ALLAWI'S BAD LUCK:

A Big Man To Watch In Baghdad (David Ignatius, February 1, 2004, Washington Post)

As Ayad Allawi recounts the story of how he was nearly hacked to death by Saddam Hussein's agents 26 years ago, he slips out of his earnest role as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and into a narrative of flickering images and half-heard noises. Listen to his account and you begin to understand why the struggle to create a new Iraq is so brutal and frustrating. [...]

Allawi was part of the Shiite merchant class. With their links to the bazaars of Persia, the prominent Shiite families were often far wealthier and more cultivated than the Sunnis. Like his relative Ahmed Chalabi, another prominent Shiite opposition leader, Allawi was a secular man who wanted to build a modern country.

Allawi's apostasy began after he left Baghdad in 1971 and made his way to London to continue his medical studies. He resigned from the Baath Party in 1975, but Saddam initially tried to coax him back with a combination of threats and bribes. When these blandishments failed, friends told Allawi in January 1978 that his name had been placed on a "liquidation list."

Saddam's henchmen were right to be worried. "At that time," Allawi says, "I was in contact with high-ranking Baath officials and military officers who shared my view that Saddam had hijacked the party."

Before he left the hospital in Wales in 1979, Allawi had already begun organizing a network that he hoped would someday destroy Saddam, who had seized power from other Baathists in a coup that year. He continued his efforts through the 1980s, traveling as a businessman in the Middle East and meeting with Iraqis who might join his opposition network. [...]

Allawi arrived in Baghdad soon after the U.S. Army. He joined the interim Governing Council that was appointed by the U.S. occupation chief, L. Paul Bremer, and was named to its nine-member "presidential committee." For two decades, Allawi had argued that a stable post-Saddam Iraq could only be built on the foundations of the modern state the Baathists had created, including the army, police, and secular courts. And Allawi says he warned U.S. officials in May that they would make a terrible mistake if they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of using it to maintain order and begin a process of national reconciliation.

But Bremer rejected that advice, probably his biggest mistake. The army, like other institutions, was swept away over Allawi's protests in a surge of de-Baathification. [...]

The council's regular Wednesday meetings with Bremer also went badly. The Iraqis felt they were being treated as a rubber stamp for whatever the Americans decided to do. Bremer listened, but in the end he did what he wanted. Through all the bickering, Allawi focused on running the council's security committee, which was responsible for building up a new Iraqi army, a civil defense force, police and an intelligence service. These security issues are probably the most crucial task of the occupation, and it's too soon to judge whether Allawi will succeed.

It has been Allawi's bad luck to be disparaged by almost everyone: by opposition leaders as an ex-Baathist; by ordinary Iraqis as a CIA man or an exile; by the Americans as a critic of Bremer's tactics; by religious leaders as too secular. And yet, there's a power to his arguments about how to keep the country from falling apart.

Of all the mistakes we may have made, the belief that we had to thoroughly de-Ba'athify is the hardest to fault. Indeed, if anything, we should probably have been prepared to handle past beneficiaries of Ba'athist rule (mostly the Sunni) more harshly.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2004 8:26 PM