Kuwait Diary

Kuwait Diary -- April 14th, 2003

Day 26 of the 2nd Gulf war
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Only Tikrit, a city, 175 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad and Saddam’s home town, remained outside coalition control. While there were early claims of a swift occupation by coalition forces, a Canadian journalist reported major fire fights. This morning, the negotiations with the Iraqi fighters for a surrender failed. Two of the conditions of surrender offered by tribal leaders had not been met with. Firstly, they had wanted the coalition forces to prevent looting and arson; and secondly, they wanted the withdrawal of all Kurd militia from Tikrit. Fierce fighting resumed and finally, predictably, the coalition forces prevailed. US Marines seized control of the center of Saddam Hussein's home town today after battling diehard loyalists, Al-Jazeera television said as they broadcast live pictures of US Marines walking through Tikrit and US tanks taking up positions in a central square. "They entered Tikrit from the South to the North and today they will cross the river...The city is totally quiet now, fighting has stopped." Sharif of Al Jazeera said.

The military offensive is however, far from over. In Baghdad itself out of the 60 zones, a third is still being occupied by hardcore Iraqi fighters resisting US forces. In most Iraqi cities like Basra in the south and Mosul and Kirkuk in the north, joint patrols with the Iraqi police have been set up. Most of these policemen have served under the regime of Saddam Hussein. People are ambivalent on their role but have little choice. Some Iraqis are helping to restore law and order, while others are still barricaded behind closed doors. Iraqi public service officials have been brought on board to restore basic supplies but with most of the infrastructure destroyed by persistent coalition bombings, restoring the confidence of the people could be the coalition's biggest hurdle. Baghdad is still a very dangerous place.

Now, with the military campaign nearly over it is time to collect trophies, time for the soldiers to have some fun. Staff Sergeant Nathan Braswell hopes a flag he found in a captured Iraqi base will earn him a tidy sum when he sells it on the Internet. Like many fellow US Marines, Braswell grabbed the trophy as American forces advanced on Baghdad. Unlike the souvenir-hunting majority, he doesn't plan to keep it.

"I got the flag that was in the commanding general's building. It's very large. It's in great condition," said Braswell, who picked up the Iraqi national colours on the eastern outskirts of the city. "I'm going to put the flag on eBay," he said, referring to the Internet auction sight where memorabilia from the toppled regime of Saddam Hussein are already in hot demand. “Some collector would probably like it." Braswell said he would identify the grid reference of the installation where he found the flag to give an added touch of authenticity for war relic connoisseurs.

Other Marines lucky enough to stumble across caches of Iraqi bayonets are making a few bucks on the side selling them to troops who were not so quick off the mark. One Marine was offering several combat knives to his comrades for $20 each, although he kept his favourite one wedged in the webbing loops on his flak jacket as a memento. Some say they plan to mount their souvenirs on the walls, making a kind of collage of items like knives or shoulder flashes found on military uniforms discarded by Iraqi troops.
"I'm going to make me a nice little plaque that's got the dates I was here," said Lance-Corporal Louis Blankenship, taking a break in his armoured vehicle in a car park in the suburbs." "I'll put my dog tags on it," he said.

Many of the items might look rather bizarre on mantle pieces back home in America. Trophies claimed included the sights to a Soviet-built 120 mm mortar, that looks a bit like a piece of surveying equipment, and Iraqi gas masks.
"When you come home you have to show that you were there, you take some pictures," said Corporal Alex Fala."Throughout the wars in the past, everybody has brought back something."
Other homes may soon find themselves adorned with portraits of Saddam, combat helmets, military car license plates, canteen cups, uniform caps and pieces of webbing. Tin cups taken from one air base have already found themselves in use by Marines boiling their morning coffee on camping stoves. Anything bearing what Marines consider to resemble a Baath Party or Republican Guard insignia has added prestige. Strictly speaking, Marines are banned from taking war trophies, but as long as they restrict themselves to picking up bits of discarded military kit, officers tend to turn a blind eye.

Now, the struggle for power has begun in earnest. American officials are organizing a series of meetings designed to create an interim Iraqi authority which will take over the running of the country after a brief period of US military rule. The first of these meetings is to be held in southern Iraq tomorrow, probably at an airbase near the town of Nasiriya, but planning for the post-war future is still dogged by controversy. The top US commander, General Tommy Franks, has invited Iraqis from inside the country and from the main opposition groups abroad.

The fractured character of the Iraqi opposition-in-exile is well known. But, now that Saddam Hussein has lost his grip on power, the fault lines within Iraqi society are becoming apparent too. The tensions which have erupted in the Shia holy city of Najaf,where a prominent Shia cleric was assassinated last week, could provide a warning of dangers to come.

Jay Garner, the retired American general appointed by the Pentagon to run a temporary US-led administration, has offered the Iraqis a "big tent". In other words, he wants to draw as many Iraqis as possible into the process. The aim is to work at the local level, with a series of what one US official has called "town hall" meetings. The hope is that Iraqis returning from exile can find common ground with Iraqis who have lived under Saddam Hussein's rule. The latter are to include tribal and religious leaders and members of the bureaucracy and the Baath Party who are deemed trustworthy. The climax of this "rolling dialogue", as officials are calling it, will be a big meeting in Baghdad - designed on the model of the Bonn conference which produced a new leadership for post-Taleban Afghanistan. It is a moot point, that the present structure in Afghanistan is itself under attack by a resurgent Taleban and local warlords.

One big difference is that in Afghanistan the United Nations was in charge. In Iraq the US is in the driving seat. "The UN can be an important partner," Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Senate committee last week. "But it can't be the managing partner." How big a role the UN should have continues to be a point of friction between America and some of its key allies, notably France, Germany and Russia. They have already warned that without UN blessing, a new administration in Baghdad would lack legitimacy. The Bonn conference consecrated Hamid Karzai as the head of the interim administration in Afghanistan. But there are no obvious contenders for the Hamid Karzai of Baghdad.

Contenders:

· Ahmad Chalabi is one of the best-known figures. He leads the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which has been backed by the US and Britain ever since it was created in the aftermath of the last war against Iraq, in 1991. He has the support of the Washington hawks, who believe he is the man to set Iraq on a democratic path. His critics, however, point out that he left Iraq in the 1950s and has been accused of corrupt business dealings. As a (secular) Shia he arouses the mistrust of the Arab world's Sunni ruling class. (more on him below)

· Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, who is from a prominent Iraqi Shia family, runs the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He has supporters in Iraq, but the Iranian connection makes the US, and some Iraqis, wary of him.

· Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister, is an 80-year-old Sunni who has been courted by the Americans and is well connected in the Gulf sheikhdoms. He is a nationalist with a secular liberal outlook. Some see him, because of his age, as a possible caretaker leader.

· Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, the leaders of the two Kurdish factions in northern Iraq, have a firm base among their own people but would be unlikely contenders for national power.

· Nizar Khazraji, a prominent Iraqi general who defected to the West, is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to Saddam. The CIA is reported to have helped him escape to the Gulf from house arrest in Denmark, where prosecutors were investigating his alleged role in gas attacks on the Iraqi Kurds.

In the absence of a candidate with impeccable credentials, the US may try to build up a collective leadership, one which would represent Iraq's mosaic of different communities and command enough confidence to return the country to some sort of normality. But it is not only within Iraq that fierce differences over the post-war future are being played out. In Washington, the State Department and the CIA suspect the Pentagon of actively promoting its protégé ( others say- puppet), Ahmad Chalabi, who was recently flown into southern Iraq by the US military with a group of his followers. He has already gathered 1000 fighters for himself.
They fear that imposing Mr Chalabi would alienate other Iraqis. The White House has tried to damp down the infighting. But the dispute is unresolved.

So, who really is Ahmad Chalabi?

If Ahmed Chalabi had his way, he would at this very moment be on his way to call for a meeting of Iraqi leaders at Nasiriyah, the first step on a royal progress to claim his rightful throne. Alas, things have rarely been straightforward for the best-known contender to be the first president of the gleaming new Iraq that is supposed to rise from the rubble left by America's bombs and the depredations of Saddam Hussein.

In the murk of the battlefield, nothing is murkier than the prospects of Chalabi. For a decade now, ever since he founded the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the most visible and vocal exile Iraqi opposition group, Chalabi has been a divisive figure. Never though has he been as polarizing as now, on the eve of what will be either his greatest triumph or greatest failure.
The divisions say as much about the fissures within the Bush administration as about Chalabi himself. History makes its own rules and so it is that an otherwise unremarkable businessman, who has spent four-fifths of his life outside the country of his birth, is a pivotal figure in a struggle whose outcome will shape events in Iraq and far beyond. Chalabi is the spice of a classic Washington dish, of ambition, personal rivalries and bureaucratic quarrels.

But the crossfire between the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell's State Department masks competing visions of the future of the entire Middle East and Arab world. For the Pentagon and its neo-conservative outriders, Chalabi is the future. For the State Department, he is a charlatan, the repository of extravagant hopes that will end in tears.
Listen to admirers at the Pentagon, in the Vice-President's office and at their various cheerleading think-tanks around town, and he is democracy's truest believer, a noble exile who will be given a hero's welcome by his countrymen.

And then there is the Israel factor. Saddam portrayed himself as the most steadfast supporter of the Palestinians, and referred to Israel only as the "Zionist entity". Chalabi by contrast has made visits to Israel and has addressed the influential Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. No wonder many see him as an instrument of the grand design of Wolfowitz and others, to make Iraq a beacon of democracy for the Arab world, at ease not only with its neighbors but with Israel as well.

At the State Department and the CIA, the take on Chalabi is utterly different that the neo-conservatives' hero has pulled off one of the great con-tricks in modern history. Somehow a snake-oil salesman has persuaded naive idealists such as Wolfowitz that he is the Garibaldi of modern Mesopotamia. The truth is diametrically opposite, contends the CIA. It cites an internal Agency report on the post-Saddam governance of Iraq, which concluded that "overwhelming numbers" of Iraqis were sceptical of Chalabi, a man they perceived as a carpetbagger and puppet of Washington, who lived out Saddam's tyranny in the comfort of exile.

The anti-Chalabi faction points to the anonymous Arab foreign minister who told the Los Angeles Times that "almost no one would be worse either for Iraq or the Arab world", and notes that of the six countries bordering Iraq, four have warned Washington that Chalabi should not be given too much power. Behind his back, his foes have been crueler still. "Spartacus" he was dubbed, for his endless insistence that if the US sent him back to Iraq at the head of a few thousand fighters, Iraqis would rise up and throw off their oppressor. The supposed king in waiting was in reality an emperor with no clothes, a vain and egotistical man whose support was in Washington, not Iraq. The British too are not in his favor.

So who is right who is the real Ahmed Chalabi? The confusion stretches back to the beginning. He was born, depending on which source you consult, in either 1944 or 1945, to a prominent Baghdadi family whose members had held senior government posts almost from the moment the British created the modern Iraq after the First World War. In 1956, he left Iraq for the US, where he attended such blue-chip institutions as MIT and the University of Chicago. Chalabi obtained a doctorate in mathematics, devoting his thesis to the Theory of Knots.

"Whatever else, the guy is smart," says one close observer, less admiring of his ability to create a new Iraq. Later he taught at the American University in Beirut, until the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975 and he moved to Amman where as usual his connections were impeccable. With the help of King Hussein's brother, Crown Prince Hassan, he set up Petra Bank, which became the second largest private bank in Jordan. In 1989, the bank collapsed amid allegations of financial impropriety by Chalabi, who was forced to flee to Syria hidden, it is said, in the boot of a car. By 1992 he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud, and his sentence of 22 years' hard labor stands to this day.

Jordan claims the debacle cost the state $300m. Unsurprisingly, Chalabi sees matters differently, insisting he was framed under pressure from his mortal enemy Saddam whom Jordan, highly dependent on Iraqi oil and Iraqi trade, could not afford to offend. Indeed, Amman was one of Baghdad's few supporters in the 1991 Gulf War. By then, Chalabi had settled in London and had become a British citizen. There he founded the INC, as a non-sectarian organisation open to Kurds, Shias and any other Iraqis who believed in a democratic future for their country. But if London was his base, Washington was where the real power lay and the true anti-Saddam believers were to be found, and the place where his formidable lobbying skills could be wielded with the greatest effect.

Disaster soon struck. In 1995 Chalabi persuaded the Clinton administration that Saddam could be toppled by an uprising in Kurdish northern Iraq, where the INC had already set up shop. But the revolt was a fiasco. The Iraqi army stayed loyal to Saddam, and his 1,000-strong force, bankrolled by the CIA, was swept from the field. So much for the "Spartacus" solution to Iraq's ills. Since then the Agency and the State Department have shunned him even though Chalabi did win passage in Congress of the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act, which made "regime change" official US government policy, and allocated funding for the INC out of the State Department budget. A new administration would bring no let-up in his troubles.
In 2001, a government audit discovered irregularities in the INC's use of the money, some of which had gone for paintings to decorate its Washington office, and on gym subscriptions for its staffers.

But with President Bush's "axis of evil" speech of January 2002, Iraq and Ahmed Chalabi were back at the very top of the White House agenda. By late last year, Saddam's days were plainly numbered, and across the administration planning began for the succession. Barely had the first US missile struck southern Baghdad in the early hours of 20 March than he was back in northern Iraq. Last Sunday, on the express instructions of the Pentagon, Chalabi was ferried to Nasiriyah for his date with destiny. The debate persists, sharper-edged than ever: just who is the real Chalabi?

"He has the potential to be one of the great Arab leaders of the century," Max Singer of the Hudson Institute proclaimed in the neo-conservative National Review last year. For others though, it's the same old Chalabi, "smart but not wise". Another keen student calls him "a chancer, who'd be wonderful fun over dinner, but someone I wouldn't trust further than I could spit backwards". A veteran Middle East specialist remembers the Chalabi of the London years as "rather chubby, immensely affable but at no point did you understand what he really thought". In ruthless but oddly gullible Washington, however, an ability to be all things to all men is often the key to success.

So where will it end? His stock with the Pentagon could not be higher, but Colin Powell, with the possibly decisive backing of Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, seems to have put any intended coronation on ice. Even Rumsfeld acknowledges that Iraq's future is for Iraqis alone to decide, not to be imposed by a candidate pre-anointed by Washington. The confabulations between Iraq's external opposition groups and "free Iraqis" from within will not take place before next week, its prospects not improved by the killing of two prominent Shia clerics in Najaf on Thursday.

At least, for Chalabi, the decades of scheming, cajoling, manoeuvring and dreaming are over. His moment has arrived. The new Iraq is up for grabs, and the controversy that surrounds him captures perfectly the dilemmas and disagreements of those embarking on the mountainous task of building a new Iraq. Chalabi too seems to understand that. "This is not really about me," he told The New York Times a few weeks ago, when war was certain. "This is about whether people think that Arabs are wogs who really don't deserve, and can't handle, democracy."

Can they?