BY NORM DIXON
A carefully choreographed meeting of the "Iraqi opposition" was held in Washington on August 9 and 10. Attending were leaders from six right-wing groups opposed to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The US government is seeking to rehabilitate the groups dismissed by many, even by some US officials, as a gang of puppets, traitors and spivs to front a military-dominated post-Saddam regime.
Present at the meeting were high-ranking leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a CIA-backed group of former military officers known as the Iraqi National Accord (INA), the Iran-backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement.
The groups gathered at Washington's behest to convince skeptics that the discredited, fractured and feuding "opposition" had suddenly united and was ready to govern. Afterwards, they pledged to work together and seek "broader" allies to overthrow Hussein. They vowed that a post-Hussein government would be "democratic" and would defend Iraq's "territorial integrity".
Motley bunch
This motley bunch of unlikely "liberators" has more experience stabbing each other in the back than fighting Hussein's dictatorship.
The INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, was formed in Vienna in 1992. For many years, it was central to US-sponsored schemes to overthrow Hussein. At first, most major Iraqi opposition groups were represented on the INC's executive committee.
Until 1996, the heavily CIA-backed INC was based in Erbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. A "Kurdistan Regional Government-Iraq" was created in 1992, beneath the US-enforced northern "no-fly" zone. The KDP and PUK agreed to a 50-50 power-sharing deal.
In 1994, a squabble between the Kurdish factions over lucrative "custom duties" on oil smuggled across the Turkish border degenerated into a bloody civil war. The PUK seized Erbil with the aid of 5000 Iranian troops.
In September 1996, KDP leader Masoud Barzani called on the Iraqi army to help. Hundreds of Iraqi tanks, artillery and thousands of Iraqi troops stormed Erbil and handed control to the KDP. The Iraqi army took the opportunity to crush the INC as well. From that time on, the INC ceased to have a political or military presence within Iraq.
In the years that followed, the INC now based in up-market Kensington in London became little more than a high-living rump. The US State Department and the CIA grew weary of the INC's ineffectiveness and corruption, shifting its attention to the INA and former Iraqi military figures claiming to have contacts within the army hierarchy and the Sunni elite.
In 1999, the Clinton administration in a effort to appease the Republicans began to disperse US$97 million earmarked by Congress in 1997 for the INC.
In January, the State Department suspended its funding for the INC because of "accounting problems", including the disappearance of almost $600,000. In July, the stalemate was broken when the US defence department agreed to take over the funding of the INC.
Since 2001, the groups with real forces inside Iraq the KDP, PUK and the SCIRI have pulled out or remained members in name only.
SCIRI leader Hamid al Bayati, whose group is propped up by Tehran and is fighting for an Iran-style Islamic state, told the June 2 Washington Post that the "Group of Four", as the informal grouping is called, represents the "core" resistance against the Iraqi dictatorship. The INC, he added, "is not an Iraqi opposition force, it's an employee of the Americans".
For about a year, encouraged by the State Department and CIA, the KDP, PUK, SCIRI and the INA have been meeting in London separately from the INC.
Washington's Kurdish collaborators are led by corrupt warlords who have few qualms about collaborating with the anti-Kurdish regimes of Turkey and Iran and even Hussein's Iraq for short-term gains.
On many occasions the KDP fought side-by-side with invading Turkish troops to hunt down the fighters of the left-wing, pro-independence Kurdistan Workers Party. The PUK has had close links with Tehran. Both parties oppose the creation of a united independent Kurdistan.
Since a 1997 agreement brokered by Washington, Iraqi Kurdistan home to almost four million people and 30% of Iraq's population has been partitioned into separately administered enclaves: one controlled by the KDP around Erbil and another ruled by the PUK from Sulaymaniyah.
'Stability'
The August 9-10 Washington meeting came as sections of the US ruling elite, as well as most European and Middle Eastern governments, demand evidence that, should a US invasion succeed in toppling Hussein's regime, a viable alternative leadership would quickly take control and "stabilise" the country.
There is concern within the US ruling class that tens of thousands of US troops may have to occupy Iraq for as long as 10 years if a viable government cannot be installed. Apart from the expense of such a massive occupation, US troops may be drawn into a bloody Vietnam-like guerrilla war, not just against the Sunni Arab population in central Iraq that is Hussein's support base, but also against Kurds seeking independence in the north and Shiite Arabs seeking autonomy or independence in the south.
In such a scenario, the American public is likely to turn against the occupation, forcing Washington to withdraw troops before Iraq could be "pacified". European governments and some in Washington especially within the State Department and the CIA fear that Hussein's Iraq could end up being replaced by two or even three new "rogue states".
Turkey, Syria and Iran oppose an independent or genuinely autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq because it would incite similar demands by their Kurdish minorities. The ruling classes in the Arab states are terrified at the prospect of a Shiite statelet in southern Iraq or worse, a democratic Iraq ruled by the country's Shiite majority because it could become an ally of Iran. The US shares these concerns.
The August 9-10 meeting which was jointly convened by the State Department's Marc Grossman and the Pentagon's Douglas Feith was also a public show of unity within the US ruling elite, which has long been divided over which Iraqi opposition group to favour.
While the State Department and CIA have attempted to marginalise the INC, and were largely successful during the Clinton administration, Chalabi and the INC continued to be championed by the Republican right, including vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Chalabi is still the most likely candidate to become Iraq's "Hamid Karzai".
Consensus
Prior to the meeting with memories of US betrayals in 1975 and 1991 fresh in their minds the Kurdish factions had said they wanted a promise of US military protection if Iraq preemptively attacked the north or if the US invasion falters. There was also no offer of US military training or arms for the opposition groups.
The Kurds and the INC had said they would be seeking an assurance that Washington would not replace Hussein with another military dictator. The INC had also hoped that the US would recognise the six groups as the "interim government" of Iraq.
However, the US did not offer the factions any of the promises or assurances they sought.
This reflects the renewed consensus within the US government that a post-Hussein regime must have as its backbone sections of the Iraqi military leadership that break with Hussein before or during the planned US military invasion. The INC and other groups would provide "civilian" and "multi-ethnic" cover for a pro-US, military-dominated regime.
US government officials stressed that the "talks" which lasted two hours on August 9 and just 90 minutes on August 10, with most time being devoted to appearances by Rumsfeld, Cheney, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were only "an initial step" in uniting a "broader" front of opposition groups.
It was announced that "a larger, broader-based political conference" will be held in Europe soon, from which a US-recognised provisional government may be announced.
The US has been cultivating exiled Iraqi military defectors who could participate in a post-Hussein regime. Late last year, US officials also met with an outfit known as the Iraqi Free Officers Movement, led by General Najib Salhi.
The May 13 Washington Post reported that in February, US officials met with leaders of the Iraqi National Movement (INM), a group that claims support among Sunni Arabs in Iraq's central provinces. The State Department agreed to pay the group more than $1 million a year.
On May 30, representatives of the INA, INM and the Free Officers gathered in Washington for a two-day seminar on "Prospects for Democratic Change in Iraq".
In July, 50 former Iraqi military officers and INC leaders met in London. The meeting elected a military council headed by former general Tawfiq al Yassiri and included ex-officers guilty of human rights abuses and massacres of Kurds and other opponents of Baathist Party rule in Iraq.
One notable absence was Nizar al Khazraji, chief of staff of Iraq's armed forces between 1980 and 1991 and now living in exile in Denmark. According to a report in the March 11 Boston Globe, Khazraji is the CIA's favoured military strongman to replace Hussein.
Khazraji was unable to leave Denmark because he is under investigation for ordering poison gas attacks against Iraq's Kurdish minority and Iranian soldiers between 1983 and 1988, culminating in the horrific 1988 gassing of 5000 people in the Kurdish town of Halabja.
Representatives who attended the August 9-10 meeting seem to have meekly accepted their US-assigned role as fig leaf for a pro-US military regime.
According to the August 10 Washington Post: "The Iraqis assured the Americans that their next step is to build ties among a wider array of Hussein's enemies ... They also intend to send delegations to Iraq's neighbors to build credibility and ease worries about their intentions."
From Green Left Weekly, August 21, 2002.
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