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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka ęape-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Ozeti

International Herald Tribune

Tuesday, August 24,2004

Two power brokers collide over Iraq’s fate

John F. Burns

Letter from Baghdad

BAGHDAD

In Iraq, of late, it has been a tale of two cities, and of two men of vault-ing ambition, each seeking a path to power in the Iraq that will emerge, some day, from the turmoil that hi fol-lowed the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

In Najaf, Moktada al-Sadr has shown how a portly cleric with a ded-icated militia and an artful grasp of Shiite Street politics can confront American power. In Baghdad, Ayad Allawi, also portly and Shiite, but sec-ular and backed by American tanks, has used his place as Iraq’s interim prirne minister to warn Sadr that the time for his insurrection is running out. Adding to the drama, the two men have joined in conflict over Najaf’s Imam AJi Mosque, the holiest shrine in the 1,300 years sińce the Shiite breakaway that followed the Prophet Muhammad’s death.

As the week ended, the confronta-tion had neither exploded nor sub-sided. There were signs that Sadr was seeking a way to back out, sparing himself and his fighters annihilation,

and saving what he had sought all along — an en-hancement ofhis claim to have de-fended his fellow Shiites’ faith and. pride.

Allawi, com-mitted to ousting Sadr and disarm-ing his Mahdi Army but aware that storming the shrine would be a heinous biot on the reputation of any Shiite politician, seemed also to be reaching for a me-diated solution, an outcome sure to be favored by Allawi’s patrons in Washington, for whom a bloody showdown in Najaf was likely to be still morę un-palatable.

Messy times favor messy Solutions. Even Iraqis who sigh for the brute simplicities of life under Saddam Hussein, as many now do, have not forgotten what he did when he, too, was confronted by an armed occupa-tion of the Imam Ali shrine, during the Shiite uprising that followed the Gulf war in 1991.

Tyrannical as he was, Saddam un-derstood that compromise served him better than soldiers blasting through the shrine’s massive gates and walls. After firing rockets, he whispered that

Chemical weapons might be next, and the rebels fled the mosque. Later, many were carried off to be executed and buried in mass graves.

But while his is hardly the profile of a man with an instinctive feel for the give and take of democracy,

Allawi is wedded to a political blue-print for Iraq that was drawn up under U.S. guidance in the period of forma 1 occupation.

This required, first, the appoint-ment of the provisional government that Allawi now heads; second, the convening of a national conference to appoint a 100-member council to oversee the govemment, review its decrees and cali its ministers to ac-count until a National Assembly can be elected. The Assembly is to draw up a permanent constitution, ratify it and lead the country to a fully elected govemment by January 2006.

While events were moving to a cli-max in Najaf, the conference met in * Baghdad, offering a glimpse of the kind of country this might be if demo-cratic ideals prevaiL The proceedings were chaotic, disrupted by tensions over the battles in Najaf, and were compromised by backroom deals that saw organized blocs, roligious and secular, securing representation on the new council to the exclusion of smaller, independent groups.

Still, it was the most representative gathering held here for at least 40 years, its members elected in caucuses from every comer of the country. Its very clamor proved how eager Iraqis are, after decades of repression, to have a voice in remaking their country.

Just getting 1,100 delegates to Baghdad for the conference, and keeping them safe for the four days of the gathering, was a triumph of sorts for Allawi’s govemment and its American patrons, considering the shooting gallery that much of the country —

and Baghdad itself — have become in recent months. But throwing a cordon of concrete and Steel around a conference hall is a far cry^ logistically and politically, from the next steps in the constitutional blueprint, the three rounds of national elections sched-uled for next year.

The first, by Jan. 31, will choose the assembly that will appoint a new tran-sitional govemment, and draw up the new constitution. In all this, Allawi and Sadr, and the poles they represent in the march to a new Iraq, seem likely to find themselves opponents once again, whatever the outcome of the immediate confrontation in Najaf.

One U.S. official took the optimistic view: that the debate in Baghdad and the battle in Najaf were two sides of the same coin, Iraqis struggling to make their weight felt The task for those who want a democratic Iraq, he said, was to draw the men with guns — Sadr’s and the insurgents who have tumed the Sunni heartland into a war zonę — into the political arena. He cited approvingly a conference dele-gate who had said that all Iraqis, insurgents included, were seeking the same end.

It was this perception that seemed to have inspired the peace proposal put to Sadr’s representatives by the political and religious figures who flew to Najaf on behalf of the conference. In return for disbanding the Mahdi Army and vacating the shrine, they offered an amnesty for his fighters, and an opening for Sadr to partic-ipate in the political process “in any way he may choose."

Allawi, too hard-headed to have thought it likely, put the same propos-ition in his ultimatum to Sadr, telling him that his choice was to be forced from the shrine in battle, or to disarm his militia and contest elections.

Najaf represents as crucial a juncture as the U.S. has faced in lraq.

In the end, this seemed to have been morę an American than an Iraqi idea. Indeed, most Iraqis seemed to think it chimerical that any of the men who have cast Iraq into the convulsions of war, in the name of Islam or of Saddam Hussein or of wounded Iraqi pride, could be persuaded, by force of argument or arms, to abandon their arms now and take to the hustings.

If there has been one message writ-ten in all that the insurgents have done, whether Sunnis or Shiites, these Iraqis say, it is a rejection of the very idea that Iraq’s futurę can be chosen under a U.S. military umbrella — morę broadly, of the idea that America and its notions should have any place in reshaping Iraq at all.

When they were done with their spinning, senior Western officials who briefed reporters on the develop-ments in Najaf seemed to agree. Najaf, an official said bluntly, represented as crucial a juncture as America has faced in Iraq, one from which Iraq could proceed, with the emasculation of Sadr’s rebellion, to a new period in which Iraqi politicians, not gunmen, could begin to set the country’s agenda; or, conversely, if the govem-ment became resigned to leaving Sadr’s militia still rooted in the city, to a further slide into chaos.

In that case, he said, what would be left would not be a country with an ac-

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