Quotes of the Day
For a man burdened with the immediate political fate of 24 million Iraqis — and, quite possibly, one President of the United States — Lakhdar Brahimi keeps an office in central Baghdad that is anything but grand. He sits in his windowless office along a hallway in the headquarters of the American-led occupation that once was a cavernous palace belonging to Saddam Hussein. The massive central rotunda so reminds Brahimi of the spaceship in his favorite movie, Star Wars, that when he enters, he mutters, "Aaah, this is the mother ship.'' His working space is cramped, just 10 ft. by 12 ft., with a small, imitation-leather couch and two chairs facing his desk. As the special envoy of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Brahimi, 70, has been holed up in this office
for four weeks, working to piece together an interim Iraqi government by June 30. The assignment has made Brahimi the man to see in Iraq, even as what he calls an "impossible" security situation makes it too dangerous for him to move around. "Sometimes he sighs, and it's like that east wind coming out of his lungs," says aide Ahmad Fawzi. "The longer the day, the longer the sigh. You can see the weight of the world on his shoulders. Sometimes I just want to put my arms around him and tell him it's going to be all right."
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As much as anyone, Brahimi knows that success doesn't come easily in Iraq. He intends to unveil this week the names of the interim-government officials who will run the country after the handover of power at the end of June. The new government will have barely a month to sell itself to ordinary Iraqis as an autonomous body with real authority rather than be seen as a puppet of an occupying power that much of the population no longer trusts. But the selection of the new government has proved to be almost as shambolic as the occupation itself. It forced Brahimi last week to rip up well-laid plans, accede to political pressure and abandon some first principles — including his original intention to appoint a new Prime Minister untainted by association with the U.S. Though the pieces of Iraq's first post-Saddam government may fall into place this week, it's anyone's guess how long it will hold together. "It's a very complicated business," Brahimi told TIME. "And we're doing that against a background of very little communication between the people of Iraq themselves."
Given those constraints, it was inevitable that the makeup of the new government and how it was chosen would invite controversy. When Brahimi returned to Iraq at the beginning of May, backed by President Bush's pledge to hand sovereignty to whatever political arrangement Brahimi could come up with, he made clear his desire to stock the new government with nonpartisan technocrats without links to either the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council or to the man he calls "the big chief," Saddam. But only days before he had hoped to name Iraq's new leaders, that plan was overhauled. Brahimi's first choice for Prime Minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, was leaked early last week to Washington reporters. But Shi'ite members of the Governing Council quickly complained that al-Shahristani, a former nuclear scientist, lacked any political base in the country; non-Shi'ite members of the council said he was too religious. Iraqi and U.N. officials say that after al-Shahristani withdrew his name from consideration, members of the Governing Council advised Brahimi that they had agreed to back one of their own for the new government's most powerful post — Iyad Allawi, a physician and Shi'ite Muslim who is head of the Iraqi National Accord (I.N.A.). By then, Brahimi — who insists his job is to broker a consensus on the new government, not to handpick its members — had little choice but to go along. "Brahimi decided that since this is their choice, he'll work with their decision," says a close aide. "He respects it."
But the reaction to Allawi's appointment highlighted the near impossibility of choosing an unelected Iraqi government that can command wide support. Almost from the moment they endorsed Allawi, Governing Council members rushed to declare that he was no one's top choice. "He's a compromise candidate," says council member Mahmoud Othman. "Nobody wanted him at the start, but in the end nobody rejected him." Allawi is a former member of Saddam's Baath Party who left Iraq for London in the mid-'70s and was later attacked by an ax-wielding assassin when he refused Saddam's demands to return. Beginning in the early 1990s, Allawi's I.N.A. began working with the CIA against Saddam's regime; in 1996 the CIA tried to use the group in a disastrous coup attempt against Saddam. While some U.S. officials expressed relief that Iraq's top post would be filled by someone they could do business with, some Iraqis warned that Allawi's association with the CIA and the Governing Council may compromise his authority before he even takes office. "He'll have to handle this somehow," says Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni member of the Governing Council.
The new government's basic task sounds deceptively simple: hold Iraq together, and lay the groundwork so reasonably fair elections can be held just seven months down the road, in January 2005. Getting there won't be easy, but after a year of U.S. stumbling, the Brahimi plan may well be the last chance to cement Iraq together as a relatively stable country. At this point, concedes a British official, "there is no plan B."
With the handover approaching, American commanders are trying to scale back the U.S.'s combat operations and force Iraqi troops to take over the job of maintaining security. As it did in Fallujah in April, the U.S. last week chose to deal instead of fight, this time accepting a truce with the Shi'ite militia loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, 30. The U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division agreed to pull back from the holy city of Najaf in a deal pushed by Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the most respected Shi'ite leader in the country.
Whether the truce can stick is critical for the Administration and the viability of the interim government. The U.S. has desperately tried to accommodate Ayatullah Sistani — the symbol of what senior Bush advisers see as the Shi'ite silent majority, a group they believe is impatient with the occupation but willing to support a sovereign government if it is seen as legitimate. Reducing the violence in the Sunni triangle and the south will, Administration officials hope, buttress their case that it's safe for the U.N. to throw its support behind the new government. A senior Administration official told TIME that the U.S. expects a Security Council resolution endorsing the interim government to pass "in the next couple weeks," despite concerns raised by Security Council member states — most notably China, France and Russia — about whether Iraqis will have any say over U.S. military operations after the June 30 handover.
Whether the U.S. can line up the international support it needs will depend on the diplomatic skills of Brahimi, who is due to return to New York City within days to brief the Security Council on the outlines of Iraq's new political structure. Given the Administration's original ambitions for remaking the Middle East in Iraq's image, Brahimi is an unlikely savior. Despite his talents as a diplomat, he is a symbol of the secular Arab status quo, and as a member of Algeria's governing council in 1992, he helped put down Islamic radicals who were starting to win elections. Throughout his 40-year diplomatic career, he has shown a preference for stability above all, which makes him a soothing figure for at least some of Iraq's very nervous neighbors. Says Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister: "The role of the U.N. and the confidence he can give to the people of Iraq ... will make or break the work he is doing."
Since returning to Iraq early this year, Brahimi has distanced himself from the Bush Administration. He criticized the Marines' siege of Fallujah and blasted Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. He sometimes has a hard time hiding his disdain for the world's only superpower, chiding the U.S. for having kept the international community on the sidelines in Iraq for so long. "The Americans call themselves the indispensable country," he told TIME. "And I suppose they are. But I have been calling the U.N. the indispensable organization for quite some time now ... We are doing what a lot of Iraqis have said they wanted the U.N. to do all along."
While some Administration hard-liners may bristle at such talk, the White House is willing to accept those kind of darts in silence. "We love him no matter what he says about us," says a White House aide. U.S. officials, including proconsul L. Paul Bremer and National Security Council envoy Robert Blackwill, have kept a close eye on the Iraqis vetted by Brahimi for top jobs in the government. Another White House aide says Brahimi spent last week working "around the clock" to finalize names of the new government, soliciting opinions from dozens of Iraqi leaders and U.S. advisers. The official says that two weeks ago Brahimi narrowed the list of candidates for the Prime Minister slot to four names and settled on Allawi just as the Governing Council was rallying around him. A senior Administration official calls the selection process a "three-dimensional game of chess."
For all that, Allawi's appointment has stirred up the kind of controversy the Administration and Brahimi hoped to avoid. An imposing secular Shi'ite who remains close to the U.S. intelligence community — the I.N.A. continues to receive CIA funding — Allawi is a reassuring figure to the White House, which hopes to maintain influence over Iraq's future through its ties to the new body's most powerful executive. The CIA has long backed him over his voluble rival, Ahmad Chalabi, to whom Allawi is related by marriage. A Brahimi aide claims that Allawi's appointment also received Sistani's blessing, which the U.S. hopes may earn him some quick credibility. But some Iraqi leaders say Allawi's ties to U.S. intelligence and the widely unpopular Governing Council will undermine him. Says Sheikh Mohammed Basher al-Faidi, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, a powerful group of Sunni clerics: "This is a man who came into Iraq in an American tank. Is there anybody who honestly believes the Iraqi people will respect such a man?"
At this point the U.S. doesn't have anywhere else to turn. The Administration is still betting that by enlisting Brahimi, it may have hit upon a solution to the Pottery Barn problem — Colin Powell's warning to President Bush before the war that if the U.S. "broke" Iraq, it would own it. "If we are helping the occupation do anything," Brahimi says, "We're helping them get out." It's a testament to the state of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq that the Administration is hard pressed to come up with a better definition of success.
- Bill Powell; Vivienne Walt/Baghdad