Staging "democracy" in Iraq. Was Brahimi Bushed?

May 29, 2004

SELECTING A LEADER
Surprising Choice for Premier of Iraq Reflects U.S. Influence
By WARREN HOGE and STEVEN R. WEISMAN

UNITED NATIONS, May 28 — After turning to the United Nations to shore up its failing effort to fashion a new government in Baghdad, the United States ended up Friday with a choice for prime minister certain to be seen more as an American candidate than one of the United Nations or the Iraqis themselves.

The man chosen to be prime minister, Iyad Alawi, is the secretary general of the Iraqi National Accord, an exile group that has received funds from the Central Intelligence Agency. His ties with the C.I.A., and his closeness to the United States could become an issue in a country where public opinion has grown almost universally hostile to the Americans.

The announcement of Dr. Alawi's selection appeared to surprise several at the United Nations.

"When we first heard the news today, we thought that the Iraqi Governing Council had hijacked the process," said a senior United Nations official, referring to the American-picked body that voted to recommend Dr. Alawi earlier on Friday.

A senior State Department official in Washington, as well as a senior American official in Baghdad, said Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy asked by the United States to choose an interim government for Iraq, had indeed selected Dr. Alawi. The State Department official suggested that the Iraqi council had merely ratified the selection after the fact in order to make it seem that the council was the kingmaker.

According to other reports, Dr. Alawi appeared on Mr. Brahimi's short list of candidates, but it was unclear whether the selection of Dr. Alawi had Mr. Brahimi's wholehearted support.

Statements from the United Nations seemingly confirmed the idea that Mr. Brahimi was merely bowing to the wishes of the others.

"Mr. Brahimi respects the decision and says he can work with this person," Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for Secretary General Kofi Annan, said in response to a barrage of skeptical questioning. Asked what Mr. Annan's view was, Mr. Eckhard said: "The secretary general respects the decision, as I said Mr. Brahimi does. `Respect' is a very carefully chosen word."

Some time later, perhaps because of the skepticism that comment engendered, a less circumspect statement was issued in the name of Ahmad Fawzi, Mr. Brahimi's press spokesman, saying: "Let there be no misunderstanding. Mr. Brahimi is perfectly comfortable with how the process is proceeding thus far."

In a telephone interview from Baghdad, Mr. Brahimi refused to discuss the selection of Dr. Alawi. "I don't want to go back saying who is good and who is bad," he said.

But in a hint that the selection process had not gone exactly as planned, Mr. Brahimi added, "You know, sometimes people think I am a free agent out here, that I have a free hand to do whatever I want." He noted that he had been asked to take on the job in a letter to Mr. Annan from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the Iraqi Governing Council.

United Nations officials said Dr. Alawi had been on Mr. Brahimi's list of acceptable candidates for prime minister, although he was not his first choice. The officials said Dr. Alawi had ranked third on the list.

The United Nations is wary of having the world organization or Mr. Brahimi himself appear too close to the United States. At the same time, Mr. Brahimi must balance many competing interests as he moves between the American occupying powers and the Iraqis.

Mr. Brahimi said he felt that regardless of how the selection of Dr. Alawi had emerged, it would free him to proceed rapidly with a host of choices he had settled on for other ranking government positions.

"This is the first name to come out, but there is still the rest of the government to complete," he said. "All of this is going to take place in the next few days, and I am very, very much involved in this process."

Among the jobs he has to fill and for which his aides say he now has names ready to go are a president, two vice presidents and 26 cabinet members for the new government, the members of a preparatory committee planning a national council of Mr. Brahimi's design for a post-transition and the officials for an electoral commission.

The choices could become known as early as Sunday, aides said.

Mr. Fawzi said Mr. Brahimi and Dr. Alawi had met often. "His name came up frequently in the wide-ranging consultations that Brahimi conducted," Mr. Fawzi said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands, where he had gone from Baghdad on personal business.

United Nations officials said any misgivings that Mr. Brahimi had about Dr. Alawi were not about the man himself but about his past associations and how they might play with the Iraqi public, because of Dr. Alawi's ties with the C.I.A.

"Let's see what the Iraqi street has to say about this name," Mr. Eckhard said.

Members of the United Nations Security Council, which this week began negotiating a new resolution for post-transition Iraq, had been expecting Mr. Brahimi to deliver the names for a new government by the end of the month. They had also been told that the names would be made public as a group, not in the sporadic and individual manner that Dr. Alawi's name emerged Friday.

Asked about those expectations, Mr. Eckhard said, "This is not the way we expected this to happen, no, but the Iraqis seem to agree on this name, and if they do, Mr. Brahimi is ready to work with him."

France, Germany, Russia and China, all opponents of the Iraq war a year ago, complained Tuesday that the draft resolution submitted by Britain and the United States had left unclear the crucial relationships between the new government, the Iraqi armed forces and the United States-led multinational force that will remain in Iraq.

In response, the American and British sponsors of the resolution promised that the names would come in time for the Council to factor them and their views into its deliberations.

Mr. Brahimi said he agreed wholeheartedly with the Security Council members' wishes. "The Security Council is right in saying that this new government must take part in the discussions on the resolution," he said.

Warren Hoge reported from the United Nations for this article, and Steven R. Weisman from Washington.

[Gordon B]

Finally, some good news in Iraq. Let's hope Dr. Alawi has a successful term. I wish the Bush Administration had listened more to him and less to Chalabi about how to proceed in the immediate post-war period.


MAN IN THE NEWS (New York Times - 5/28/04)
A Guide for Hard Times: Iyad Alawi
By JOEL BRINKLEY

Published: May 29, 2004

he political map in Iraq was in turmoil once again late last year as members of the Governing Council furiously jockeyed for power. Iyad Alawi, a leader among them, professed to want nothing to do with it.

"Things are so confused," he said with a deep frown and slow shake of the head, sitting in his Baghdad office. "It does not honor me to be a part of it."

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And in fact, through the winter and spring, Dr. Alawi, a medical doctor, kept a relatively low public profile while other members of the council were grandstanding. That reticence may have helped persuade others on the council to choose him on Friday to be the interim prime minister of Iraq.

Dr. Alawi is an imposing figure, more than six feet tall with a sonorous voice and an easy air of command. He listens carefully, but can maintain a manner that does not betray even an inkling of what he is thinking. The resulting impression is not of a man holding secrets, but of one without guile, a feature not normally associated with politicians.

He has maintained strong relations with the United States through two administrations; to this day, his organization, the Iraqi National Accord, receives financing from the Central Intelligence Agency. But he lived abroad for 30 years and is not well known in Iraq.

The C.I.A. chose to support him eight years ago while the better-known former exile leader, Ahmad Chalabi, lost his C.I.A. financing but later received money instead from the State Department and then the Department of Defense. With different government sponsors, the two men pushed opposite approaches toward Iraq, both before and after the war.

While Mr. Chalabi has relentlessly promoted de-Baathification, a policy pleasing to conservatives in the Pentagon, Dr. Alawi has remained single-minded in his determination to use the expertise of former senior Baathist members of the military to bring stability to Iraq.

"He thought the wholesale rejection of Baathists from government was a big mistake," Patrick Theros, his representative in Washington, said Friday.

Dr. Alawi's group came to be home to former senior Baathist military officers after they fled Iraq.

"Many of them were sentenced to death before they fled," Dr. Alawi said in an interview in Baghdad late last year. "Our idea was to take off the upper crust of the military after the war and replace them with our people. They would redeem themselves by spear-heading change in Iraq. But that is not what happened."

Iyad Alawi was born in Baghdad in 1946 into a wealthy Shiite family of prominent business leaders. After the Baath Party gained control of Iraq, Dr. Alawi, as a young man, joined the party's youth branch. He studied medicine in Baghdad and then in London. Dr. Alawi occasionally treated young Saddam Hussein for minor ailments.

By the mid-1970's, Dr. Alawi had resigned from the Baath Party and was living in London. He ignored Mr. Hussein's entreaties to return to Baghdad. As a result, in 1978, an assassin presumably sent by Mr. Hussein attacked Dr. Alawi in his bed with an ax. He was seriously wounded and spent almost a year in a hospital.

That attack helped persuade him to begin organizing former Baathists in exile, like himself. And after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, suddenly Mr. Alawi and his organization were in great demand. Financial support flowed in from Britain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and, eventually, the C.I.A. That year he founded the Iraqi National Accord.

In 1996, with American encouragement and financial support, the group tried to mount a coup in Iraq, using Baathist allies still in the military and government. But agents of the government infiltrated the network. The coup failed, and the plotters were arrested. Many were executed. When members of Dr. Alawi's group look back on that disaster now, many of them say they felt betrayed by the United States, which decided not to give the plotters any overt assistance.

When the Bush administration began making plans to invade Iraq in 2002, the C.I.A. came to Dr. Alawi again. His organization's mission this time was to make contact with senior military commanders in the Iraqi Army and urge them not to fight. Dr. Alawi says he succeeded.

"We negotiated successfully with a significant number of officers, including officers in the Sunni Triangle," he said. "During the war, no bullets were fired there in defense of Saddam."

But then he suggested a feeling of betrayal once again.

"This was an indication that these soldiers were not Saddam's cronies and could have been used as an asset for the new Iraq," he said. "It was really logical for policymakers in the U.S. to use these people." But instead, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, disbanded the Iraqi Army.

Dr. Alawi's relationship with the United States seems conflicted. He is unwilling to criticize the Bush administration directly, but he does say, using no pronouns: "After the war, I am not sure there was a strategy. After the war, there wasn't a clue to where things should be going."

Now that he has been named interim prime minister of Iraq, the United States and his own people, in search of a strategy, will be looking to him.

His connection to the CIA is troublesome, IMO.

[ormsbop]

Apparently the big cheese Ayatolah al-Sistani, accepted Alawi's appointment - a good sign.



http://www.boston.com/news/world/art...der_is_chosen/

[Uli]

Apparently he is the "Security" expert among the candidates on the short list. For the council he was dealing with the build up of local forces. They sure need them.

That's , from what I hear from the chatter in the news.

[BFrank]

I thought that they were supposed to dissolve the Governing Council because as a US appointed body it was not supported by the Iraqi people. In following, the new leader was supposed to be someone outside of this group.



(May 29, 2004 -- 12:39 PM EDT // link // print)
I continue to think that something very important happened in this selection of Iyad Allawi. Precisely what, though, remains unclear. After all the twists and turns over the last 24 hours it seems to have been something very close to what I suggested early yesterday afternoon, a coup de main by the IGC. Or, more specifically, a coup de main launched by Allawi himself and either helped along, or facilitated or encouraged by the other members of the IGC.

Now, if the IGC were either a representative or popular body -- in other words, if it were perceived as legitimate -- that would probably be a good thing. It would be good to have them take the lead. For any sort of transition to be successful in any way, the people who become the new Iraqi government cannot simply be handed power in their own country. They must take it, assert it, probably even in some degree over and against us. If nothing else this is just a matter of national dignity, which is a key part of what we're dealing with here.

The problem is that the IGC isn't perceived as a legitimate body at all. Nor do the folks on it -- particuarly the ones most identified with us, like Chalabi and Allawi and others -- have any large followings.

So who is taking over here? And is their assertion a product of our disarray?

-- Josh Marshall

I guess it comes as no surprise that the Bush thugs have made another dumb decision. I know, I know, the selection was, supposedly, not theirs...but let's be real.--CA

29 May 2004

Exiled Allawi was responsible for 45-minute WMD claim

By Patrick Cockburn

The choice of Iyad Allawi, closely linked to the CIA and formerly to MI6, as the Prime Minister of Iraq from 30 June will make it difficult for the US and Britain to persuade the rest of the world that he is capable of leading an independent government.

He is the person through whom the controversial claim was channelled that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes.

Dr Allawi, aged 59, who trained as a neurologist, is a Shia Muslim who was a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party in Iraq and in Britain, where he was a student leader with links to Iraqi intelligence. He later moved into opposition to the Iraqi leader and reportedly established a connection with the British security services. His change of allegiance led to Dr Allawi being targeted by Iraqi intelligence. In 1978 their agents armed with knives and axes badly wounded him when they attacked him as he lay asleep in bed in his house in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Dr Allawi became a businessman with contacts in Saudi Arabia. He was charming, intelligent and had a gift for impressing Western intelligence agencies. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq National Accord (INA) party, which he helped to found, became one of the building blocks for the Iraqi opposition in exile. The organisation attracted former Iraqi army officers and Baath party officials, particularly Sunni Arabs, fleeing Iraq.

In the mid-1990s the INA claimed to have extensive contacts in the Iraqi officer corps. Dr Allawi began to move from the orbit of MI6 to the CIA. He persuaded his new masters that he was in a position to organise a military coup in Baghdad.

With American, British and Saudi support, he opened a headquarters and a radio station in Amman in Jordan in 1996, declaring it was "a historic moment for the Iraqi opposition". After a failed coup attempt that year there were mass arrests in Baghdad. Abdul-Karim al-Kabariti, the Jordanian prime minister of the day, said that INA's networks were "all penetrated by the Iraqi security services".

Dr Allawi and the INA returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam and set up offices in Baghdad and in old Baath party offices throughout Iraq.

There were few signs that they had any popular support. During an uprising in the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, last year, crowds immediately set fire to the INA office.

Dr Allawi was head of the security committee of the Iraqi Governing Council and was opposed to the dissolution of the army by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. He stepped down in protest as head of the committee during the US assault on Fallujah. But his reputation among Iraqis for working first with Saddam's intelligence agents and then with MI6 and the CIA may make it impossible for them to accept him as leader of an independent Iraq.

[BFrank]

(June 01, 2004 -- 11:39 AM EDT // link // print)
Now that some of the dust has settled, we can see one thing pretty clearly: the IGC basically hijacked the process. The IGC essentially reconstituted as a caretaker government. The new President, Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, was the current president of the IGC. Hoshiyar Zebari, who was the foreign minister in the IGC, is now the foreign minister under the interim government. Allawi was a member of and choice of the IGC, etc. And so on down the list. The only key issue is that Chalabi, if not his crew, has been purged. Brahimi agreed to a laying on of hands. But he didn't make the choices. He was sidelined.

-- Josh Marshall

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Is there anyone to be empowered on June 30 not an Iraqi exile? And is there anyone who doesn't have CIA/US ties?

[lynn]

Don't look know, but they are empowered today. The Governing Council is disolved and the government in place as of today.

I think this is a little ahead of schedule and a real twist to the Bush timetable.

[BFrank]

Yet..........the "Governing Council" and the new "Government" are the same thing anyway.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

We'll just have to wait to see how this plays out. According to some poll taken a few weeks back many Iraqis think that on June 30th the American troops will be leaving Iraq. I hope the poll's wrong because there will be a whole bunch of disappointed folks.

[BFrank]

June 3, 2004
DUPING THE UN?....UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi apparently isn't very happy with the interim Iraqi government he was supposedly in charge of choosing:

Asked how big a role the American administration had in forming the government and selecting the prime minister and president, Brahimi reminded reporters that American Ambassador L. Paul Bremer runs things in Iraq.

"Bremer is the dictator of Iraq," he said. "He has the money. He has the signature."

He later added: "I will not say who was my first choice, and who was not my first choice ... I will remind you that the Americans are governing this country."

Sadoun al Dulame, the head of a Baghdad research organization and polling center, said he spoke with Brahimi last week and that the diplomat was discouraged.

"He was very disappointed, very frustrated," al Dulame said. "I asked him why he didn't say that publicly (and) he said, 'I am the U.N. envoy to Iraq, how can I admit to failure?'"

It seems fair to say that in the end, Bush and Bremer managed to use the United Nations as little more than a respectable cover for their own choices. They got exactly the government they wanted but made it look like it was the work of the UN.

If this is what really happened, it's a clever piece of work. I wonder, though, if it will hurt us in the long run. After all, having the UN — and through them the rest of the world — feeling like they've been duped might cause problems down the road.

Not that Bush is likely to care about something like that. In fact, duping the UN would probably tickle him no end. Maybe that's why he was in such a good mood on Tuesday.

—Kevin Drum 12:54 AM