Infighting hurting U.S. effort to prepare Iraq’s new leadership
UNITED NATIONS (AP) – Held together only by their desire to topple Saddam Hussein, six key Iraqi opposition parties are hurting U.S. efforts to map out a strategy for a democratic, post-Saddam Iraq, according to documents and interviews with key American and Iraqi players. While the Iraqi groups – split along ethnic, tribal, religious and political lines – are close to agreeing to democratic principles, infighting over who would be in charge in the face of regime change is threatening the plan, to be presented at a conference meant to highlight unity among Saddam’s foes.
The lack of a deal among the groups on this major issue could leave open the possibility of a dangerous power vacuum inside Iraq should Saddam’s regime fall.
Regardless of who is at fault, and by all accounts there is blame all around, more than six months of intense work to bring the opposition to a common goal on the eve of what could become a very different Iraq is seriously at stake.
“The closer we get to a deadline for a military invasion, the more vocal the infighting has become, because the questions of leadership, alliances, stakes and who gets what have intensified to an almost impossible degree,” said Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College who is following the talks.
The answers to those questions lies with the conference itself, where the United States hopes the road map – known as the “democratic principles,” working paper – will be shown off as the centerpiece of their efforts.
The paper envisions a truth and reconciliation commission, a war crimes investigation of Saddam and his inner circle, the elimination of all military courts and the creation of a volunteer army. The success of the plan would largely require an initial three to four months of foreign military occupation, in which a U.S.-led coalition would establish security throughout Iraq.
Once the country was stabilized, a census would be conducted, a transitional government would be put in place and within two years Iraqis would hold their first free elections in over 50 years.
The 100-page paper is the product of months of negotiations among the Iraqi opposition parties, which operate mostly in exile and are united only by their desire to topple Saddam.
The United States facilitated several rounds of secret talks and provided experts from U.S. think tanks to help draft the paper, Iraqi and American officials said.
The opposition groups involved in the talks are the Constitutional Monarchist Movement led by Sharif Ali bin Al-Hussein, a first cousin of the last Iraqi king; Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord; Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress; Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party; the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan run by Jalal Talabani; and the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Ayatollah Mohamad Baqir Al Hakim, a Shiite Muslim.
Some of the details in the paper remain unresolved, but the overall framework has been agreed to by all parties.
The Kurds want the paper to emphasize a federal democracy that would allow them to hold onto some limited autonomy in northern Iraq. But neighboring Turkey fears such a system could spark secession among Turkish Kurds.
Right now, the main obstacle to the conference is deciding whether participants should create a transitional body poised to take over Iraq in the event of regime change. Who would lead that group and what kinds of powers and responsibilities it would have are at the heart of the disputes among the competing parties.
David Phillips, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is involved in the talks, said several groups want the conference to be mostly about a show of unity.
“Others think the meetings need to culminate in elections” for a transitional government, Phillips said.
Chalabi, whose quest for power is backed by the Defense Department, is among the latter.
“We’d like a coalition that will transition from post-Saddam through reconstruction until a democratic model for elections is in place,” said Chalabi’s aide, Nabil Mousawi.
The Kurds are resisting that format.
“Something has to come out of this conference,” said Hoshayr Zabari of the Kurdish Democratic Party said in a recent interview. “But we have no plans to set up a government-in-exile or a transitional government because it’s too premature.”
Another area of friction is that all six Iraqi opposition groups are trying to stack conference seats reserved for “independents” with their own supporters.
Chalabi, a Shiite banker living in London, successfully managed last week, with direct intervention from Washington, to increase the number of independent delegates from 100 to 300. He has gambled that the move will bolster his efforts to secure a prominent position in any outcome.
Frustrated by a lack of agreement among the parties, four senior officials on the Iraq desks at the State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council wrote a toughly worded memo to the opposition groups outlining a uniform position for a conference Washington had hoped would be held in late November in Brussels, Belgium.
One expert involved in the talks said the memo reflected a new consensus within the U.S. government and was meant as a strong message to the Iraqi groups to “get their house in order.”
According to the memo, the conference should be “a major public event to highlight the desire of Iraqis for freedom and liberty against (Saddam’s) Baath party rule.”
Hoping to appease allies and suppress divisions among the Iraqi groups, the four officials wrote that Washington “does not support the creation of a national assembly or a provisional government at this point.” The best outcome would be formation of a diverse “advisory committee” that could serve as a liaison with the Bush administration, it said.
The Brussels meeting never got off the ground, partly because Belgium’s government was unhappy about hosting a gathering dedicated to Saddam’s ouster while the U.N. Security Council had committed itself to Iraq’s disarmament through inspections. But mostly, the conference was postponed for a third time since early September because the Iraqi opposition groups couldn’t agree on the agenda or the number of delegates.
The groups are now trying to reschedule the conference for Dec. 10 in London.
The four U.S. officials flew to London in mid-November to press the opposition leaders for action, said officials involved in the talks.
The American memo lays out in specific terms what it expects from the conference, including support for a multiethnic, democratic Iraq that forswears weapons of mass destruction and accepts all Security Council resolutions in place against Iraq.
“All delegates to the conference should agree to these principles in advance and the outcome of the conference should be a document adopted by acclamation which captures these principles as a vision for the future of Iraq,” the memo says.
Gerges, the professor at Sarah Lawrence, said the infighting is “worrisome because the United States has worked hard to impress the need for cooperation.”
“It’s stalling progress toward the development of some kind of democratic system that could take over the country in the immediate aftermath of a U.S.-led military intervention,” he said.
—
EDITOR’S NOTE: Associated Press Writer Salah Nasrawi in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.