The strongman of Baghdad
Undaunted, Mr Allawi kept up his contacts (and income) with the
spooks and an even thirstier, less discriminating audience, the
British press. At top-secret meetings in London hotels, murmured
conversations with selected extra-gullible hacks would produce
exciting headlines in top right-wing newspapers. It was the INA, in
July 2000, which fed the Sunday Telegraph the sensational scoop that
Saddam had deployed crack ‘Mata Hari’ teams of killer belly-dancers
to Britain to assassinate his political opponents, a story which
continues to be remembered with tears of real joy whenever
Iraq-watching journalists gather to reminisce.
Mr Allawi may never have been able to bring about a real coup,
but he was certainly unmatched in the PR variety. After the war, it
emerged that the legendary claim that Saddam could launch weapons of
mass destruction in 45 minutes — the claim that did more than any
other to book British troops their passage to the Gulf — was, in
fact, an INA production. (The source was an INA-supporting general,
Abdul Muhie, whose son-in-law, a frontline army officer, claimed to
have seen boxes of ‘special weapons’ that were to be used in the
event of an invasion. After the war, it emerged that the son-in-law
had not actually seen inside the boxes, leaving even a shamefaced
INA spokesman to describe the ‘well-sourced intelligence’ as a
‘crock of shit’.)
Mr Allawi has spent the 18 months since the war working flat out
to build his political base. This does not seem to have involved
much contact with the Iraqi people. The security situation is so
difficult these days, after all. But it does seem to have involved a
lot of contact with American political lobbyists. Filings to the US
justice department show that Mr Allawi has, since summer 2003, paid
between $50,000 and $100,000 a month to a constellation of
Washington political consultants — sums far greater than those spent
by any of his rivals. When the time came to choose an interim prime
minister, it was Mr Allawi, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, who was
picked by the Governing Council — which was made up of Iraqis, but
US-appointed ones.
The man who was actually supposed to make the choice — the UN
special representative Lakhdar Brahimi — certainly sounded a little
peeved at the news, describing the ‘terrible pressure’ he had been
placed under during the process and how the US administrator, Paul
Bremer, was ‘almost the dictator of Iraq’. Brahimi had wanted to
appoint an apolitical technocrat who could hold the fort until the
elections, forcing the largely unknown exiles to try to muster
popular support. But Mr Allawi’s appointment has given him an
enormous artificial head-start in the race.
Since his elevation to provisional power, Mr Allawi has been
busily closing down TV stations, having his opponents arrested on
trumped-up charges and sanctioning air raids on his own citizens —
exactly the sort of thing that used to get Saddam into such trouble.
But it would be wrong to suppose that the Iraqi people necessarily
mind the strong-man approach. Urban myths circulating in Baghdad
(and even in the Western press) that the Prime Minister is not above
personally executing the odd prisoner have done Mr Allawi no harm at
all.
Much of the Prime Minister’s political strategy is sensible,
coupling sticks for the intransigent with carrots for the
co-operative: ex-Baathists, whom he wants to re-employ, and many
insurgents, whom he wants to amnesty. But the Americans are
resisting the carrot part of the operation. The showdown with
Muqtada al-Sadr earlier this year was bungled, leaving the pimply
cleric yet again the winner. The voters don’t mind toughness, but
they do demand results. As the violence in Iraq begins to make daily
life almost impossible, Mr Allawi’s political honeymoon has come to
an end and the frailty of his political position has been exposed.
The trouble, you see, with wafting in a British passport-holder
from Wimbledon as your chosen leader is that he has no genuine
political capital in Iraq to spend, no popular support to withstand
the inevitable crises. Recognising this, Mr Allawi is at last trying
to build some support. He has voiced his first real criticism of his
former US paymasters, castigating their incompetence for allowing
dozens of Iraqi police to be ambushed and killed. And the people in
charge of the war crimes tribunal trying Saddam Hussein say that the
Prime Minister is trying to seize control of it to orchestrate a
crowd-pleasing trial in time for the elections.
Allawi’s defenders say that no Iraqi politician has clean hands,
democratic credentials or indeed much popular support. What, they
ask, is the alternative? Well, there was an alternative: Hussein
Shahristani, the former Iraqi nuclear scientist preferred by the
UN’s Brahimi. Closely associated with the real political force in
Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, completely unassociated with
the exiles or the Baath, and, crucially, a long-suffering opponent
of Saddam and of the invasion alike, Shahristani’s rejection by the
Governing Council may come to be seen as among the most serious
mistakes yet made in post-war Iraq.
For now, Allawi’s, and the Americans’, most important task is to
realise that they cannot behave as if they hold the keys to the
kingdom. In Patrick Cockburn’s words, they are ‘only two of many
powers in Iraq’, trying to crush their enemies where they would do
better to increase their friends. Unfortunately, there are few signs
yet that Iyad Allawi has been able to break free from the
authoritarian habits of the past. He may want to be a strongman, but
he is not operating from a position of strength.
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