A Prime Minister with a Past 

A Prime Minister with a Past

A cynic might say: "The Baathists are back." According to this article in the Globe and Mail, Iyad Allawi, despite being a Shiite, was a member of the Baath party for roughly 10 years--until 1975. "After moving to Britain for medical studies in 1971, Mr. Allawi reportedly continued to receive payments from the Iraqi embassy in London and did not quit the Baath Party until 1975."

"Mr. Allawi has also been an outspoken advocate of the idea that former members of the long-ruling Baath Party, such as himself, should not be excluded from senior government posts in the new Iraq."

Since the beginning of the Sadr uprising, it seems the Shiite mullocrats and the Baathists have co-operated to a remarkable extent. Perhaps they can only agree on ending the U.S. occupation, after which they will return to their own war. Allawi in a way personifies the collaboration.

Some more light on the factions within Washington, DC:

"He is the head of the Iraqi National Accord, a political party dominated by exiled military figures who defected from the Saddam Hussein regime. The INA was a long-time rival to another Shia exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a distant relative of Mr. Allawi.

"While the Pentagon favoured the more flamboyant Mr. Chalabi, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department preferred Mr. Allawi. Last week, when Iraqi police raided the office of Mr. Chalabi and his Pentagon funding was terminated, it was further evidence that Mr. Chalabi had fallen into disfavour and his rival was winning."

Can we shed some light on the attempted coup in 1996, in which everyone, so to speak, seems to have been involved?

"In the long years of exile, during debates over how to get rid of Mr. Hussein, it was Mr. Allawi, with the CIA's support, who argued for a military coup that would leave most of the Iraqi regime in place."

Spencer Ackerman: "Allawi recruited a number of ex-Baathist Sunnis and, after a brief return to London to rekindle his British contacts, set up shop in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he ingratiated himself to CIA agents trying to oust Saddam. Sympathetic CIA operatives enlisted the support of Jordanian and Kuwaiti intelligence for schemes that Allawi dreamed up--even as Allawi himself whispered in the ears of selected allies that he didn't think his plans would work. Those whispers turned out to be right, as the CIA and INA's long-planned military coup was thoroughly penetrated by Saddam's agents and ended in disaster."

Michael Ledeen comments on one of the Kurdish leaders: "Jalal Talabani is closely linked to the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Intelligence Service, and reported to Tehran on U.S. activities in 1996 during the failed uprising against Saddam."

The role of Chalabi (and others) in the "Bay of Goats" in 1996: "Indeed, in 1996 an ill-organized INC offensive in northern Iraq, where Chalabi had assembled about 1,000 fighters, was half-heartedly backed by the CIA. Not only did Saddam Hussein's troops not defect en masse, as predicted by Chalabi, but one of the INC's key allies, the Kurdistan Democratic Party [Barzani's, not Talabani's group], chose to ally itself with Baghdad, inviting the Iraqi army back into northern Iraq's Kurdish areas for a mop-up exercise. Another of the INC's allies, the Iraqi National Accord, apparently blew up the INC's main offices in an act of bloody fratricide. These tragic failures only increased the distaste for Chalabi at the CIA and among the U.S. military."

While we're at: a piece in the New Yorker on Chalabi (via Atrios): A new total! "Between 1992 and the raid on Chalabi's home, the U.S. government funnelled more than a hundred million dollars to the Iraqi National Congress. The current Bush Administration gave Chalabi's group at least thirty-nine million dollars." Making Saddam look as bad as possible was originally a CIA operation, with money channelled through the Rendon Group.

Peter Galbraith emerges here as yet another American who has been charmed by Chalabi. He says Chalabi's stories before the war were not lies, and in any case Chalabi is not responsible for any decisions the Americans made. My question: what if Chalabi decided at some point (maybe after the Bay of Goats) that he wasn't getting enough from the Americans, so he turned to Iran? And what was Allawi doing all this time?

Clearly the U.S. has found a way to identify the elite of the country--the George Washingtons, the Thomas Jeffersons--and allow them to lead their country in a proud new direction.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus says "if Sistani's happy, I guess we should be happy." The IGC may simply have made a decision in defiance of U.S. wishes, the preference of Brahimi of the U.N., and indeed the "official" process. This is not likely to represent the popular wishes of the Iraqi people, in any meaningful sense, but it may reflect the views of the "mullocracy" that is taking shape as a result of U.S. and Iranian actions.