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[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

Hard Man for a Tough Country 
By Paul McGeough 
Sydney Morning Herald 

Saturday 17 July 2004 

His enemies say he was an assassin for Saddam Hussein. Now Iyad Allawi is 
accused of personally executing prisoners. Paul McGeough examines the dark 
background of Iraq's new Prime Minister. 

Hold the doctor up to the light and there are flaws in the glass. We are not 
quite sure how Iyad Allawi became Iraq's interim Prime Minister and no one 
knows just how and why he fell out with Saddam Hussein. It is unclear whether his 
preoccupation with security outweighs a professed love for democracy or what 
that might mean for Iraq's 25 million people. 

His past is murky. His present is ambiguous. Allawi's every response to the 
Iraq mess is that of a hard man: he threatens martial law; he warns he might 
shut down sections of the media; he suggests he might delay elections. His 
Justice Minister is bringing back the death penalty; his Defence Minister warns 
he'll chop off insurgents' hands and heads. 

He was put in - unelected - with a tight constitutional brief to ready Iraq 
for polls in January. But in his first days in control, Allawi seems to have 
crafted a loophole to run more freely with inordinate emergency powers that 
would allow him to take direct command of Iraqi security forces, with the right to 
impose curfews, seize assets, tap and cut telephones, and crack down on 
groups in declared "emergency zones". 

And already he is wriggling out from under the limited US security blueprint 
for Iraq, saying that what the country needs is some of the old Saddam 
institutions of state and what he calls the "clean" from among the old cadres. But he 
is yet to make clear how much of the old Iraq he wants to salvage, as he 
presses ahead with plans for a security regime that reminds some Iraqis of where 
they have been, rather than of the promised land. 

He tells people he's a "tough guy". And friends and enemies alike resort to 
the same page of the thesaurus when they talk about him: "willing to be 
ruthless," says one; "potential for brutality," says another; "muscular law 
enforcement comes naturally to him," concludes a third Iraqi voice. 

There is a strong view among some war-wearied Iraqis that this is just what 
the country needs. 

But piled on a personal history that has too often lurched to the dark side, 
today's graphic witness accounts of summary executions by Allawi at a Baghdad 
police station challenge many assumptions about the man, and about where and 
how he might try to lead his beleaguered nation. 

Surprisingly, few Iraqis professed to be shocked by the allegations. But why 
would Allawi do it? The answer is not so difficult in Iraq. If he could kill 
for Saddam when the former president was on the verge of power, wouldn't it 
come more easily if it would help Allawi cement his own grip on the levers? 

In this part of the world, police forces are bred as instruments of fear. But 
right now, Iraqi police are afraid to take to the streets, not least because 
of tribal retribution if they kill in the line of duty. Eighteen men from the 
Al-Amariyah security complex have been killed in a year - and at least three 
had written warnings that they would be targeted by tribesmen seeking vengeance 
for the loss of one of their own in a clash with police. 

The rationale offered by some is that if the Prime Minister spilt blood 
before their eyes, then the police would know they could kill with impunity. He 
would become a man to be feared and all too quickly the force would impose that 
fear on the community. 

Then there are the Baghdad whispers, invisible but frightening weapons of 
mass intimidation, which Saddam himself used to powerful effect. 

Spreading like wildfire, tales of his conduct and that of his murderous 
agencies set the rules by which people might survive. They were whispered from one 
person to the next, drawing lines within which most people might get on with 
their meagre lives - with a level of immediate personal security they can only 
dream of these days. 

Once the Allawi whispers started a few weeks ago, there were signs that the 
image of the new strongman was already being cultivated. Allawi may have worked 
out that, to succeed, he too must go down the Saddam road, which, in any 
event, seems to be his natural inclination. 

Saddam acted tough and he kept the lights on; Allawi has been talking tough, 
and now he is trying to act tough so that the same troubled Iraqi minds might 
fall in behind him. 

A casual driver retained briefly by the Herald said he had picked up a 
version of the alleged police station killings in the swirl of fixers, translators 
and drivers in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel. 

He was more impressed than he was shocked. 

Elsewhere, a doctor claimed the killings were being discussed "all over 
town". He speculated: "Maybe Allawi wants to be seen like Saddam, because when 
Iraqis hear a rumour like this they presume it is based on fact." 

It was after the first such exchange that the Herald began to investigate - a 
few days before the 67-year-old Saddam made his first court appearance on a 
catalogue of appalling crimes against humanity. 

It took courage for the witnesses to speak. To be too specific about these 
individuals, or the personal channels used to find them, might help identify 
them. But there was no help from military or political organisations, or from 
individuals likely to be bent on spinning a damaging report. 

They were reluctant to speak until they had guarantees of anonymity; one of 
them even insisted that the Herald not reveal the chance element that 
intervened as he was located deep in suburban Baghdad. These men are afraid for their 
lives. 

Their detailed accounts are compelling. In the shark-pool politics of 
post-invasion Iraq, there is always the possibility that parties or people have set 
out to destroy Allawi - but the failure by Iraqi and US officialdom to mount 
convincing denials makes the witness accounts impossible to ignore. 

It took Allawi's office almost a week to issue a denial. At the same time his 
staff and US officials retreated into the argument that these accounts were 
just more of the Baghdad rumours - not substantive allegations that warranted 
any examination. 

Neither witness could be precise on the date of the killings. But in this 
part of the world, events are often recollected in such hazy fashion unless they 
coincide with a significant religious feast or some historic anniversary. 

If confirmed, the allegations have the potential to undermine the latest 
crucial chapter of the Americans' political project in Iraq. 

When the highest-ranking US offficials in Iraq were appraised of the witness 
accounts 10 days ago, there was no outright denial. 

Allawi got to the top from the shadows of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing 
Council, the first and flailing Washington effort to put an Iraqi face on its 
occupation. 

After being away for 33 years, he kept a low profile for the first year after 
the fall of Saddam, seeking out the chairmanship of the council's powerful 
security committee, but reportedly shying away from general meetings of the 
council. 

Despite single-digit popularity among Iraqis, he kept aloof from the Iraqi 
press. Instead, he is said to have spent much time in Jordan and Britain - and 
in the US, where he spent a reported $US300,000($415,000) on New York and 
Washington lobbyists to enhance his image higher up the geopolitical food chain. 

When the United Nations sent Lakhdar Brahimi to Baghdad in the northern 
spring to craft a new interim government, he called for neutral "technocrats and 
professionals" to guide Iraq to its planned January elections. 

But Allawi is a master of backroom political manoeuvring. He had to climb 
over the ferocious ambition of his arch rival, Ahmad Chalabi, and the 
reservations of Brahimi, who vented his frustrations at Allawi's emergence as the winner 
with his sharp denunciation of the departing US administrator, Paul Bremer, as 
the "dictator of Baghdad". 

The new Prime Minister was in league with Saddam in the late '60s and there 
is an assumption that he broke with the tyrant when he went to London in 1971. 
But various reports suggest that he remained on the Baghdad payroll at least 
until 1975. And the idea that the break was about principle is tempered by 
suggestions of a row over a sizeable wad of cash. 

A senior Jordanian official who met the new Prime Minister "dozens of times" 
before the US invasion was always worried about an Allawi ascendancy. He 
explained to the Herald this week: "He made it clear that he was going back to Iraq 
with vengeance; it was never going to be about a beauty of democracy, so much 
as a settling of scores. 

"Think about it: it is the resistance that will be his downfall, so he thinks 
if he kills them, he will prevail." 

Early this year, a vivid article by one of the Prime Minister's former 
medical school classmates, Dr Haifa al-Azawi, published in an Arabic newspaper in 
London, was hardly noticed, despite what it revealed of the Prime Minister's 
character and qualifications. 

Describing Allawi as a "big, husky man", she wrote: "[He] carried a gun on 
his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorising the medical students." And of 
his medical degree, she wrote: "[It] was conferred upon him by the Baath 
party." 

The first unvarnished look at Allawi's past since he was named leader of 
post-Saddam Iraq was by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, in which he quoted an 
unnamed US intelligence officer on the ties between Allawi and Saddam in the 
1960s: "Allawi helped Saddam get to power." 

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East, 
elaborated further: "He was a very effective operator and a true believer. Two 
facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of 
ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he's a thug." 

Hersh also quoted this assessment of Allawi by another former CIA officer, 
Vincent Cannistraro. "If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from 
his days in London, the answer is yes, he does. He was a paid Mukhabarat 
[intelligence] agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." 

An unnamed Middle Eastern diplomat spelt it out a bit more for Hersh, 
claiming that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that ran to ground and 
killed Baath party dissenters throughout Europe. 

In 1978, the brutal world in which Allawi moved came home to him, literally, 
when he was attacked in his London bed in the middle of the night by a man 
brandishing an axe. This was the third attempt on his life and he spent a year in 
hospital, recovering from horrific injuries presumed to have been inflicted 
at the behest of Saddam. 

It was after this attack that Allawi began his long and close associations 
first with the British intelligence agency MI6 and then with the CIA, which 
still helps fund his Iraqi National Accord (INA) organisation. 

In the early 1990s, as Washington and London began to take Iraqi opposition 
groups more seriously after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Allawi set up the INA. 
One of his early organisational associates was Salih Omar Ali al-Tikriti, who 
reportedly had supervised public hangings in Baghdad for Saddam. 

Curiously, Allawi chose not to respond when The New Yorker gave him the 
opportunity early in June. Allawi, of course, has not led a sheltered existence, 
and he is familiar with the role of a free press. He is a Western-educated man 
who has lived in Britain for more than 30 years, in the hurly-burly of a 
vibrant media and legal profession. He retains lawyers and lobbyists on both sides 
of the Atlantic and he and his advisers would have been well aware a damaging 
story was in the making. 

Since The New Yorker published its profile, there has been a raft of more 
troubling claims and assessments of the past and present conduct of the man 
anointed by Washington to nurture a civilised, Western-style democracy in Iraq. 

A group of former CIA agents told The New York Times that in the mid-1990s 
the agency had backed an Allawi campaign of car bombs and other explosive 
devices intended to destabilise Iraq; and a US-backed coup attempt in 1996 ended in 
failure after it was infiltrated by Saddam - apparently after some of the 
plotters had blabbed to The Washington Post. 

Recalling Allawi's bomb-throwing in Saddam's Iraq, Kenneth Pollack, a former 
Iran-Iraq military analyst for the CIA in the early 1990s, remarked of the job 
ahead of Allawi: "You send a thief to catch a thief." 

Kenneth Katzman, an Iraq watcher and terrorism specialist at the 
Congressional Research Service in Washington, detected in Allawi what he called a familiar 
Middle East road map to becoming a strongman. 

Juan Cole, a Middle East historian at the University of Michigan, wrote of a 
stinging assessment of the Prime Minister's leanings: "He is infatuated with 
reviving the Baath secret police, bringing back Saddam's domestic spies. Unlike 
the regular [Iraqi] army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the 
secret police are dirty. If they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter." 


It is hardly surprising that they are pacing in Washington. "He's our kind of 
bully," was one of the first backroom endorsements of the 58-year-old 
neurologist. 

But after only a week of sovereignty, there were also signs of a wind shift 
on the Potomac: "The last thing we want is for the world to think we're 
foisting a new strongman on Iraq," a senior US official told reporters on background 
in Washington last week. 

But having punted on Allawi, Washington is stuck. The Deputy Secretary of 
State, Richard Armitage, sidestepped issues of principle or a need to verify when 
quizzed about the Prime Minister's propensity for abuse in his Baathist past. 
He argued to a Herald reporter, Marian Wilkinson, that Iraqis wouldn't care. 

Without pause, he endorsed the new leader: "This is a fellow I know pretty 
well. We'll see - I don't think [the allegations will] sell particularly with 
Iraqis." 

Falling back on Allawi's more recent opposition to Saddam's regime and the 
attempt on his life in 1978, Armitage remarked: "That's the story that Iraqis 
pay attention to - and if polls that we have all seen are any indication, he and 
his colleagues represent a government that actually can get things done." 

Allawi must secure Iraq. That means breaking the insurgency and the outline 
of his strategy is there - drive a wedge between the nationalist Iraqis, who US 
military analysts in Baghdad now concede are the vast majority among as many 
as 20,000 insurgents, and the small force of foreigners and terrorists who 
have come to Iraq to take a shot at the Americans. 

It's a big gamble. 

Allawi is a secular Shiite, but he is courting the largely Sunni Baathists 
who were disenfranchised by the US-imposed de-Baathification program last year, 
and at the same time offering dignity to former members of Saddam's huge 
military disbanded by the US. 

He hopes to persuade the Sunnis and the Baathists to lay down their arms 
because there is something for them in the new Iraq. To this end he is offering an 
amnesty for those who "don't have blood on their hands". If it works, he 
might be able to isolate some of the foreigners who, without support from the 
Iraqi community, would find it tough to soldier on. 

He pushes his pitch with terse criticism of the US occupation. 

Any Washington wobbles over the alleged Al-Amariyah executions would be a 
useful brake on Iraqi claims that Allawi is a US stooge. In Iraq, such killings 
could be defended on the grounds that the victims were bomb-throwers of no 
account, and Allawi could well argue that he was living by the Colin Powell dictum 
that "Iraqis will have to kill Iraqis". 

But what troubles some observers is that Allawi remains opaque on the terms 
of a deal with the Baathists. It also remains to be seen if he can deal with a 
key Iraqi power bloc that the Americans have not properly understood: the 
tribes. 

His INA was home in exile for many Sunni military and former Baathist 
officials. But in his public criticism of the party and the regime, he is 
disturbingly muted compared with the voice others have found to condemn Iraq's past 30 
years. He has argued that the problem was the individuals more than the 
institutions. 

Allawi reportedly urged the US not to alienate Sunnis with a post-invasion 
purge, insisting that as few as 90 people needed to be removed. He seems to have 
been proved right. There is a consensus among observers that 
de-Baathification and disbanding the military were huge mistakes by the US occupation. 

But how much of the old regime he seeks to reinstate and how the Shiite 
majority will respond is a balancing act that has yet to be performed. Some 
observers worry that showing through all that Allawi says and does is a belief that 
perhaps Iraq is not ready for a Western-style democracy. 

What comes through in his attitude to the past is a sense of the same 
ambiguity that allowed so much of the Iraqi elite - the moneyed, the intelligentsia 
and the officer class - to take their reward under Saddam while seeing little 
to complain about in the system that Saddam built. 

Ghanim Jawad, a human rights campaigner at the Al-Khoei Foundation, a Shiite 
charitable organisation in London, was not impressed when he looked down the 
road to Allawi's Baghdad: "I think [Allawi] will succeed in creating not a 
fully democratic state, but something on the model of Jordan or Egypt." 

But if he could get that far on the back of the military, police and internal 
intelligence complex he wants to build, to what use might he put them once he 
had a semblance of security? 

It sounds like Saddam-Lite in the making; and in it all there's an odour of 
the Arab authoritarianism that the Bush men say they came to eradicate. 

-------

 Jump to TO Features for Sunday July 18, 2004                                 
                        &                                   

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