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ANALYSIS
Battle of the old Middle
East hands
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - As in all things linked to United
States foreign policy these days, the question of who
should lead a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is a matter of
deep disagreement within the administration of US
President George W Bush.
On the one hand,
neo-conservative hawks around Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney have lobbied
heavily for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and
especially its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.
On the
other hand, Middle East specialists in the State
Department and their colleagues at the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) have generally favored former
military officers who are believed to retain influence
in Iraq's army.
While the contending sides
agreed last summer to co-sponsor meetings among Iraqi
opposition leaders in hopes of coaxing a united front
out of them in advance of US military action to oust
Saddam Hussein, the task appears as daunting as ever.
In the past two weeks, both sides have been
dealt significant setbacks, even as the US military
build-up around Iraq has shifted into overdrive, and CIA
officers have returned in force to Kurdish northern Iraq
for the first time since Saddam's ground forces routed
the CIA-backed INC there in 1996.
Washington had
hoped for a planned meeting of top opposition leaders to
begin in Brussels at the end of this week. But
infighting among the groups, sparked by the INC's demand
that several hundred more of its backers be invited,
resulted in a three-week delay and a change of venue -
to London, if the British government agrees - according
to State Department officials.
While
anti-Chalabi forces in the administration saw the delay
as a victory, they received a major setback of their own
on Tuesday when a Danish judge formally charged General
Nizar al-Khazraji, a former chief of staff of the Iraqi
army, with crimes against humanity. The general was
accused for his alleged role in the infamous 1988 Anfal
campaign, when almost 200,000 Kurdish villagers were
killed, some by chemical weapons, in the closing days of
the Iran-Iraq war.
Khazraji, a self-described
nationalist who left Iraq in 1995 and has denied the
charges, has been championed by CIA and State Department
officials as the best candidate to replace Saddam after
a US invasion. The charges were reportedly issued just
as he was preparing to leave for the Gulf.
Al-Khazaraji's indisposition is likely to
strengthen Chalabi, who has made no secret of his desire
to become Iraq's Hamid Karzai, the Afghan politician
hand-picked by Washington to become the country's
interim president after last year's military campaign.
But unlike Karzai, London-based Chalabi, a
wealthy, US-educated banker whose family fled Iraq when
the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, has lived in exile
virtually all of his adult life. Close to Jordan's
Hashemite monarchy until 1989, when he fled the country
after being charged with bank fraud, he first came to
prominence in Iraqi politics when he launched the INC in
1992.
Chalabi, who hails from an aristocratic
Shi'ite family, has depicted himself as an Iraqi
nationalist dedicated to human rights, the rule of law
and a federal structure for a future Iraq that would
guarantee greater autonomy for the country's disparate
regions and ethnic groups.
That image has won
him significant support in the US Congress, which in
1998 approved the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), a bill that
provided almost US$100 million in aid for opposition
groups, particularly his INC.
But what has
really given him political muscle in Washington is the
enthusiastic backing he has received from a group of
neo-conservatives closely identified with Israel's Likud
Party and associated with the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) and the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC).
Rumsfeld and Cheney, charter
members of the PNAC, recruited their top foreign policy
aides heavily from these two groups, while the AEI's
Richard Perle, who heads Rumsfeld's Defense Policy
Board, has been friends with Chalabi for some 20 years.
Aside from his avowal of Western ideals,
Chalabi's attraction to these forces appears based
mainly on the belief that an INC government in Baghdad
would fatally weaken what one influential
neo-conservative thinker and Perle colleague, David
Wurmser, has called a "PLO-Syria-Iraq-Iran axis" against
Israel, and strengthen a burgeoning alliance between
Israel, Turkey and Jordan, to which Iraq could then be
added.
In addition, a democratic Iraq, according
to these forces, would set in motion a series of
upheavals against authoritarian regimes, including Iran,
Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that could bring more
open and representative governments to power.
But the State Department and the CIA, as well as
retired high-ranking military officers with experience
in the Middle East and the Gulf, have openly scoffed at
these notions, beginning with Chalabi himself. Despite
his professed democratic values, according to these
critics, other INC leaders have complained repeatedly
about his centralized control over the organization.
Indeed, the main constituents of the INC - the
Kurdish groups in the north, and the Shi'ite,
Teheran-based Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which together
may have as many as 100,000 men under arms - have
repeatedly dropped out of the umbrella group, and last
summer joined with the Iraq National Accord, a group of
former Iraqi military and intelligence officers with
close CIA connections, to create the "Group of Four".
"The INC claims to be an umbrella, but it
doesn't cover anyone," noted one State Department
official this week.
Chalabi's personal style has
fueled charges that he is unreliable. The former head of
the US Central Command, retired general Anthony Zinni,
who is also a top Middle East advisor to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, has been particularly outspoken,
referring to Chalabi and his INC colleagues as
"silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London".
Despite their agreement to work together, the
two administration factions still appear to be jockeying
on behalf of their favorites. For example, the Pentagon
succeeded in wresting control of most of the unspent
money from the ILA last summer and is using it to train
Iraqi exiles recruited through the INC.
At the
same time, the State Department and CIA reportedly
blocked a proposed intelligence-gathering project that
the Pentagon wanted the INC to carry out.
(Inter
Press Service)
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