KILLING TOO FEW:

A MAN OF THE SHADOWS: Can Iyad Allawi hold Iraq together? (JON LEE ANDERSON, 2005-01-17, The New Yorker)

Allawi will preside over the first national elections in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s removal; the elections are scheduled to take place on January 30th. Allawi himself is running for a seat in the Transitional National Assembly, which will have two hundred and seventy-five members. This body will write a new constitution and select a new Prime Minister. Although Allawi has portrayed the elections as a victory for democracy in Iraq, events in recent weeks have not been auspicious. On December 27th, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Iraqi Sunni political party, pulled out of the elections, citing security concerns; the same day, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the home of Abdulaziz al-Hakim, one of the country’s most prominent Shiite leaders, killing fifteen. On January 11th, Allawi admitted in a news conference that “there will be some pockets” of Iraq where violence will prevent people from voting.

The elections were meant to solidify a spirit of Iraqi national unity, but the upcoming vote has only increased the tensions among the country’s ethnic groups. The removal of Saddam abruptly disempowered Iraq’s Sunni minority, which had ruled Iraq for nearly five centuries. The resulting Sunni hostility toward American occupation forces—and their fears of being subjugated by Iraq’s Shiite majority—has inflamed the insurgency. Many Sunnis fear that Shiite parties will win the elections and install an Islamic theocracy closely linked to Iran’s. Some Sunni leaders have called for a boycott of the elections.

I asked Allawi whether he was worried that the elections might lead to more violence. If there was a weak Sunni turnout and the Shiites swept the polls, could this deepen the sectarian split in the country and inspire an all-out civil war? Allawi seemed to choose his words carefully, in order to avoid using the word “Sunni.” He replied, “I may be wrong, of course, but I don’t believe that the ingredients for civil war really exist in Iraq. There are people who are trying to foment religious and ethnic problems in Iraq. The problem of the election is not security; it’s the inclusivity. There are those who are trying to prevent this, by telling people not to vote, by attacking and committing crimes. I have been trying to insure inclusivity by talking to people, even on the fringes of the so-called resistance—tribal leaders from Al Anbar, from Mosul, Shias also, and Kurds.” (Iraq’s minority Kurdish population, concentrated in the north of the country, had flirted with the idea of pursuing independence.)

Allawi told me that he had met with former members of Saddam’s Baath Party. (Allawi began his own career as a Baathist in the nineteen-fifties, when he was young, long before Saddam’s rise to power, at a time when Baathism represented anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism.) “I ask these former Baathists, what is it you want to achieve—to bring Saddam back, to get the multinational forces out of Iraq? If it’s to bring Saddam back to power, forget it—khalas—he’s finished. He ended like a rat, hiding in a hole in the ground. This is not respectable. Or if you want to bring bin Laden or someone like him to Iraq, we’ll fight you room to room. We won’t accept this, ever. If you want to get the multinational forces out, then join the elections. Use your vote to get them out.” [...]

Allawi was anointed Iraq’s leader in June, in a formal ceremony with Paul Bremer III, the outgoing administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Since Allawi took office, Iraq has become unmoored by violence, and his efforts to restore security have been the central obsession of his leadership. “I want to see consolidated the rule of law,” he said after we went back outside. “I want to see Iraq unified and strong.” One of his first decisions was to announce a state of emergency, and, in the early weeks of his tenure, Allawi took pains to show that he was a man of decision and courage, habitually rushing—some would say recklessly—to the scenes of car-bomb explosions around Baghdad just after they had occurred. He used these occasions to denounce terrorism and defend the rule of law. (His security advisers eventually dissuaded him from this activity.)

More unnervingly, there have been persistent rumors that, a week or so before he took office, Allawi shot and killed several terrorist suspects being held prisoner at a Baghdad police station. When reporters asked him about the rumors, Allawi denied that he had shot anyone, but added that he would do “everything necessary” to protect Iraqis. I was in Baghdad at the time; although most Iraqis I spoke to believed the rumors, journalists and diplomats speculated that Allawi had spread them himself, in order to bolster his stern reputation.

In late June, however, I sat in on an interview, conducted by Paul McGeough, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, of a man who claimed to have witnessed the executions. He described how Allawi had been taken to seven suspects, who were made to stand against a wall in a courtyard of the police station, their faces covered. After being told of their alleged crimes by a police official, Allawi had asked for a pistol, and then shot each prisoner in the head. Afterward, the witness said, Allawi had declared to those present, “This is how we must deal with the terrorists.” The witness said that he approved of Allawi’s act, adding that, in any case, the terrorists were better off dead, for they had been tortured for days.

In the ensuing months, the story has lingered, never having been either fully confirmed or convincingly denied. (Allawi did not address the incident with me.) During my visit to Jordan, a well-known former government minister told me that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place, saying to him, “What a mess we’re in—we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another.”

Just as, in the past, Iraqis hid their true feelings about Saddam’s brutal tyranny by referring to him as “strict,” Iraqis today commonly describe Allawi as “tough.” It is an oddly polite term—a euphemism—that conceals varying degrees of fear, loathing, and admiration. An Iraqi friend of Allawi’s who has close links to Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy told me, “Iyad’s a thug, but a thug where he needs to be one. The Americans who set this up call him Saddam Lite.” Another old friend of Allawi’s, an Iraqi who now lives in Jordan, told me that, during a recent private reunion, Allawi had said that he was shocked, upon returning to Iraq after thirty years in exile, by the degree to which Saddam’s rule had debased Iraqi society. “He said Iraqis had become liars and cheats and murderers, and only respected brute force, and that was how he had to deal with them,” the friend recalled. In a fit of emotion, Allawi had exclaimed, “I will use brute force!”—three times, as if uttering a vow, punching one fist into the palm of his other hand.

Allawi has a temper, although he tries hard to conceal it. During the crisis in August in Najaf, he appeared in public with a bandaged hand, and there were rumors that he had smashed his fist in a bout of fury, during a critical moment of the standoff. At one point, I asked him about this story, and he laughed and acknowledged sheepishly that it was true—though he wouldn’t divulge the precise cause of the incident. “As we were facing the crisis, I was not getting a lot of information—just some to please me, some that was not accurate,” he said. “The information I received was wishful thinking rather than the reality. And that’s when I hit the table very hard and . . . I broke the hand, a bone in the wrist and another in the hand”—he showed me the fleshy part of his palm—“in two places.” He poked at it with his other hand. “But that is water under the bridge.” He looked up, and added, “You know, we are emotional people, and we believe in right and wrong.”

Allawi’s strongman persona has proved politically useful, helping him foster the illusion that he is protecting Iraqi “sovereignty”—even though Iraq is still an occupied country and its security remains a largely American project. In August, Allawi tried to negotiate an end to the uprising in Najaf, which was led by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. When talks broke down, however, two thousand U.S. Marines and eighteen hundred Iraqi troops invaded, killing some two thousand insurgents and hundreds of civilians before a deal was finally brokered. Allawi had issued the formal order for the attack, and helicoptered into Najaf during the fighting, but the U.S. had been in charge.

One of his top priorities, Allawi told me, was the creation of a well-trained, well-equipped Iraqi Army large enough to replace U.S. troops, and he has set up a national directorate for domestic security and a police agency dedicated to counterterrorism. Still, a senior American official who has worked closely with him told me, “Allawi is tremendously frustrated that he doesn’t have a better military. He’s like a gardener without a trowel. We’re still building the factory to make the trowel.”

Time to get to weeding.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2005 10:29 AM