Analysis
Allawi more endangered than ever

By Bloomberg;John F. Burns
The New York Times

MARCO DI LAURO / AP Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Dr. Ayad Allawi is seen outside a meeting with local officials in the city of Basra in southern Iraq on Sept. 12. Allawi attended a meeting with local officials in Basra and Umm Qasr as insurgents attacked Baghdad, leaving at least 25 people dead.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Dr. Ayad Allawi will have his right wrist in a cast when he arrives in the United States this week for his first visit as Iraq's interim prime minister, and it will provide the 59-year-old neurosurgeon with a powerful talking point.

Asked about the wrist in an interview here as he prepared to leave for London, New York and Washington, Allawi joshed: "I've been shooting people, didn't you know?"

Shortly after he took office in June, stories circulated of Allawi visiting a detention center in the Baghdad suburb and shooting several detained insurgents dead. The story quickly faded, with U.S. officials saying they had no information to confirm it, and Allawi dismissing it as a "ridiculous" fiction. But a curious thing happened: Many Iraqis who heard the story told friends they would not be unhappy if it were true, because it would show that Iraq finally had a strongman at its helm again, one who might restore order.

In the interview on Thursday at his heavily guarded residence in the Green Zone compound in Baghdad, Allawi went on to give another explanation. What really happened, he said, was that he lost his temper at his Iraqi aides and pounded the table so hard that a bone snapped. "I was angry," he said.

The issue, aides said later, was that Iraqi government spokesmen had reported that a man arrested by U.S. and Iraqi troops in Tikrit was Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the second-in-command for Saddam Hussein, but a DNA test proved them wrong. An embarrassed Allawi seems to have concluded that he had been made to look less like a square-jawed sheriff than a bungler.

Allawi's trip will take him to London today to meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then to New York to address the U.N. General Assembly. He will address Congress on Thursday and meet afterward with President Bush. As he makes his first trip to the U.S. as America's chief partner in Iraq, Allawi finds himself at a tipping point.

Twelve weeks after Americans transferred sovereignty to Iraqis, he is more endangered than ever. If Allawi was popular among moderate Iraqis in the first weeks after his interim government took over in June, it is plain now that his grace period has expired.

In the suicide bombings and attacks on U.S. military vehicles in the last week in Baghdad, at least 75 Iraqi civilians, policemen and police recruits were killed. One constant was the fury that survivors turned on the Allawi government, accused of being the creation of the U.S. troops who brought miseries to Iraq, and of failing so far to stem the growing violence.

Visiting Allawi at his sprawling residence is a short course in just how bad the situation has become for anybody associated with the U.S. purpose in Iraq. To reach the house is to navigate an obstacle course of checkpoints, with Iraqi police cars and Humvees parked athwart a zigzag course of concrete barriers.
 
An hour or more is taken up with body searches and sniffing by dogs, while U.S. soldiers man turreted machine guns. A boxlike infrared imaging device can detect the body heat of anybody approaching through a neighboring playground. The final security ring is manned by CIA-trained guards from Iraqi Kurdistan.

This is the man who has been chosen to lead Iraq to the haven of a democratic future, but he is sealed off about as completely as he could be from ordinary Iraqis, in the virtual certainty that insurgents will kill him if they ever get a clear shot.

Even his opponents would not contest that Allawi is brave. He flies aboard American helicopters to the most dangerous cities in Iraq: Najaf, last month, at the height of the insurrection there; Samarra, more recently, to negotiate with tribal chiefs.

The U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has said he finds it hard to see how an election could be held under current conditions, but Allawi, in the interview, said he remains unwaveringly committed to the January vote. So are U.S. officials.

The immutable fact, acknowledged by all, is that much blood will have to be spilled in U.S.-led offensives if any election is to be possible. The plan that U.S. commanders and Allawi have laid out is to regain control of predominantly Sunni Muslim cities — Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba, among others — and to do so with Iraq's newly retrained security forces spearheading the assault.

Simultaneously, they aim to root out the potential for recurrent uprisings in the Shiite population centers that lurks in the shape of the Mahdi Army of the rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

In post-occupation Iraq, the Americans now advising Allawi have begun speaking not of insisting on a Jeffersonian democracy, but of creating a "working democracy" that excludes rabble-rousers like al-Sadr, of building Iraqi forces to help crush the cleric and other enemies, and of getting out.

For these purposes, Allawi is considered a safe pair of hands. His favorite undertaking is to travel with American commanders to review the new Iraqi battalions that will soon be asked to march into the rebels' guns and to exult in what they, together with U.S. soldiers, may accomplish.

In recent days, Allawi toured a base near the Baghdad airport with Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. officer now charged with righting the mess that had been made of training Iraq's new fighting units, many of which mutinied or disintegrated the moment they were asked to go up against rebels in the spring battles at Fallujah and Najaf.

U.S. officers concede that the true mettle of the thousands of Iraqis now pouring out of the training camps will not be known until they are asked to fight for real. But Allawi, watching recruits attacking mock terrorist safe houses and staging helicopter-borne assaults, could hardly contain his enthusiasm. As smoke cleared from a mock attack, he turned to his new security adviser, Qassim Daoud, and asked, "Qassim, why do you keep telling me we don't have anything?"

Details about Allawi's visit to the U.S. were provided by The Associated Press.

Saddam trial

Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and 11 other members of his regime will face trial beginning next month, Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told ABC News.

"It's going to be a very transparent and very just trial," Allawi said, according to a transcript of the interview released yesterday. The interview is to be aired today on "This Week."

Allawi said the trial would open "definitely in October," and Saddam might appear in November or December.