever met," says a former CIA official who knew him well, "whose lips didn't quiver when he said Saddam Hussein's name." That is all the more impressive considering that Saddam sent hit men to London in 1978 to eliminate Allawi when the two Baathists fell out. Struck in his bed by two men wielding axes, Allawi fought them off, though he suffered wounds so severe he was hospitalized for a year. It was during that recuperation, he has said, that he concluded that it was his "destiny" to rid Iraq of Saddam. "The thing that really drives him is that he suffered himself from what was done to Iraq," says a senior British official in Baghdad. "It made him determined he was going to change that."

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