Quotes of the Day
For years, the joke in the State Department and CIA was that Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi enjoyed more influence along the Potomac than along the Euphrates. But the joke was on his detractors, this week, as Chalabi parlayed his Potomac — or, more correctly, Pentagon — backing into a triumphant return to Iraq at the head of what one senior U.S. commander called "the core of a future Iraqi army." Chalabi flew into the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, Monday, on a U.S. military transport plane at the head of some 500 Iraqi exile fighters he dubbed "Free Iraqi Forces."
The spectacle of Chalabi claiming the De Gaulle role — the leader of the Free French forces who took the reins in Paris as soon as it was liberated by the U.S. — won't sit well with State Department, the CIA and other elements of the foreign policy bureaucracy in Washington, nor with Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair. They doubt that Chalabi, who has been in exile for 45 years, has the standing to rally the Iraqi people, and prefer to see him as one of a number of contenders that should be drawn into a new process for forming a new regime. Their concern: If the U.S. appears to be imposing a new government of its own making, the post-Saddam era could devolve quickly into a civil war.
Chalabi's supporters in the Pentagon portray him as the strong and decisive leader required by the times, a forceful advocate for the Bush administration's wider Middle East agenda. Clearly, he's forging ahead to cement his claim by establishing facts on the ground. But the opposition leader who left Iraq 45 years ago has plenty of detractors, even among Iraqi some of the Iraqi exile groups corralled by the U.S. into an uneasy alliance with his Iraqi National Congress. The news that Chalabi had returned was immediately followed by an announcement in Tehran that Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), would return home shortly. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld just last week warned the organization to keep its Al-Badr brigades — a guerrilla army forged out of the remnants of the 1991 Shiite rebellion against Saddam, armed and trained in Iran by that country's hard-line Revolutionary Guards — out of Iraq. But SCIRI has historically been the most influential organization among Iraqi Shiites, and the political tenor of statements emerging from the Iran-based Shiite organizations suggest they accept neither U.S. occupation of Iraq nor any Iraqi government chosen by the U.S.
As the race for power begins to unfold on the ground in Iraq, President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair met in Northern Ireland Tuesday to consider how to ensure the legitimacy, and therefore the stability, of the transition in Iraq. The central question: What role the United Nations will play. The answer, of course, was "a vital role," although the two leaders offered only vague clues as to what that might mean. Washington's hawks are reluctant to see the UN playing anything more than a humanitarian role, but Blair has insisted that the viability of any post-Saddam regime depends on it getting the UN stamp of approval. Afghanistan is his prime example of an instance where the U.S. managed to have its own choice, President Hamid Karzai, installed in a UN-sanctioned process. (Of course that was a lot easier in Afghanistan, where the UN Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi had designed the loya jirga process years before the U.S. military intervention that toppled the Taliban.)
There are obvious difficulties in drawing the UN into administering the aftermath of a war it never sanctioned. Still, Blair will point to practical and legal issues: a government constituted by virtue of U.S. military power might have real control, but that would not automatically mean recognition as the legal government of Iraq. (The Taliban had military control of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, but the country's UN seat remained in the hands of the government it had overthrown.) Also, the UN already has legal authority over Iraq's oil revenues and assets frozen abroad in line with UN sanctions. And some key donor nations have already signaled that they will provide aid only to a UN-sanctioned authority in Iraq.
The primary concern, however, is political. Given the potential for civil war that arises from the ethnic cleavages and contending regional interests in shaping post-Saddam Iraqi politics, Blair believes the only way to ensure a stable transition is for an Iraqi government to emerge through a broadly representative consultative process inside Iraq. The legitimacy of such a venture, the British argue, will require the UN stamp of approval. But that remains a tough sell to a Bush administration that believes it has earned the dominant voice in shaping post-Saddam Iraq by virtue of the lives and treasure it invested in bringing down the dictator, and views the UN as an epic failure for having failed to authorize military action to oust the regime.
Although the specifics were fudged in Belfast, Bush and Blair did stress that the UN's role would include a direct role in establishing an interim authority composed of Iraqis to begin running the government. But the shape of a post-Saddam political arrangement is likely to remain for some time the focus of some bitter infighting, both along the Potomac and along the Euphrates.
- Tony Karon
- Not Saddam. And that's why the struggle over what and who will govern Iraq is raging with new intensity