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Bin Laden's number two warns US the fight will go on
DOHA (AFP) - Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri warned in his second video appearance in a year that his Al-Qaeda terror network would go on with its fight against the United States.
And he told Arab and Muslim nations that they could face the same fate as Saddam Hussein's Iraq if they renounced holy war, taking to task in particular the governments in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and his home country Egypt.
"I have a final piece of advice for America ... you must choose between two ways of behaving towards Muslims: either you deal with them on the basis of respect and mutual interest or you treat them as easy prey," he said in an extract of the video shown by Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera.
"But you must know that we are a nation of patience and perseverance ... We will persevere with our fight against you until the end of time," said the number two of the Al-Qaeda terror network.
The tape was apparently recorded before the November US election won by incumbent George W. Bush over his Democrat challenger John Kerry, as Zawahiri told Americans to "elect who you like -- Bush, Kerry or the devil himself."
"The two candidates are in competition to satisfy Israel," he said, also highlighting the continuation of the "crime against Palestine for 87 years" an apparent reference to the Balfour Declaration when Britain publicly favoured making Palestine a homeland for Jews.
But in the extracts shown by Al-Jazeera, Zawahiri said: "The results of the election don't concern us. What matters to us is the way the United States behaves towards Muslims."
"What matters to us is to rid our countries of the aggressors, to confront those who attack us, who violate what we hold sacred, or steal our riches."
He said the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 after the US-led war could be repeated in other nations "which renounced holy war and helped in the invasion of Iraq."
The last time Zawahiri was seen was in a video shown on Al-Jazeera just two days before the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks of 2001, in which he forecast a US defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Washington believes Zawahiri, who faces a death sentence in Egypt and like bin Laden has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, is the main strategist and key ideologist in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy.
In an audiotape message aired on October 1, also on the Doha-based Al-Jazeera, Zawahiri called on young Muslims to resist the "crusader campaign" and threatened the interests of several Western and Asian countries.
In Monday's tape, Zawahiri lashed out at the authorities in bin Laden's birthplace Saudi Arabia for having "introduced the crusaders (and) for allowing US planes to bombard Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan from its air bases," according to Al-Jazeera.
He also denounced the absence of an independent judiciary and a representative political system in Saudi Arabia, a strictly conservative Muslim kingdom.
Turning to Egypt, he criticized the human rights situation and the way the government regards the "Palestinian resistance," while Pakistan came under fire for "recognizing Israel" and helping Americans "kill Muslims in Afghanistan and Waziristan," on the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Since the September 11 attacks, Zawahiri has surfaced occasionally in taped audio or video messages calling for more strikes on the United States.
The United States tends to examine such tapes closely for hidden messages amid suspicions that Al-Qaeda communicates secretly about operations to its followers through them.
The former leader of Egypt's fundamentalist Jihad group, implicated in the 1981 assassination of president Anwar Sadat and the massacre of foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997, Zawahiri has appeared in several videos at Bin Laden's side.
He is listed on the US government's indictment for the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and he was sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court a year later.
Bin Laden himself last appeared in a video broadcast in late October, shortly before in the US presidential election threatening new September 11-like attacks.
Zawahiri, an eye surgeon by training from a wealthy Egyptian family, has come to symbolize the radical Islamist movement.
November 30, 2004 at 01:08 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Washingtonpost.com: Iraq Report
By R. Jeffrey Smith and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 15, 1996; Page A01
Iraqis interested in toppling their country's president have for several years made their way to a compound of four houses on a hill in the city of Salahuddin, in Kurdish northern Iraq, where a small team of American CIA officers has been helping to implement a classified 1991 U.S. presidential order to oust Saddam Hussein.
Hands outstretched, dissident Kurds and other Iraqis there and elsewhere asked for and received tens of millions of dollars in CIA funds. They spent the money on light arms and ammunition, communications gear, publishing materials, broadcasting equipment, cars and trucks, food and medicine -- all items they said they needed to harass Saddam, foment a revolution or plot a palace coup.
Egged on by lawmakers and policy officials, the CIA's leadership found it hard to say no to anyone who asked for U.S. assistance to oppose Saddam. Dissidents set off some bombs, recruited defectors, fought a brief military battle with Iraqi troops in March 1995 and took hundreds of Iraqi army prisoners, not at the CIA's explicit direction, but with its strong encouragement and financial support.
After spending around $100 million, or an average of about $20 million a year since 1991, on the anti-Saddam campaign, however, the U.S. spy agency today has strikingly little to show for its effort, according to administration, congressional and Iraqi dissident sources.
A military sweep across northern Iraq in the past two weeks by Kurdish forces backed by Baghdad has left the major CIA effort in the Kurdish region in tatters. For years the two principal Kurdish separatist groups drew support from the CIA, but last month one of them abruptly switched sides, allied with Saddam and drove the other eastward. As a result, many members and sympathizers of a CIA-supported umbrella organization in the area have been captured, killed or surrounded by military forces loyal to Saddam.
A string of other, mostly non-Kurdish dissident groups and individuals financially sustained by the CIA has also failed to seriously harm Saddam, although their attempts to oust him have provoked the Iraqi leader to take increasingly draconian security precautions and conduct periodic purges of his military leadership. As the Defense Intelligence Agency said in a recently declassified report to Congress, "Saddam's departure from the Iraqi political scene does not appear imminent."
With the recent emergence of new details of the CIA's failed campaign to oust Saddam, questions are being asked on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about the wisdom of the covert effort, about the skill of those who managed the program, and about the reliability of the dissidents the CIA funded. Did the CIA repeatedly place its bets on the wrong individuals in Iraq? Was there ever any hope of success? Or did the agency do the best it could in a country with a chronically divided opposition and an exceptionally brutal and efficient security force?
The picture that emerges from an investigation by The Washington Post is of a covert program born in the intense U.S. anger over Saddam's actions at the time of the Persian Gulf War. The effort was propelled by a widespread U.S. and allied conviction that Washington should try any means at its disposal to eliminate Saddam as a strategic threat, short of an all-out military effort like that used by the CIA to help expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
As one intelligence official said, covert action was potentially the "10 percent" solution. It was meant to complement, but not be a substitute for, the public U.S. and allied campaign to contain Iraq through a military buildup in the region, air patrols over much of its territory, economic embargoes, United Nations weapons inspections, and diplomatic isolation, a campaign that the official said had amounted to around 90 percent of the overall U.S. effort.
Although no U.S. order was given to any Iraqi dissident to kill Saddam, the CIA provided funds to groups that it knew were attempting to do so. When the covert program was expanded early this year, the agency was even authorized by the White House to support acts of sabotage inside Iraq that would create an image of a country descending into chaos; it is unclear, however, whether any of these CIA-supported acts were carried out.
From the outset, Washington had no idea who might replace Saddam if the program succeeded, and proceeded on faith that no one else could pose as great a threat to U.S. interests. However, U.S. officials fretted anxiously -- along with Saudi Arabian, Jordanian, and Turkish officials who were kept informed about the effort -- that if Saddam's replacement did not hold the country together, neighboring Iran would effectively grab a chunk of Iraqi territory and gain new regional influence.
The program's recent expansion partly reflected Washington's growing impatience with Saddam, as well as a CIA estimate that he had suddenly become more vulnerable. As a result, Washington threw its weight behind a Jordanian-based group of former Iraqi military officers and government officials that claimed it could engineer an abrupt coup. But the group, called the Iraqi National Accord, was penetrated by Saddam's security agents, and last summer the Iraqi government arrested and likely executed as many as 100 people suspected of involvement with it.
In the end, the longer-running CIA effort in northern Iraq was undermined by persistent infighting among the Kurdish groups that controlled the area. It was the unforeseen alliance between Saddam and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), a group that had benefited at least indirectly from CIA funding, that enabled Iraqi forces to move northward and forced the CIA team to flee the country on Aug. 28.
Some U.S. intelligence officials now say that Saddam may still be slain by someone able to penetrate his praetorian guard. But if so, they add, the plot will likely unfold without CIA help. As one official involved in the effort said, "There are two great realities that govern here. First, if we know about it, Saddam does [due to the intensity of his security precautions]. Second, if someone comes to us needing help [to mount a coup], they are probably incapable of pulling it off" successfully.
The official explained that the CIA came to believe that there is little it could do to "tip the balance" and ensure such a result.
The long-standing skepticism and wariness of some CIA officers about taking on Saddam is summarized in a banner strung by the head of the agency's operations group for Iraq on a doorpost at the group's offices in CIA headquarters in Langley. It is a quotation from a letter written by Winston Churchill in 1921 to the British prime minister after Churchill was appointed to head the colonial office, with jurisdiction over the Middle East, and refers to Iraq by its ancient name of Mesopotamia.
"I feel some misgivings," Churchill wrote and the banner repeats, "about the political consequences to myself of taking on my shoulders the burden and odium of the Mesopotamia entanglement."
3 Options Discussed
A U.S. presidential finding authorizing a covert action to topple Saddam Hussein was signed by President George Bush in May 1991, less than three months after U.S. and allied military forces had driven Iraqi troops from Kuwait. At the time, Bush was being heavily criticized in Washington for having publicly called on Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands" to oust Saddam, but withholding U.S. military support from rebellions by the Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south.
Three major options were discussed by intelligence officials at the time: encouraging Kurdish groups to trigger a "rolling coup" that moved southward from territory under their control; using economic sanctions to create a pressure cooker atmosphere in Iraq that might lead to a "silver bullet" assassination by a lone security official or family member; and promoting a "palace coup" against Saddam and his aides by disgruntled Republican Guards or Iraqi security units.
In his memoirs, then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III recalled being advised by a series of allied officials in the Middle East that Washington should pursue a more ambitious fourth option: an Afghan-styled covert action to inflict major losses on Saddam's loyal Republican Guard forces and help split the rest of the Iraqi military from Saddam. But Baker noted that such an aggressive program would risk rupturing the U.S.-led international coalition that fought the Gulf War, or fragmenting Iraq with potentially negative results.
What the Bush administration decided to do instead was order the CIA to try to topple Saddam through a combined shotgun approach, essentially by giving covert financial aid and encouragement to anyone who stood a reasonable chance of success through any of the first three options. Doing so would demonstrate U.S. resolve to regional allies, by convincing them that Washington's animus against Saddam was deep and lasting; it would also complement the larger, public U.S. effort to strangle Iraq militarily, economically and diplomatically.
"It was a minimal program. We had Kurdistan around our necks. And anything we could do to make trouble for Saddam, and to encourage the formation of a core of opposition to him in the region, was good," said a former senior Bush administration official who is familiar with the presidential directive. "We never got to the point where we seriously contemplated using [direct U.S. military] force."
The CIA began by contacting whoever its analysts and regional station chiefs thought might form the nucleus of a credible opposition, including Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq, Iraqi exiles in Europe and members of a group of Iraqi prisoners who had refused to be repatriated at the end of the war. One person who reportedly attracted early Saudi and U.S. support was Salah Omar Ali Tikriti, a former member of Iraq's ruling Baathist party who had once been Iraq's information minister but broke with Saddam when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Together with a former Iraqi intelligence chief named Ayad Alawi, who had broken with Saddam and left Iraq in 1971, Omar Ali had helped establish the National Accord opposition group, which later received substantial CIA support. With U.S. encouragement, the group set up a radio station called the Voice of Free Iraq, which operated from Saudi territory and called on the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam. But the National Accord became much less potent when it fragmented in 1991, with Alawi and Omar Ali going separate ways.
Their split exemplified a habit of divisive infighting that came to infect most of the Iraqi opposition groups that enjoyed financial support at one time or another from the CIA and its counterpart organizations in Saudi Arabia, Britain and Jordan. Still, many experts were optimistic that the anti-Saddam campaign would succeed quickly. As Baker wrote in his memoirs, "All our Arab coalition partners believed that Saddam would be ousted by a coup within six to eight months."
`Not Many' Choices
By 1992, the CIA had fixed its gaze on other Iraqi dissidents, including two rival Kurds: Massoud Barzani, a tribal chieftain and leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party since 1970, and Jalal Talabani, who had broken with the KDP in 1975 to found the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). But neither had any substantial standing outside northern Iraq, and as a result, the CIA's directorate of operations never expected that either could bring down Saddam. It was just, as one former government official said, that "there were not many other choices" for mounting an anti-Saddam campaign.
The CIA's idea was to unite these two Kurdish groups with other organizations in northern Iraq under an umbrella organization, the Iraqi National Congress. By financing that organization's operations, the agency reasoned, Washington might be able to keep peace between the Kurds, deter Iraqi military forays in the north, and provide a public forum for stirring up popular opposition to Saddam.
Under pressure from Turkey, which also has a large Kurdish population, however, Washington remained consistently opposed to the two Kurdish groups' own principal motivation: the Kurdish people's historical dream of political autonomy. This difference in views produced immediate tensions between the CIA and the Kurdish groups, which were reflected in part by Washington's refusal to supply grenade launchers, anti-armor projectiles and other sophisticated weaponry the Kurds demanded.
"Their claim was that they could take Saddam down, and all they needed was a little bit of support from the United States," said a former U.S. government official who followed the program closely. "They claimed they had unbelievable contacts in Baghdad, and incredible intelligence on low morale in the Iraqi military. They were so naive in regards to Saddam."
The head of the National Congress's executive committee was Ahmed Chalabi, a Western-oriented Iraqi exile. Although Chalabi was highly valued in Washington for his organizational skills, his involvement in a Jordanian banking scandal had raised questions about his accounting practices. As a result, the agency made periodic secret inspections of his books to ensure that the millions it poured into his London bank accounts were properly spent.
Chalabi's group formally announced its existence at a news conference in a ritzy Vienna hotel in June 1992. It then set up television and radio stations to beam anti-Saddam invective toward Baghdad; published miniaturized versions of anti-Saddam books; and from time to time sent unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles supplied by the CIA over Iraqi cities to drop propaganda leaflets. Each of the two rival Kurdish groups used some of the CIA funds to sustain separate militias; one former U.S. government official recalls that they purchased Toyota Land Cruisers and Jeeps to transport their top officials around the rugged Kurdish countryside.
After Bill Clinton's election in November 1992, however, new appointees at the CIA and the National Security Council took a close look at the program and concluded that it did not amount to much. As one senior official said, "The program was too fat, and all this front-end capitalization had been completed, and there was no coup plotting. There did not seem to be much prospect of bringing down Saddam."
As a result, the CIA and Clinton proposed to cut spending for the program, by one account slicing its budget by as much as 50 percent. A few lawmakers supported the plan, but a larger number on Capitol Hill -- egged on in part by Kurdish protest faxes -- expressed outrage at Clinton's proposal and demanded to know how Washington could possibly slacken its effort to oust a dictator as odious as Saddam.
"The predisposition of everybody in policy and on Capitol Hill is to throw money at these things," without understanding just how difficult they are, sighed a government official who witnessed the secret debate. The result was that millions of dollars in funding for the anti-Saddam effort that the administration had proposed to cut wound up being restored.
Case Officers on Site
By mid-1994, the CIA decided that it needed a handful of officers on the ground in northern Iraq to keep an eye on the operations of the National Congress and its Kurdish members. Several case officers, including a veteran of the agency's covert action program in Afghanistan, were dispatched to open an office in Salahuddin, on a hillside overlooking the strategically important Kurdish city of Irbil. Elaborate negotiations were conducted with the Pentagon to ensure that U.S. military forces in Turkey could assist their evacuation in a crisis.
In the four rented houses, the CIA installed elaborate communications gear and other equipment; it also posted a guard force of locally hired mercenaries outside. "They didn't wear badges, but everybody knew who they were," said an Iraqi dissident source who saw the buildings. Besides advising the National Congress on its purchases and checking up on its activities, the CIA team collected its own intelligence and interviewed defectors and dissidents who were able to make their way north from Baghdad.
One such defector was Wafiq Hamud Samarrai, a former deputy director of Iraqi military intelligence who had retired after the Gulf War in 1991 and defected in November 1994 by walking for 30 hours into Kurdish territory from Kirkuk.
Claiming to have supporters in key jobs inside the Iraqi military and in Baghdad, Samarrai sought assistance from the National Congress and the CIA in carrying out a plot to attack Iraqi military encampments on the edge of the Kurdish region and produce a "rolling coup" that would gain strength from subsequent military revolts in Mosul and other Iraqi cities.
After Samarrai gained the backing of Chalabi and Talabani, but not Barzani, he and his supporters publicly announced in mid-March last year that they had started a coup. The National Congress and Kurdish forces enjoyed considerable, if fleeting, success. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers defected or were taken prisoner, but a wider Iraqi military rebellion failed to materialize and the Kurds halted the operation. Even before it was over, Samarrai bolted Iraq for Damascus, where he lives now.
Several Iraqi dissident sources claim that the effort might have succeeded had Washington not withheld a promised aerial bombardment of Iraqi military positions in the north. But a Clinton administration source familiar with the episode dismisses this claim of promised U.S. support, saying Samarrai "appeared to be one in a long list of people saying, I'm the man to bring Saddam down for you. All I need is $50 million, the 82nd Airborne, and maybe some B-52s, and I can do this thing for you."
Another U.S. official agreed, saying, "The clear message from Washington at the time was, it's not a good idea, it can't succeed." Several administration officials said the episode helped provoke more bad blood between Talabani and Barzani; it also contributed to a precipitous decline in the fortunes of the National Congress at CIA headquarters in 1995.
There, a new management team overseen by CIA Director John M. Deutch concluded that the program should be made "tighter, smaller and more focused," as one administration official put it, on "bringing down Saddam." The defection in August 1995 of a senior Iraqi arms industry official, Hussein Kamel, helped convince the CIA that Saddam had grown weaker, and the conviction deepened when some riots were reported and Saddam began to shift the location of various Republican Guard units.
The CIA responded by shifting a chunk of the program's resources from the National Congress to the old National Accord, which was then based in Jordan and was marketing itself to Washington as the prospective architect of a quick, clean decapitation of the Iraqi regime's top leadership. According to several officials, Deutch's decision reflected in part his desire to help revive both the Operations Directorate and the use of covert action in U.S. foreign policy.
After spending considerable effort to build up a series of contacts inside Iraq, National Accord leader Alawi bragged to a reporter last summer that disaffected army officers who were allied with the group had stolen some field radios from a depot in Amarah, in southern Iraq, and were using them to communicate with dissident military officers.
But Saddam had penetrated the group, evidently by watching or capturing one of its key couriers between Amman and Baghdad. Shortly after the Alawi interview he "began to roll up networks" associated with the group, particularly targeting Amarah, according to a U.S. official.
Correspondents John Lancaster in Cairo and Jonathan C. Randal in Salahuddin, Iraq, contributed to this report.
HOW THE U.S. BACKED IRAQI OPPOSITION TO SADDAM
A chronology of U.S., Kurdish and other Iraqi dissident efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power:
1990
August: Iraq invades Kuwait.
November: Saudi intelligence sets up 30 Iraqi exiles, who later form the Iraqi National Accord, to promote a coup against Saddam Hussein.
1991
January-February: U.S.-led international alliance drives Iraq out of Kuwait in Persian Gulf War.
March 1: Shiites in southern Iraq begin uprising that spreads to Kurdish areas in northern Iraq. The United States at first moves troops as if to support rebellion.
March 26: Bush administration decides not to intervene to prevent Saddam from crushing Kurdish and Shiite rebellions. United States is worried about possible breakup of Iraq and Iranian-backed Islamic takeover.
April 5: U.N. Resolution 688 calls on Saddam to end repression of Kurds and others.
April 16: United States and allies create a "safe haven" in northern Iraq for the Kurds.
May: President Bush approves covert action to topple Saddam.
1992
June: Iraqi National Congress, a new anti-Saddam umbrella group seeking partly to unite diverse Kurdish factions, makes its debut in Vienna.
1995
March: Second attempt at a popular rebellion. CIA, through National Congress, tries to get a "rolling coup" started from Kurdish areas in north. But one major Kurdish faction declines to get involved.
Aug. 10: Gen. Hussein Kamel,Saddam's son-in-law, defects to Jordan. Jordan's King Hussein decides to help organize Iraqi opposition.
November: Bomb kills 20 at the National Congress security office in Salahuddin, Iraq, and is blamed on agents of Saddam.
King Hussein meets with opposition representatives in London, but there is no agreement on who should attend. King gives up for now on forming a broad coalition of Iraqi opposition groups.
Mid-December: Hussein Kamel proposes creating nucleus of new opposition army, to be based in Jordan, but dissident groups reject his call.
1996
Mid-January: U.S., British, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence representatives meet in Riyadh and decide to switch their main effforts from the faction-ridden National Congress to the National Accord.
Late January: Clinton administration approves plan to spend $6 million on the National Accord, a radio station and other opposition activities. Saudis, Kuwaitis and British all put money into the National Accord.
Feb. 23: Hussein Kamel returns to Baghdad and is executed.
March 6: King Hussein in Washington urges United States to accelerate Iraqi opposition activities, including efforts to launch the National Accord.
March 30: Iraqi National Accord formally opens office in Amman, the only opposition group authorized to do so, and launches radio station the following month.
June: Saddam foils coup attempt by disgruntled military, reportedly arresting more than 100 officers, including many sympathetic to National Accord.
Aug. 31: Iraqi troops, in alliance with Barzani's forces, capture Irbil from Talabani's group. Some supporters of National Congress are arrested, reportedly executed.
KEY IRAQI OPPOSITION LEADERS
Massoud Barzani
Leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the principal Iraqi Kurdish separatist groups. Last month he made an unexpected alliance with the Iraqi government, and expanded his area of control in northern Iraq at the expense of his rival, Jalal Talabani.
Jalal Talabani
Leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Longtime rival of Barzani for leadership of Iraq's Kurds.
Ahmed Chalabi
Exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group formed partly to try to unite the Kurdish factions led by Barzani and Talabani. A U.S.-educated Arab Shiite Muslim, Chalabi now lives in London.
Ayad Alawi
Exiled secretary-general of the Iraqi National Accord, a secular opposition group including former government officials and military officers. Alawi is an Arab from a Shiite Muslim family, who left Iraq in 1971 and now lives in Amman and London.
Wafiq Samarrai
Exiled former Iraqi military intelligence officer who left the military in 1991 and defected to the opposition in 1994. Not formally attached to any group, he is an Arab Sunni Muslim and lives in Damascus.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 28, 2004 at 04:32 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
by Randy Stearns, "ABCNews", feb. 1998
"The White House"
If Presidents Clinton and Bush shared one foreign-policy fantasy, it was to live in a world without Saddam Hussein. Both the Republican president and his Democratic successor commissioned secret plots to eliminate the Iraqi despot, and for more than six years the CIA has struggled to carry out that task.
The Geopolitical Rub
The difficulty, however, is that even more than it wants to eliminate the Iraqi leader, Washington needs to maintain political stability in the Gulf. As a CIA deputy put it at the end of the Gulf War, "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, not his regime." Thus, nearly every time the United States reaffirms support for the democratic aspirations and human rights of the Iraqi people, it also restates the importance of maintaining the "territorial integrity" of the Iraqi state. Balancing the contending powers—Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq—would be vastly more difficult if Iraq devolved into a motley federation of ethnic states.
"Messy Alternatives"
To Washington, the prospect of a popular insurrection in Iraq has been far less appealing than the possibility, however remote, of a palace coup. In practice, that has meant publicly promoting popular resistance as a means of destabilizing the Iraqi regime, but all the while pinning U.S. hopes on an insider job. As a result, policy-makers’ anger at Saddam never overcame their fear of a power vacuum in the Gulf. "We recognized that the seemingly attractive goal of getting rid of Saddam would not solve our problems or even necessarily serve our interests," former National Security Adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft told Newsweek in 1996. "So we pursued the kind of inelegant, messy alternative that is all too often the only one available in the real world."
"Push Came to Shove"
When Shiites in southern Iraq appeared ready to finish the job with a grass-roots revolt against Saddam in the spring of 1991, the Bush administration chose to step aside and permit Iraqi troops to regroup and crush the rebels with helicopter gunships. The alternative, as the White House saw it, might have been the collapse of Iraq and the rise of a new Islamic state bordering Iran. In March 1995 and again in the late summer of 1996, the Clinton administration faced similar dilemmas in northern Iraq. Rather than throw its weight behind a coalition of rebels with divergent allegiances to Iran and Iraq, and aspirations for an independent Kurdistan, Clinton chose to do nothing while Saddam’s troops invaded the "safe haven" and destroyed the CIA-backed opposition. Washington had grown impatient with supporting the political opposition and demanded that the CIA find a way to get rid of Saddam before the 1996 presidential elections. The upshot was that neither popular political resistance nor quick-fix coups were successful and Saddam remained in power. Four days after Saddam’s attack on the northern city of Arbil in August 1996, the president decided to launch a cruise-missile attack—not on the invading armies in the North, but on Iraqi radar installations 500 miles to the south. To Saddam and other Gulf state leaders, the message seemed clear: United States policy toward Iraq remains mired in indecision and a fundamental unwillingness to back its ertswhile allies inside Iraq.
Meanwhile, the 7-year-old Gulf War coalition continues to erode and Washington faces repeated crises over Iraqi intransigence.
The CIA
Unable to kill Saddam with conventional military might during the Gulf War, the Bush administration ordered the CIA to find covert means to bring down the Iraqi dictator. Their efforts helped spark at least one major uprising, two bloody Iraqi reprisals and one failed coup. Today, the agency finds itself back at square one, with Saddam’s power as entrenched as ever and opposition forces bowed but unbeaten; the only thing that has changed, perhaps, is that all parties in the Middle East are a bit more suspicious of America’s resolve.
"Both Barrels Backfired"
In 1991, the CIA swung into action, spending roughly $20 millions on anti-Saddam propaganda and at least $11 million in aid to various Iraqi opposition groups in London and Kurdistan. The agency pursued two parallel, but not necessarily compatible, strategies for ousting Saddam. It first supported the Iraqi National Congress, a popular political opposition group led by Ahmed Chalabi. The INC tended to move faster than its American sponsors anticipated, recruiting an independent army and temporarily uniting Kurdish factions behind a planned attack on Saddam’s forces. By late 1994 CIA field operatives had set up a base in the northern city of Salahuddin and had begun actively directing military activities. Top CIA and White House officials, however, doubted that the INC could bring down Saddam and were anxious about their ability to control the Kurds. They preferred a second alternative, focused on a group of exiled Iraqi military officers based in London called the Wafik, or Accord. Accord leaders promised Washington that it could pull off a "zipless coup" to bring down Saddam without dismantling the Iraqi state.
"Competing Agendas"
Former CIA field agent Warren Marik worked with the INC in northern Iraq from September 1993 until his retirement in January 1997. He still believes that what the agency was doing there was the right thing. Given more time and consistent support from Washington, he believes it would have not only succeeded in bringing down Saddam, but it might also have created the conditions for a democratic society in Iraq. The Clinton White House simply "got too impatient with a genuine effort to install democracy," Marik told The Washington Post last June. It turned instead to fighting Saddam with former Iraqi generals who hoped to take his place. It’s a mistake that Marik hopes the White House and CIA won’t repeat after the debacle of September 1996.
Iraqi National Congress
The Iraqi National Congress is partly a creation of the CIA, which provided it with its name and more than $12 million in covert funding between 1992 and 1996. The organization’s leader is Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Shiite Muslim banker from Baghdad, whose ties to Iraqi Kurds date back to the 1970s. After the Kurds elected a new regional parliament in northern Iraq in spring 1992, Chalabi organized the opposition’s various religious and ethnic factions into a coalition government. The CIA saw it as a potential ally in its propaganda campaign against Saddam and helped the INC build a radio and television station in the North.
"Uneasy Allies"
Washington publicly endorsed the INC as a democratic alternative to the Baghdad regime and began covertly channeling $4 million annually to Chalabi’s organization. Privately, however, top officials in the United States doubted that the INC could either depose Saddam or maintain order among the volatile factions of the North. When Chalabi began building an army in 1993, American officials became concerned, but not particularly supportive. "The Iraqi National Congress didn’t have much military experience," former CIA officer Warren Marik told ABCNEWS. "They didn’t fit into the coup mold that Washington had in their mindset. A year later, however, the CIA sent Marik [and other veteran field agents, money and materiel to support an INC offensive planned for March 1995. INC forces would retake the Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Mosul and trigger a CIA-backed coup among Iraqi troops.
"Inconstant Friends"
Chalabi’s strategy was to create a viable political and military organization by uniting the Kurdish factions and recruiting as many disaffected Iraqis to the INC as possible. He enlisted former Iraqi Gen. Adnan Nuri as a important ally, but the CIA later recruited Nuri to lead a rival opposition group based in London, The Iraqi National Accord. On the eve of the March 1995 offensive, Nuri flew to Washington and told the White House that the INC had tricked the CIA and was preparing to draw the United States into a new war with Iraq—something he knew the Clinton administration would avoid at all costs. Washington cabled Chalabi to inform him that the United States "will not support this operation militarily or in any other way." The attack went forward, but quickly unraveled without American support.
"Soldiering On"
Today, the INC continues to fight for a democratic, popular alternative to military rule from Baghdad, albeit without the help of the CIA. "We have learned the hard way that covert action that is not part of a large strategic political program is of no value," Chalabi told The Washington Post last June. He hopes to work in concert with the United States again, "but our involvement with any covert agencies is finished."
The Accord
The Wafik, or Accord (officially the Iraqi National Accord) is a coalition of exiled Iraqi military officers now based in Amman, Jordan. Its members are openly dedicated to staging a coup in Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein.
"The Quick Fix Option"
The Accord was organized by the British intelligence agency MI6 after the Gulf War. It gained support within the CIA’s London station later that spring as Bush administration officials looked for a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Among its leaders is Gen. Adnan Nuri, a former brigade commander in Saddam’s special forces. He joined the Iraqi National Congress in May 1992, but was recruited a month later to work secretly for the CIA within the Accord. "They said: ‘You work separate from the INC, but don’t resign from the INC’," Nuri told ABCNEWS. Nuri later convinced the Clinton White House to abandon the CIA-backed INC only hours before it was to begin a March 1995 offensive aimed at toppling Saddam. By that time, President Clinton was already favoring the Accord members predictions regarding the possibility of sparking a coup and turning cold to the potential complications of a popular insurrection in Iraq. By the summer of 1995, Washington’s efforts concentrated on working with King Hussein of Jordan and the Accord’s new offices in Amman.
"How to Drop a Dictator"
After the White House opted for a quick-fix solution that might get rid of Saddam before the beginning of the 1996 American presidential campaign, the CIA worked to organize plans for a coup. The former Iraqi army officers and one-time cronies of Saddam that make up the Accord assured the Americans that they were in close contact with top officials still in Baghdad. These insiders would oust Saddam and take power, without bringing down the entire Iraqi state, they said. Although all the alleged coup attempts against Saddam have so far failed—whether organized by Accord members or others—the CIA remains hopeful. The Accord maintains a presence in Amman, despite King Hussein’s ongoing efforts to reconstruct relations with Baghdad. It broadcasts regular radio propaganda in Iraq and is actively recruiting new members.
The Kurds
Because they live in a nation that is not a state, Kurdish leaders have grown accustomed to seizing the opportunities history hands them. They’ve never succeeded, however, at gaining the political autonomy that has been repeatedly promised by the international community.
"Statehood by Stealth"
At the end of the Gulf War, amid exhortations from President Bush to seize the moment and rebel, Iraqi Kurds put aside their differences, took up arms and tried to topple Saddam Hussein’s government. They very nearly succeeded. But at that critical moment, the United States refused to back the rebellion and instead stood by while Saddam’s helicopter gunships crushed the rebellion. In the ensuing chaos, a flood of Kurdish refugees fled north to the border region of Iraq, Turkey control came in the form of a militarily protected "safe haven" for refugees in northern Iraq. The refugees culled opportunity from the disaster. They took advantage of coalition air cover to organize the first free regional elections in Iraqi history the following spring. Long-feuding rivals Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) agreed to split power following a close election in which more than one million Kurds voted. Within months, a regional parliament was established and the Iraqi National Congress was working with the CIA to oust Saddam.
"No Friends But the Mountains"
The Kurds seemed to have built the foundations of an autonomous state on the ashes of another superpower betrayal. But by 1995, lingering suspicions about the reliability of the CIA’s mandate and simmering disputes among the Kurds themselves caused the fragile northern coalition to unravel. The CIA enlisted the PUK and KDP in its planned assault on Iraqi outposts at Kirkuk and Mosul in March 1995. When the United States backed out at the last minute, Barzani withdrew his KDP fighters as well and the Kurds’ dreams of unity vanished in an escalating factional war. Seventeen months later, Barzani had allied his forces with Saddam and invited Iraqi troops to help "liberate" Arbil, while Talabani turned to Iran for help. The Americans once again decided to do nothing. While the United States and its allies had gone to war to protect Kuwait, Barzani later told author Jonathan Randal, the Kurds understood that no one was willing to accept an independent Kurdistan carved from the existing states of Iraq, Iran, or Turkey. Barzani insists that while the Kurds deserve a country of their own, it will only come as a result of generations of political struggle.
Saddam Hussein
He’s been compared unfavorably to Adolf Hitler. But sticks, stones and armed rebellions do not seem to faze Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi dictator shows no sign of giving up power, despite the best efforts of the CIA and U.S. military. He’s endured the concentrated might of many nations during Gulf War, periodic cruise-missile attacks and punative bombings, numerous rebellions and coup attempts and yet his grip on power appears as ruthlessly certain as ever. "The truth is that Saddam Hussein is now stronger than he was since the invasion of Kuwait," INC leader Ahmed Chalabi told ABCNEWS. "He is defiant, intransigent, and he is dangerous."
"Thumbing His Nose, Consolidating Power"
And within the borders of his state, he is supremely powerful. Even though U.S. and European forces still patrol the skies over nearly two-thirds of the country, Saddam has been able to attack his internal enemies with impunity, crushing rebellions and rounding up suspected traitors with deadly speed. Some Iraqis undoubtably remain loyal because they admire their president’s defiant attitude and fierce confidence. But it’s reasonable to suspect that most simply fear his wrath. Since the end of the Gulf War, Saddam has crushed rebellions by Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south. He’s carried out a genocidal campaign against the minority Ma’dan Arabs, turning fertile wetlands into desert to deprive them of their homeland. And he’s arrested, imprisoned and executed hundreds, perhaps thousands of suspected traitors and participants in thwarted coups. Seven years after the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein remains a threat to this neighbors and the White House is preparing, once again, to bomb Iraq.
November 28, 2004 at 04:30 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Burhan Wazir
Asylum-seekers arriving in Britain are being met by violence and hostility - but it comes from established ethnic minority communities, not far-right white groups
THE ghost of Christmas Past haunts Mahmoud Mustafa. An Iraqi Kurd asylum-seeker who has lived in Cambridgeshire for the past three years, he was with friends last Boxing Day when they were set upon by a gang of young racist thugs.
He and his friends were strolling through the city centre when a car carrying a group of youths sped up, forcing them off the pavement and into a pool of water.
“When my friend shouted at them, the boys got out and started beating us,” Mr Mustafa, 49, said. “They were punching and kicking. One friend was badly hurt (and) has since left Peterborough. Some locals here are very angry with us. They are not always friendly.”
Mr Mustafa’s bloody lesson in local community relations was an early indication of rising tensions and simmering racial feuds that climaxed with a series of pitched street battles during the summer.
Rival gangs fought with sticks and knives, windows were smashed and houses and cars set alight before police restored order. On one side were groups of young, male and predominantly Kurdish asylum-seekers. What made the wider world sit up and take notice was that their antagonists were not the stereotypical white yobs of the far-right fringes. They were young Asians.
The city’s May riots were initially dismissed as a localised problem, but Peterborough’s experience of a violent antagonism developing between rival ethnic minority communities is increasingly finding echoes in towns and cities across England.
The new racial tensions pit Pakistani against Kurd, or West Indian against African, while the white majority focuses on the cleaning of its own Augean stable. In Woolwich and Plumstead, southeast London, where young West Indians have been at war with their Somali neighbours, a black youth speaks of the African newcomers as being “a different kind of black, like dirt”, and a West Indian grandmother wishes the Somalis would “go back where they came from”.
In Harringay, North London, a man was killed during a street fight between Turkish and Kurdish groups. In the West Midlands, successful Asian businessmen casually dismiss local blacks as lazy and drug-ridden. And in Peterborough, designated as a cluster area for the dispersal of asylum-seekers, the greatest resentment of the newcomers — who include an estimated 3,000 Kurds — is to be found among the city’s 10,000-strong Kashmiri population.
Across England, ethnic minority communities formed at the tail-end of the British Empire — West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians and Sikhs — seem to have discarded the immigrant solidarity that once united them against white oppression. To some extent, the long-term victims of racism have become the new model racists.
The growth of inter-ethnic hostility has outraged veteran race campaigners, including the broadcaster and writer Darcus Howe. He argues that ethnic minority groups who arrived in Britain in the 1950s have forgotten the persecution that they initially suffered.
“They have become too middle-class,” he says. “Remember that West Indians and Asians were loathed when they first arrived here. How can they then dish out the same treatment to newcomers? There is a collective memory loss in some parts of elderly Asian populations in this country. They forget what it is like to arrive here with nothing. Integration has that effect on some people.”
Peterborough is a curious mix of old and new. An ancient city with a 12th-century cathedral, it was designated a new town in 1968 and saw its population double from 75,000 to 150,000 in 20 years. It has low unemployment and the region’s highest per-capita GDP, but also features pockets of severe deprivation. Drugs are a major problem and violent crime has doubled since 2000.
The first Asians, Kashmiris who came to the city in the 1960s, were hard working and put down roots to form a cohesive and settled community. In recent years they have found themselves living alongside fellow Muslims, asylum-seekers and migrant workers from Iraq and Afghanistan with whom they have little in common.
The new arrivals are viewed with suspicion and blamed for severe overcrowding problems, rising crime rates and the stretching of public services to breaking point. They seek the acceptance that the Kashmiri community earned over decades.
Instead, they feel rejected by the very people they believe should most appreciate their sense of isolation.
Humayun Ansari is the author of The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain 1800, a recently published analysis of Muslim immigration to Britain. He believes that intercommunal ethnic violence is far more widespread in Britain than was thought.
“There is a general trend towards older, more established Asian communities in Britain taking on the fears of the host nation,” he said, suggesting that newly arrived single men were particular targets for demonisation.
“Asian communities pride themselves on extended family traditions. To them, the solitary asylum-seeker or migrant worker, more often than not a young man in his late twenties, provides an example of predatory behaviour.”
The Kashmiri enclave around Gladstone Road, Peterborough, is a street of Victorian semis littered with the detritus of an impoverished underclass. Mohammed Choudhry, 45, director of the Gladstone Community Association, a local support group, delivers a withering denunciation of his Kurdish neighbours. “There are some serious cultural differences,” he says. “The newcomers have a lack of commitment. Asians who arrived here 50 years ago were very hard working. They assimilated into the community and have made some notable achievements.
“The Kurds, for the most part, are single young men. They are aggressive and at times arrogant. They refuse to move from street corners; they are disrespectful to our women. This has led to tensions. The newcomers should be restricted to certain areas.”
The disturbances in May and a further outbreak of hostilities in July, when a hundred youths fought in the streets, were sparked by claims that a group of Iraqis had been harassing local Pakistani women.
The anti-Kurd sentiments of Peterborough’s Pakistani population are partly fuelled by a perception that the newcomers are moving solely into areas of the city that were historically Kashmiri.
Imam Abdul Rashid Nomani, of the Islamic Centre on Gladstone Road, said initially that the summer’s problems had all been resolved and that many Kurds worshipped at his mosque. Later, however, he complained that some houses in “Kashmiri” streets were now being occupied by up to ten Kurds. “They want to be near us so that they can get access to the halal food stores — but that sometimes leads to differences. They hold more liberal values.”
Peterborough’s Kurds have the sympathy of Yassin Ismail, 38, director of the Somali Refugee Action Group in Woolwich, which is home to thousands of Somalis who have fled their homeland since the country’s civil war.
Some have found themselves in open confrontation with members of the established West Indian community who, like the Kashmiris of Peter- borough, have found it tempting to blame all their ills on “parasitic” refugees.
“The Somalis are the newcomers,” Mr Ismail said. “They tend to face persecution and alienation. Even now, there exists a number of stereotypes about us: that we are people without principles and live like warring tribes.”
Many outbreaks of violence are caused by fundamental misunderstandings, he said. “When people from other cultures see a group of Somali men walking down the street, they get scared. They never stop to think: why are the men walking in a big group? It is because they are scared. As a newcomer to this country, doesn’t it make sense that we would find comfort in numbers?”
November 28, 2004 at 12:40 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Greg Hurst, Political Correspondent and Roland Watson
PRESIDENT BUSH expressed hope yesterday that his surprise intervention in the Northern Ireland peace process could help to push both sides towards a deal.
Mr Bush interrupted his Thanksgiving holiday to speak by telephone to the Rev Ian Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader. “I’m trying to be a part of the process of getting both Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams to the table to get a deal done; in other words, to close the agreement they have been working on for some time,” Mr Bush said.
Speaking outside the only café in Crawford, Texas, the hamlet seven miles from his ranch, Mr Bush said: “Hopefully it will help. Anything I can do to help keep the process moving forward, I’m willing to do,” he added before heading inside for a burger lunch.
Officials in Washington said that Mr Bush’s call was a sign of how close both sides may be to clinching a deal. Mr Bush has made it a rule not to involve himself personally in peace negotiations, be they in the Middle East or Northern Ireland, unless he believes that both sides are committed to the compromises required to move forward.
But Mr Paisley gave a sharp reminder to President Bush of his own uncompromising stance against terrorism.
He told Mr Bush that it would be “inconceivable” that terrorists would be allowed to join the US Administration in Washington.
“I reminded the President of the fact that he would not have terrorists in his Government and we must be satisfied that IRA terrorism is over and cannot return,” Mr Paisley said.
The involvement of President Bush, which would have been at the request of Tony Blair, was another indication of the critical stage reached in the intensive talks seeking to restore devolved government to Northern Ireland. An initial deadline of yesterday has now slipped to Tuesday.
Unlike President Clinton, his predecessor, whose similar eleventh-hour calls to party leaders before the Good Friday agreement were a symptom of his close involvement in the process, President Bush has until now stood back from the politics of Northern Ireland.
Mr Paisley, who has resisted pressure to conclude the process while demanding significant concessions during the talks, said that President Bush had offered his involvement should it be of help.
“He wished me well in our endeavours and told me I could come back to him if I wanted to speak again to him. I told him we have been praying for ever in this country and I wished him well at this time,” Mr Paisley said.
The DUP’s executive was due to meet in Belfast last night to discuss whether to strike a deal with Sinn Fein to form a powersharing government in place of direct rule from London.
November 28, 2004 at 12:39 PM in Ireland | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
27 November 2004
Peter Hain, the Leader of the Commons, has denied media reports that the security services foiled a plot by al-Qa'ida to fly planes into the skyscrapers at London's Canary Wharf.
The reports by the Daily Mail and ITV News came on the eve of the Queen's Speech on Tuesday and were seen as an attempt by the Government to justify the "safety and security" measures dominating its legislative programme.
In a pre-recorded interview for Channel 4's Morgan & Platell programme tonight, Mr Hain said: "If there was a specific threat to Canary Wharf or anywhere else, we would have said so ... That leak, if it was a leak, did not come from a government minister or as far as I know a government source."
Asked if there have been any specific threats against Britain since the 11 September terror attacks, he said: "I don't know of a specific threat. But what I do know is that the intelligence services ... have constant intelligence on al-Qa'ida-type cells in Britain."
Counter-terrorist officials have made checks to discover whether details of a plot had been uncovered during investigations or upcoming court cases. A source said yesterday there was no material to back up the media reports and he believed they were wrong. MPs suspect the two news organisations were briefed by a senior official or minister. The reports have fuelled claims that the Government is trying to create a "climate of fear" to justify draconian measures such as identity cards.
Mr Hain also denied a BBC report that there was a specific threat to the House of Commons this month. "I would have expected as Leader of the House to have known about a specific threat and I certainly wasn't informed," he said.
He stood by his claim that Britain would be "safer" under Labour even though it led to accusations that he was "playing politics" with terrorism. He said: "I believe that Britain will be safer under Labour, just as I believe Britain will be more prosperous under Labour, that there'll be more schools under Labour, more hospitals under Labour." He added : "We have enormously increased, in fact doubled, the spending on the security services and counter-terrorism measures, and are recruiting a thousand more MI5 staff, to make sure we have a strong preventative strategy and that is another reason why I believe we will be safer under Labour."
November 28, 2004 at 12:32 PM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
TheStar.com - Diplomacy's just not his style
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - When George W. Bush brings his second-term diplomatic tour to Ottawa and Halifax next week, Canadians will see a change in tone, but will observe a man for whom diplomacy will never come naturally.
A quick check of his efforts since re-election earlier this month shows a style of diplomacy that sometimes has all the subtlety of a bulldozer and features a president who still carries grudges.
Just ask Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
The socialist leader of Spain called Bush hours after his victory was confirmed on Nov. 3, but the president was too busy to take the call from a man who pulled his troops out of Iraq. Zapatero is still waiting for that return call. White House aides cite "scheduling problems."
Just to ram home a point to the government in Madrid, Bush had Spanish King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia out to the ranch in Crawford, Tex., last week, for a little Thanksgiving lunch; free-range turkey, giblet gravy, prairie chapel bass, mashed sweet potatoes with maple syrup and chipotles and pan-roasted root vegetables stuffing, topped off with pecan and pumpkin pie and washed down with a 2002 Chardonnay.
Zapatero reportedly passed a message to Bush through the king, who holds no political power in Spain, and Bush did finally dash off a written note to the Spanish prime minister. But the White House has nothing to say about the two men actually chatting by phone.
The souring on Spain is reminiscent here of Bush's cold shoulder to Mexican President Vicente Fox, refusing to acknowledge the Cinco de Mayo national holiday in Mexico, a sign of their differences over Iraq, and Bush's cancellation of a May, 2003, trip to Ottawa for the same reason.
Last month, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, George Argyros, skipped the parade marking the Spanish national holiday, then passed on an official reception later in the day hosted by the king.
In Spain, the move was seen as an official snub from Washington. The Madrid daily El Pais, quoting sources, said Juan Carlos buttonholed Bush at Thanksgiving dinner last Wednesday and asked him, "What's up? Are you annoyed?"
Bush, according to the newspaper, told the monarch he was awaiting some type of "gesture" from Zapatero.
Even when Bush reaches out, things can go wrong.
Santiago, Chile, was the site of a now famously shrunken state dinner last weekend when Bush's security contingent refused to back down on its insistence that all guests — Chilean legislators and Supreme Court justices among them — be put through metal detectors before being allowed to sit down for dinner at La Moneda, the presidential palace.
Chilean President Ricardo Lagos said he would have to withdraw invitations to 200 people if the White House didn't back down. The dinner was cancelled. This came a day after Bush waded into the crowd to stare down a Chilean security officer who was in a standoff with a presidential Secret Service officer. Bush grabbed his man from the melee, dragged him out, then strode over for a photo with Lagos, flashing a self-satisfied grin and a wink to the White House press corps.
That won him the moniker "The Gringo Sheriff" in one Chilean daily. Another dubbed the Secret Service "Bush's Gorillas."
Still, the Bush tone was conciliatory. He told a Chilean reporter that even though Lagos did not agree with his decision to invade Iraq, "I respect that, he's still my friend."
But when Bush was asked about the state dinner fiasco a couple of days later in Colombia, he made no attempt to mask his contempt for the question. He told his startled host, President Alvaro Uribe, that that would be just enough, thank you, after a mere four questions at a joint news conference.
"Do you want to take one more?" Uribe asked Bush.
"That's plenty. No, thank you," Bush replied.
Uribe used his extra time to wander through the White House press corps' filing room to ask reporters to write stories touting Colombia as a tourist destination.
Despite the natural inclination of a presidential visit to stoke resentment by closing roads and turn cities upside down, as it will in Ottawa and Halifax this week, Bush will be on the road because he needs more friends in the global sandbox.
There is danger on the horizon in Iran and North Korea and any pre-emptive, unilateral strike by the U.S. in either hotspot would be a diplomatic disaster.
So Bush has re-engaged France, Germany and Britain to help challenge Iran's nuclear pretensions and has again turned to six-party talks to try to ratchet down the temperature with North Korea.
Since his re-election, Bush has also promised to work toward establishment of a Palestinian state during the next four years. Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state-designate, sent an important message to the world when she made it known unilateralist John Bolton would not be her deputy.
Bush even injected himself into last-ditch talks to revive power-sharing in Northern Ireland last week, phoning Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. That act of diplomacy reminded some of efforts made by president Bill Clinton in the run-up to the Good Friday peace accord of 1998.
So, expect lots of smiles and proper words of support during the brief Bush visit to Canada. But don't expect him to suddenly become a man of summitry.
Bush is a president who spends as little time at international summits as he can, routinely leaving early; and he openly questions the merits of summits (putting Prime Minister Paul Martin's idea for a "Leaders' Group of 20" way down on his to-do list).
When his top European ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, came calling while the votes were still being tallied in Ohio, Bush gave a frosty answer to Blair's suggestion of a global summit on the Middle East, allowing as how he had nothing against summits, as long as he thought they could accomplish something. An announcement Friday that the U.S. will not attend next week's Nairobi anti-land mines conference, to review progress in the pact brokered by Ottawa, was another reminder of international agreements that do not include the Bush administration. The anti-land mine agreement has been ratified by 143 countries; the U.S. is among 51 nations that have not signed.
Bush is still a man whose diplomacy depends very much on personal relations, but even that is not infallible. He once said Russian leader Vladimir Putin was a good man because he could see it in his soul. But Putin is no longer quite the good man now that his favoured candidate in the Ukrainian presidential election is accused of fraud, and the Russian leader himself is seen as yanking his country back into autocratic rule.
Additional articles by Tim Harper
November 28, 2004 at 11:48 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
frontline: the survival of saddam: interviews: dr. ahmad chalabi
This is not a situation unique to Iraq. Saddam Hussein runs a totalitarian dictatorship, augmented by a medieval clan structure. A totalitarian dictatorship is a twentieth-century phenomenon. You had it in the Soviet Union, you had it in Nazi Germany. In each of those countries, the regimes perpetrated untold disasters on their people. And they remained in power.
It took the deployment of huge resources by other countries to bring those dictatorships down. In the case of Germany, there was a major war and millions of people died. And in the case of the Soviet Union, the United States alone spent perhaps four trillion dollars on defense, let alone other expenditures to contain the Soviet Union until the system was brought down.
Saddam's regime is of a similar nature. In Iraq, Saddam has control over the security services, the army, and he has a complete monopoly on instruments of violence. He has complete control over any foreign exchange, any money that comes to Iraq. He also has total and absolute mastery of the media. Every newspaper in Iraq, every day, has on the front page a picture of Saddam, without a caption. He is just there--like the sun, he always shines. He is there. So people know that Saddam is omnipotent and omnipresent. Every significant public space in Iraq has a huge mural of Saddam in every garb--Saddam the great leader, Saddam the Kurd, Saddam in Arab dress, Saddam with a feather in his hat. All these things are displayed.
And also Saddam demonstrates his control by spending billions of dollars to build new palaces, while he claims the children of Iraq are starving. And he says, "I, Saddam, am more important in my trappings of mastery of you than the food for your children." There are details of how this happens.
Saddam has divided the armed forces of Iraq into broadly three structures, which are separate--in concentric circles--they don't join. The regular arm is weak, hungry and ill clothed. They have no ammunition. They have old equipment, and they are deployed on the periphery of the country. They cannot get near the capital. Then there are the Republican Guards, who are better off than the army, but also they cannot enter the capital. And in the capital only, there is the Special Republican Guards. . . . And they are an urban control force.
So the military is immobilized. It cannot move. The checkpoints are controlled by units of the Special Republican Guards, who do not obey orders of the General Command. So it is difficult to gather together a military force to move against Saddam. Furthermore, the officers in the units have with them, unknown to them, people who report to the Special Security Service, and they report on the officers. So the officers really cannot talk to each other about anything at all.
There are several different methods where Saddam can immobilize a plot against him, and that is why he has been successful in thwarting the thrust of U.S. efforts against him, which have mainly been concentrated in plots to overthrow him. Saddam is a far better plotter, a more apt and accomplished plotter, than the CIA will ever be. He is good. He is, as they say, pro-active. He doesn't sit still. If he thinks that there is something in the offing, he will go and send provocateurs to offer coups to his enemies. In every direction, he's done that. He manages to thwart these things.
And also Saddam lives on the contradiction of his enemies. The neighbors of Iraq and the United States each have a contradictory vision of how Iraq should be ruled. Saddam ends up, by default, being everybody's second choice, and that has been the major brunt of our struggle--to persuade the United States government that Iraq, an important country of 20 million people with the world's largest oil reserves, occupying a strategically important, crucial point in the Middle East, cannot be liberated through plots and covert action.
We say that the way to get rid of Saddam is to organize a movement of the people, and enable the people, in order to attract units of army who are disgruntled with Saddam--to control territory in Iraq, to use the resources of this territory to relieve the Iraqi people, and at the same time, to generate resources to overthrow Saddam. That is why we have been working so hard since 1996 in the United States, to get this idea across. We have done work in the media, and we managed to get bipartisan support in Congress.
We called for an open U.S. policy and open U.S. support for the people of Iraq to overthrow Saddam. Congress responded by passing the Iraq Liberation Act, which says specifically that it should be the policy of the United States to help those in Iraq who want to overthrow Saddam and establish a democratic government. Then it specifies the steps the United States is prepared to take to help those Iraqis, and that is providing weapons and training. Then it says that, after Saddam is gone, the United States will not abandon Iraq but will help to reintegrate Iraq into a community of nations.
This is the kind of thing we have been working for--it's a very big step forward. The president signed this law. The administration has been reluctant to implement it, but the experience is that the United States ultimately gets obeyed. And now we have an answer to, "What do you want from the United States?" Our answer is, "Obey the law, that's what we want." We are moving ahead in this direction, slowly, slower than we think is required. But we are definitely moving ahead. The United States now is engaged with us openly, through our political process, a messy political process.
There are many egos to overcome, and all kinds of contradictions to deal with. All kind of secret services, including western secret services, have people in the opposition dealing with them. We have to bring all these groups together, and unify them for one purpose. We want to use the resources available to us that the United State says that they will provide, to mobilize our own people in the south, in the north, and in the center, everywhere in Iraq, to pounce upon Saddam, through a process where you can measure how far you are going at each stage. This is what we want.
You compared Saddam to other totalitarian regimes, and said that it took a massive effort to overthrow the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Is the same scale of effort required to overthrow Iraq?
Already the scale of resources deployed against Saddam has been monumental. Half a million American troops went to the Gulf to get Saddam out. Subsequent to that, the United States took in tens of thousands of Iraqis as refugees. From the wars of Saddam in the north after the Gulf war, over 9,000 people went. People continued to go to the United States. The United States government accepts them as refugees, all because of Saddam. That's a big thing.
Then the United States has been flying aircraft over northern and southern Ira, since 1991-1992. Missions everywhere, hundreds of sorties every month, to keep Saddam's air force away. In the past two year, the United States flew over 13,000 combat missions in Iraq, and they dropped over 12,000 munitions over Iraq. That's not a small-scale effort.
But does the plan that you envision require more military commitment from the U.S. to back up your plan to overthrow him?
We are not asking for deployment of ground troops. We say, extend the no-fly zones in scope to be military exclusion zones, in other words, no- drive zones. The United States declares that Saddam cannot maintain armed forces and artillery in those areas.
But the point is, that the Iraqi military should be put on notice, that if they stay with Saddam, and remain in those areas, then they are subject to U.S. and allied air attack. If the United States and the allies do that, we could easily deploy a force of not many thousands--small forces, two brigades--which are well-equipped, well-trained and can withstand one hour's attack from Saddam. Then, I think, with some speed we can control sufficient territory in the south and west to attract major units away there.
Saddam would be faced with a dilemma. Will he deploy his Special Republican Guards that he can absolutely trust to deal with this operation, and vacate Baghdad from necessary forces which he needs to control the capital, or not? What will he do? It's a lose-lose scenario. Using that, I believe we can make steady and fast progress to get through.
What does the Pentagon think of your plan?
The Pentagon does not think much about that. The Pentagon thinks that they [the Pentagon] need 200,000 people to get rid of Saddam, so how can a few rag-heads with a few thousand people get rid of Saddam with this kind of scenario? So they don't like it. At the same time, the Pentagon has a persistent admiration for Saddam's military capabilities from what they observed during the Gulf war. Using military statistics, Saddam's is the only country, militarily, which can operate at division level among the Arab countries.
They will tell you that the Iraqi army has good repair services. They will tell you the Iraqi army can maneuver armor and aircraft in coordinated unison. They will count you all those things. But then they neglect the loyalty factor. We are not fighting the Iraqi armed forces; we are making a revolution. We want to attract the Iraqi armed forces.
We tried that in 1995. We know that, if we have the resources, we can be successful in attracting a lot of the Iraqi military. I saw that first-hand in 1995, dealing with the Iraqi armed forces. We discovered that the Iraqi army is too weak to make a coup on their own, that they will not fight and die to defend Saddam. They will join other Iraqis in a serious, credible effort that can protect them to overthrow Saddam.
We can put all these lessons to use now. Despite the fact that the Pentagon doesn't think much of our forces, other U.S. military experts, generals, who have experience in Iraq, who have led forces and operated against Saddam, have staked their military reputation on our plan. And it is those generals who talked to the senators and persuaded them that this can be done, and got them to pass the Iraq Liberation Act.
Let's go over some of the history, starting with the Ba'ath Party's coup in 1963.
The United States got scared that the communists were going to take over in Iraq. And they were scared that the Kassem regime was going to permit the communists to have strong influence in the country, and eventually Iraq would be a communist country. So they found a group of officers and civilians in the Ba'ath Party, who fit the United States recipe on how to deal with communism in the Arab world and in the Third World, which is to encourage so-called indigenous, well-organized nationalist forces to oppose Marxism. These people were ideal military officers, organized conspirators, so they worked with them.
They helped them in every way. They sent messages, and passed messages to them, and they permitted them to operate from areas where the U.S. had influence, in Lebanon, in Egypt. They funded them, and provided them with communications facilities. They also provided them with a list of maybe 1,600 names, broadcast over some radio stations, of communists who should be "eliminated." That's what happened. One of the people who had a minor role to play in this was Saddam himself, who was in Cairo at the time.
. . . [So] definitely the U.S. helped them. [And] there's a clear place where the U.S. helped them diplomatically. In 1963, in the spring, there was the most vicious and determined campaign to eliminate the Kurdish rebellion in the north. For the first and only time since the monarchy, Turkey, Iran and Syria worked together to eliminate the Kurdish rebellion. I believe this was coordinated by some United States agencies. The Syrians were even permitted to send a brigade to participate in the massacre of the Kurds.
Because it was a difficult time for the Kurds in spring, 1963, it became very strange that Iraq and Turkey would cooperate with the Ba'ath Party and nationalists against Kurds. And the Shah, was, in fact, helping the Kurds just a few months earlier.
Let's talk about 1968. Was the involvement of the U.S. in that coup as detailed and as significant as with the coup in 1963?
The U.S. role in the coup of 1968 was not as detailed and as determined as its role in the coup of 1963. I think the Anderson episode was overblown. There's a great deal of fantasy and conspiratory theory involved in this, and I don't think Anderson, who was a Republican, had much clout with the Johnson administration. But the United States knew of that one, because the Ba'ath Party spared no effort to try to secure the acquiescence of the United States in their effort. They spared no efforts to try to persuade the Israelis not to block their path. One of the coup leaders, who is now deceased, came to London in February, 1968, six months before the coup. He apparently met with some Israeli military representative here in London, and said to him, if you will not stand in our way in making this coup, we will pull the Iraqi army back from Jordan once we are successful, and they did. . . .
There was some effort by officers through contacts in Beirut to keep the U.S. abreast of this. The deputy director of military intelligence also played some role with some intermediaries with the United States. He was not a sophisticated man. He was a person who had a flair, in Iraqi terms, for appearing secretive and conciliatory, and he was easily manipulated.
So, there were these links. But you see it was not all an even thing, because, by 1968, the massive Arab nationalism was essentially a spent force. Nasser was defeated by the Israelis, and the Arabs were in disarray. Iraq was also in disarray, a weak country--the oil prices were not that high, and there are always the Kurds who could be stirred up. The Shah was much more powerful than Iraq; Iraq was not considered to be a strategic threat.
We've heard from some American diplomats who were active in the 1970s that there was a gradual improvement of relations, from the mid-1970s, and, roughly, onwards--beginning with business contacts, then diplomatic contacts at higher levels. What do you think was motivating that on the American side?
Saddam persuaded the Ba'ath to nationalize the oil companies in 1972. He made a treaty with the Russians, a friendship and cooperation treaty for 15 years. I know there was a western effort to try to make a coup in Baghdad. Some Americans and British people were involved. They asked King Hussein to lead this effort, and, in 1972, did make an attempt. The U.S. also made an attempt with the Kurds, in beginning of 1972. Henry Kissinger met with Barzani in 1972 and promised them help.
King Hussein met with Barzani--unfortunately most of the actors in this drama are deceased, but they did meet--and there was a flurry of activity. Then King Hussein was told by the western powers to desist by the autumn of 1972. This effort was abandoned, because the focus shifted to using the Kurds to put pressure on Saddam--the strategy that was advocated by the Shah. So the focus shifted to Idris Al Barzani. General Barzani gave a very important interview to the Washington Post. He was interviewed in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan, around August of 1973.
General Barzani, at the time, was very forward in seeking U.S. support, and even seeking Israeli support in the effort against the Ba'ath Party. This developed into full-scale open warfare in Iraqi Kurdistan. All kinds of games were played on the Kurds, and their expectations rose, contrary to the wishes of General Barzani. His rebellion was transformed into an exodus of people. He told me that he was weakened by the fact that there were over half a million people who have migrated from their homes in the cities of Iraq.
Kurds were leaving valleys by the hundreds in Kurdistan, and across the border in Iran, and he now had to think, not only of logistics for his fighters, but for these hundreds of thousands of people, which made him very, very much dependent on the Shah.
. . . So there was this rebellion, and all kinds of games played by the Iranians on General Barzani. They promised him weapons. The United States delivered to the Shah weapons captured by the Israelis in the 1967 war--Soviet weapon, and weapons that they had captured in Vietnam--to be delivered to General Barzani. The Iranians would help with weapons, so they make some progress. Iranian involvement became more significant because they had to provide artillery support for General Barzani.
Because they did not give them the guns themselves so they can defend themselves, the end situation became right for a resolution in the style of Dr Kissinger. My own theory is, that the sell-out to the Shah, I mean the selling out of the Kurds in 1975, took place in the context of the failure of Dr Kissinger's first effort to do Sinai II in the winter of 1975. He spent 33 days trying to persuade President Nasser to acquiesce into a Sinai II--a development of the initial Sinai agreement. Nasser refused--by ending the Kurdish rebellion and letting Saddam go into Kurdistan triumphantly, that would unleash his energies against Nasser. . . .
As the same time that this happened, the Lebanese civil war started. Within a short time, on March 5, the Shah met with Saddam in Algiers, and they kissed and made up and the Kurds were sold down the drain. In the second week of April, the massacre took place in Lebanon, and that was the beginning of the civil war. Nasser was beseiged, from the east and from the west, and Sinai II took place in the autumn of 1975, six months later.
You can date the improvement in relations with the west from the time that the Shah sold out the Kurds in 1975. Unfortunately, I observed these events, and there was very little we could do about it. I got wind of this at the end of February. I went to see General Barzani in 1975 to warn him about this. He would not speak in the house, in the palace that the Iranians had given him to stay in. Although it was chilly, he took me out for a stroll in the garden, and I told him this. He said, "Now I know why those scoundrels would not let me see the Shah." He said that, the second day, the Shah came from his ski holiday, returned to Teheran, stayed less than 24 hours, and flew out to Algiers and signed the agreement.
Anwar Sadat played a role in that. He requested that Barzani send him an emissary, as he was still away, and in an important position, to meet with him. And he sent back a message to Barzani, the gist of which was, "No matter what the Shah does, he loves the Kurdish people very much." The import of that was clear.
So it is from that time that things developed. It's at the same time, in the winter of 1975, that the head of SAVAK asked that a Iraqi delegation go to Jordan, to meet with King Hussein to develop a scenario to get rid of the Ba'ath Party. A delegation went to Jordan, but was clearly chasing a red herring. Jordanians were unaware and unwilling to participate in any such event.
So this was all prepared. There were too many actors in the region were involved in this process who had also excellent relations with the United States. Saddam was reintroduced into the fold in 1975. Things developed. He played a coordinated role with Anwar Sadat in the Lebanese civil war against Syria, and he went on to develop his relations with the United States, through economic programs, through giving contracts to U.S. companies, and through exporting more oil to the United States, until he came to power in 1979.
We've heard from State Department officials who were around at the time, that there was almost a policy within the White House, Brzezinski in particular, to, in a way, make Iraq their China--get the public relations benefits like Kissinger and Nixon did of turning a hostile state around. Do you have any insight into that?
Yes. The United States government, particularly the National Security Council, at that time lead by Dr Brzezinski, felt that they could make an impact in opening with Saddam, and with the Ba'ath Party in Iraq. They though they get some foreign policy benefits out of it, by opening to a regime that was closed--drawing them out into the world, dealing with them, developing Iraq and getting credit for it. This was policy at the time. Unfortunately, they did not understand the nature of Saddam and the Ba'ath Party.
We've heard that, in 1979-1980, before Saddam took power, and before he launched the war against Iran, that he made visits to Amman, Jordan, and then Saudi Arabia. He met the king in Amman, and that there are reports that he may have met some Americans who may have been in the capital at the time. Do you have any insight into that?
I don't know whether he met Americans at the time, but I know a lot about his visit to Amman. I believe King Hussein helped Saddam avert a move within the Iraq Ba'ath Party to get rid of him. . . . There was a coordinated move by leaders of the Ba'ath Party, involving many of the senior people in the party, to get rid of Saddam. They were impatient with his high-handedness, and they were very, very disturbed by his control over oil funds, and by his control over the security services. So they made a move to get rid of him.
Saddam had suspicions. . . . Saddam clearly was preferred by some U.S. government agencies to succeed in Iraq, to succeed Bakr. Saddam was a man they could do business with. He was strong, charismatic, young, and with great anti-imperialist, and anti-American credentials--an ideal person in all respects.
So he was assisted to thwart this effort by the killer. He came down, himself. He came in a state of total paranoia. He even brought his own chair with him, his own waiter to serve him his own tea when tea was given to people in the room. He arranged a large contingent of bodyguards, and he stayed a few days. He came on the July 12, and on July 17 he became president of Iraq. Then, he subsequently arrested and executed many, many Ba'aths.
Some people, who are now still alive, were placed in a special prison where they were tortured on a daily basis. The foreign minister of Iraq died of thirst in the prison, in the arms of one of his colleagues who was arrested with him. And the man is still alive, he is living in Saudi Arabia. Saddam tortured his own comrades, his own associates, who were working with him on a daily basis in government for a period of 11 years. His private secretary was tortured and killed.
The whole thing was bizarre, but very characteristically Saddam. He took control in 1979. And his chance came because Iran was on a collision course with the United States. Saddam immediately came to power when there was a threat from Muslim leaders to the Ba'ath region. He immediately thought that the best way to deal with this problem was to fight the war with the Arabs, and he began to explore the situation. He met with Iranian exile leaders who came through Jordan, with the former prime minister, and with some generals who came also through Jordan. They went to Iraq and persuaded him that if he makes a war, there will be an Iranian uprising against him. That would be sure.
. . . And the war continued. When Saddam was under threat in 1982, the warehouses of the West were open to him. He was given the opportunity to develop weapons of mass destruction. He was permitted to buy precursors for the most lethal chemicals. Western companies built chemical weapons factories for him, enhanced his earlier effort to develop such weapons, and he was given very advanced weapons, Exocet missiles. He was permitted all this. He was able to acquire fuel air bombs, he was able to acquire fragmentation bomblets, advanced aircraft, and he was given satellite imagery by the United States, to help him in the war against Iran
It is from that time that the efficiency of Saddam and the efficiency of his military left a lingering fondness for him, as the person who can do things, and move mountains in the Middle East.
To what extent was America informed, or possibly even involved in the plan to start a war with Iran?
I think the United States knew about Saddam's plans, definitely. They knew about Saddam's plans from many sources. They knew because Jordan was privy to the plan, the king was privy to the plan. They knew from the Americans, from the Iranian generals who went to Baghdad, and from the Iranian political personalities who were aware that a war was being planned. Of course they knew it from the purchases that Saddam was doing. Saddam was stockpiling things. Iraq had $26 billion of oil revenues in 1979. They had a huge influx of revenue from oil after this revolution in Iran, when oil prices were driven up. After the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, oil prices were driven up, and Saddam had this very, very big huge revenue in 1979.
He used that to purchase weapons, civilian goods, and to give contracts. At the same time, Saddam kept the Saudis abreast of what he was doing. So it was all visits to Saudi Arabia, and visits by other Iraqi officials and contacts with other Iraqi officials with the Saudis. The Saudis were privy also to Saddam's war plans against Iran, and that was another channel where the United States was informed about these plans.
You mentioned that the CIA met Saddam. Obviously, that would have been done with authorization from Washington. What, in your opinion, was the idea behind allowing senior CIA agents to meet Saddam Hussein?
I can only speculate. It was the time of planning the war against Iran, and the time that Saddam was in active preparation for war plans against Iran. Also, he was facing a challenge by the Islamic party in Iraq, and he was seeking support and information about their activities. This situation proliferated, in terms of Saddam challenging those people. Two months after his visit, he was bold enough to execute the leader of the Iraqi Shi'ites and his sister--arrest them and execute them in Baghdad. So Saddam wanted assistance, in terms of information and tracking, and at the same time, wanted to impart some of the information about his intentions towards Iran to feel out what the United States thought.
And what did America want from Saddam at the time?
They wanted pressure to be put on Iran, and they certainly did not want any copycat revolutions on the Islamic model taking place in any Arab country, including Iraq. There was some security cooperation. Some Iraqi Islamic fundamentalists, who had no political activity in Jordan, but were just operating there, were arrested and delivered to Saddam, or they were executed by the Jordanians in that time period.
Before Saddam went into Kuwait, had you found the U.S. administration very receptive to the Iraqi opposition, and how did that change?
I used to meet with American diplomats and people in the State Department throughout the 1980s. They would listen politely, and would dismiss what we said in a joking manner, and sort of said that their policies were to keep Iraq together, that Saddam wasn't as bad as he was portrayed, and that Iran should not read exactly . . . our course. Saddam was an efficient person, and we were on the same level. People in the parties, like the totalitarian parties of Iraq, or the Leninist parties of Iraq, were on the same moral level of Saddam. People who were talking about democracy were ineffectual dreamers. They would listen--some with more interest than others. But the official policy was to support Saddam.
Then the official policy turned even more egregiously towards the U.S. There was a ban on meeting the opposition, instituted by Schultz, who was secretary of state in 1988, because Tariq Aziz refused to meet him when he heard that some little-level State Department official met General Talabani in a café
So after 1988, contact ceased, and we were able to do something. We managed to persuade the Senate in 1988 to pass a ban on any assistance given to Saddam. The Reagan administration didn't like this. They worked diligently in the House of Representatives to dilute this resolution, by giving the president the authorities to certify that he can override this, if it is in the interest of the United States. That was a sort of a warning that all was not well with their headlong rush to embrace Saddam.
So when the U.S. government came to you in 1990 . . .
Saddam threw the CIA out of Iraq in January, 1990. He ejected them. So that's another signal to the United States, but the United States refused to believe this. There's the famous trip of Senator Dole. To most, it was very, very strange to hear that we went to Washington in 1992. The delegation met with Senator Dole. One of his aides told me that they produced a transcript, although there was no tape recorder in the room, and that his own tape recorder was taken away from him. In fact, Senator Dole was bugged in the meeting. Saddam trusted him, and he was portrayed as sort of kowtowing to Saddam.
Then the United States government still would not meet with the Iraqi opposition. . . . Even after Saddam invaded Kuwait, they would not talk to us, but people in Congress did talk to us. After President Bush issued his finding in May, 1991, about the Central Intelligence Agency to get rid of Saddam, or to help overthrow Saddam, the CIA began to look for opposition people.
Strangely enough, the first people who were introduced to them were introduced to them by the French intelligence services. The French introduced them to some Sheikh Islamisists, in 1991, but there was no significant contact. The first official contact that took place between the State Department and the opposition was in April, 1991. There was a crucial NSC principals meeting, on March 22, where it was decided, finally, to let Saddam crush the uprising, in the hope that the Iraqi military would overthrow Saddam.
There was continual criticism of the administration from Congress, and in the press, that they are not meeting the opposition. We went to the United States, invited by the Council on Foreign Relations in March, 1991. We were invited to the House International Affairs Committee. We spoke, and the congressmen were impressed with what we had to say, and they said, have you talked to the State Department. I said no, they said why not, I said, they will not talk to us. The congressman said, do you mind if we try, and I said, please, go ahead. We met in the capital. They sent us with the aide of a chief of staff. We went with him to his office, and he called the State Department, who told him point-blank that they have no time to meet with us. He closed the phone and said, "This is the strangest response I have ever received from the State Department."
But the administration came under pressure. At the end of March, Secretary Baker said they'd meet with the Iraqi opposition, but no one had asked us to meet with them. So we sent them a message, and they agreed to meet with us. A delegation was appointed and three people went. I was one of them. We went to the State Department, and they just told us point-blank that the United States would not spend one penny, or risk one American soldier, to intervene in the civil wars of Iraq. That same afternoon, President Bush announced Operation "Poised Hammer" and sent American troops into northern Iraq. And that operation, which was supposed to last only three weeks, continues to this day.
So, Congress met us, encouraged us. Then our relationship with the United States government developed through Congress in the summer and the autumn of 1991.
Did you have practical assurances that America was serious about the INC as a way to change the regime?
The United States had not previously met on such an unprecedented level with any opposition of the Arab world. The secretary received in his office in Washington the INC delegation. They made statements that we represent the hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people, and they look forward to working with us and so on. . . . The rising expectations of the Iraqi opposition was at such a level that the whole movement was galvanized in an effort to get rid of Saddam. There was such tremendous momentum and potential at the time.
Picture this. Saddam had a closed totalitarian system, and the opposition manages to organize and persuade the United States to support a meeting of the opposition inside Iraq. We gather 400 leaders of the opposition, from as far away as Australia, to come through Iran and Turkey--in itself a great feat. We declared openly that we are establishing the Iraqi National Congress, and we are calling for democracy, and calling for elections and human rights. The Kurdish leaders, who each has a half a million votes in a free election, are part of this movement. We are sitting there, and the United States is clearly helping us to make a start. The feeling of people in Iraq, the opposition, felt that they were in fact empowered to do this. Now there's a contradictory view--that the CIA organized this meeting. But that is not accurate.
The United States government was very apprehensive that such a meeting would take place in northern Iraq. The Pentagon was very concerned that Saddam would make a move, and then they would either be left twisting in the wind, and they didn't think they had sufficient forces to prevent him from making the deterrent attack force. They were very eager that we should go in and get out, after they agreed that we go. They had little choice at the time, after we used our meeting with the secretary of state to demonstrate American support. A lot of people, including the Islamisists from Syria, the opposition in Syria, the nationalists, everybody. The communists felt that this is a move, let us join.
Then there was an election. It was three or four days before the presidential elections in Washington, and a new administration came in. They immediately took the view that this was Bush's war, and that they wanted a new beginning. They wanted to depersonalize the conflict. Some unfortunate statements were made that dampened the effort. But then we took care of this when we organized the meeting in Washington, in April, for the opposition. This time, the level of reception was even higher--the vice president received the delegation from the INC. This culminated in a letter that the vice president sent to me on August 4, 1993. It was a far-reaching letter that said, "On behalf of the president, I give you the undertaking of the United States to prevent Saddam Hussein from oppressing the people of northern Iraq."
He went on to say, "I, and Secretary of State Christopher, and national security advisor Lake were very impressed with your leadership, and we give you solid assurances that the United States will do whatever it can to assist you, to overthrow Saddam and establish democracy in Iraq."
It was on the basis of this letter that we went to the north and extended ourselves, organized ourselves, took bases, and established radio stations. By the way, this effort was largely our own. A great deal of it was paid for, not out of their funds, but from our own. They refused to provide us, for example, the TV studio.
They did provide you with agents. Then, in the end, some agents did come up to the north?
This was two years after we established things. One of them called me up from Washington on a secure line, and said, "We don't know what you're doing there, but we like the results." We did all this over there, and we did such an effective organization with such limited resources, that when Congress sent some staffers to see what was going on, two years after this, they were very impressed. They wrote us a letter to this effect. They said, "We are very impressed with what you've achieved, despite the scant resources that you have." We were able to organize ourselves into an effective political organization, with a military arm, and an effective media operation that extended into Iraq.
They did not really believe that we could do all this. Saddam noticed what we were doing, and he thought differently. He thought that we have much greater support than, in fact, we did have. That is what we did in the north.
What made you decide to actually launch a military operation?
We were there to fight Saddam. We had been there for two and a half years. The Kurds were at loggerheads. There was a bout of fighting, and we managed to quell it. We thought, correctly, that we had a limited window of opportunity to operate in the Kurdish area. We felt also that we had reached a plateau of organizational strength and hardware. We had a reasonable organization, and we had developed some serious contacts with military units in our area, in the north. We thought, at the time, judging from the ragtag way and the difficulties that Saddam had in mobilizing his troops to go and launch into Kuwait . . . In October, 1994, we thought that his forces were at a very low level of preparedness and capability, and had a lot of intelligence about their prospects. So we thought that this would be a good idea to go with. There was an incident on February 12, 1995, in the south, which demonstrated that Saddam's forces would rather cut and run than fight.
I myself had presented a plan to the Americans at a combined meeting of government departments concerned with foreign policy and defense and intelligence in Washington, in the autumn of 1993. I gave a written proposal.
In the summer of 1994, I had reason to believe that there was a change of heart in Washington, and that they would at least give some support to an effort to get rid of Saddam. This was enhanced when, in September of that year, a delegation came and U.S. officials in my presence told General Barzani and General Talibani that the United States government has decided to influence Saddam, and that they've asked them to work with me to put the plan together to do this.
Who were those U.S. officials?
Officials from the Central Intelligence Agency, who had accompanied the congressional delegation at the time . . . We did prepare a plan, and then we did meet with CIA officials about this move. The night before we raided, they came and told us, "You are on your own." I think they expected us to stop, but we went ahead anyway, and our problems with them began then.
Your problems with whom?
With the U.S. government.
Why would there be problems because of that?
Because we made a challenge to Saddam, and they thought they're going to face a Bay of Pigs situation where Saddam would massacre us. And of course that didn't happened, because we managed to knock out two of Saddam's divisions, and we had over a thousand officers and men who defected over to our side. We took every battalion of every brigade of their 38th Division. Later, senior officers said the whole Fifth Corps was in total disarray as a result of our effort.
In the next year, Saddam's tanks did come.
After 18 months, and seven meetings chaired by the U.S. to solve the Kurdish problem--where we had a peace plan, which depended on U.S. commitment to solve the Kurdish problem--the commitment never came.
It was not a matter of funds. There were plenty of funds generated in the area to take care of peacekeeping. But the commitment of the U.S. was reduced to giving a million dollars for peacekeeping. They wouldn't do it. It was beyond me to see why they didn't do it. It was such an easy thing to do. If that had been done, Saddam would not have invaded the north. If that had been done Saddam would have not thrown out UNSCOM. If that had been done, probably Saddam would not be in power.
I really never understood why this did not happen. The people who are dealing with it from the State Department did a great job in bringing the sides together. It depended on the U.S. giving a million dollars. They said that the money was coming. I stayed there, and nothing doing, the money did not show up. They would only come back again when the fighting would restart and the tensions rise again.
We had brought the Kurds together. It took four years and the efforts of the Secretary of State to bring them back together again. I never understood, until this day, why the United States government refused to provide a million dollars and a commitment to assist in this process to solve the Kurdish dispute.
And why do you think they didn't intervene in August, 1996?
Elections were taking place. The intervention by Saddam took place on the background of an Iranian incursion into the northern area, into Kurdistan, in July. So the Kurds were viewed in equally odious terms--one was dealing with Saddam, and the other was dealing with the moderates. Both those things are morally repugnant in Washington, so nobody had a moral high ground, and when Saddam intervened, they decided to cut and run.
And what was going through your mind when you were standing on the ramparts, looking at the tanks come towards you?
I was here at the time. I got a call from the assistant secretary of state on August 27, 1996. He said, "We have come to an agreement of ceasefire. Are you prepared to deploy INC forces to separate the Kurds?" I said, "We have been waiting for this call for 18 months. The answer is yes. Will you support this?" He said, "You have our support." I said, "I am going now." He said, "No, wait. The Kurds will come for either a meeting in Washington, or in London, so that we can agree on terms of the peacekeeping and the ceasefire." I said, "Fine."
The U.S. delegation then had to come to London. We are meeting them in the U.S. embassy conference room, here in London. The U.S. government was represented by the NSC, the State Department, and the CIA. Both Kurdish parties, the INC, and the British were represented. As we were solving the problems, I received a telephone call saying that Saddam's tanks were on their way.
So I came back to the conference room, and said, "Well, let's pack up. Saddam is coming." It's as simple as that.
One of the Kurdish Democratic Party officials told us that they consider you actually going ahead with your military plan was completely irresponsible, given the lack of U.S. support and the level of your forces. Why would they say something like that, and what do you think about that?
The KDP made the determination that Saddam is going to crush us. They did not really want to support it. We decided to go ahead, and they expected us to be defeated right away. In fact, this has not happened. We managed to make to keep the operation going. Saddam scored no military successes against us--the contrary was true. Saddam didn't capture any of our troops. We got thousand of people defecting to our side. We captured thousands of small arms, tens of heavy guns, and hundreds of heavy machine guns and mortars. We had a lot to show for our efforts. So it is not true to say that the operation failed. The KDP would say they did not participate.
The KDP was thinking that the United States was going to support it, and when they the United States did not support it, they wanted us to stop. But you see we had a different agenda. The Kurdish parties had territory to control, and revenues to collect. We were Iraqis, who were primarily interested in liberation. We had no interest in revenue, we had no interest in administration. We had a sole purpose. We felt we had reached a level that would enable us to challenge Saddam, even without United States' cooperation, even with the level of our forces such as it was. Saddam was on the defensive, on the retreat in that area. The campaign stopped, primarily because the Kurdish war erupted again. Had the Kurdish war not erupted again, we would have had a good chance to continue and to score more successes against Saddam. But we could not continue, because the Kurdish war restarted.
Let's jump forward and talk some about where we are now. You have the meeting next week in New York. Why is this meeting being held, not in northern Iraq, not in another country in the region, but in New York?
The answer is simple. For us to hold it in northern Iraq, the Kurds wanted, and we supported them, stringent guarantees from the United States that they would stop Saddam from coming into the north during the meeting and afterward. The Kurds did not get those guarantees. The United States was clear in a letter sent to us that said, "We are not going to increase our level of guarantees to the Kurds. The level of protection for the meeting is up to you." I traveled to northern Iraq, to Kurdistan, in July and talked to the leader of the Islamic movement, who agreed to host the meeting. But they changed their minds-they didn't look with favor on the meeting--so there was no meeting there.
But why wouldn't they look with favor, in your opinion?
They didn't look at with favor on the meeting, because the United States government thought that this meeting would surely generate a challenge, and an attack by Saddam, for which they were not prepared. The argument was that they just come out of the Kosavo thing, and that the stocks were depleted, that they had no forces in the region that would be able to stop Saddam from coming across. It was an argument largely made by the Pentagon.
So we could not have the meeting. Now our preference was not to meet in a European capital, but to have it in the United States, so we could show that we have the serious support of the United States government. Our principle problems with governments in the region is that they don't thing that the United States is serious. Our problem with Iraqis inside Iran is they don't think the United States is serious in the effort to get rid of Saddam. We are persuaded that the Iraq Liberation Act has changed the stance of the United States government.
Officially, the policy of the United States is containment, plus regime change. I say this means overflow, and they are moving towards that. Many people in the region are not persuaded. The president causes a letter to be sent to Congress from the State Department, saying we are now providing military assistance to the Iraq National Congress under the Iraqi Liberation Act. A few days later, Secretary of Defense Cohen says, "We're only providing political assistance to the Iraqi . . ." If you go to some Gulf state, they'll tell you that the secretary of state said that it is up to the Iraqi people to get rid of Saddam from the inside. They're not helping you.
If we have a meeting in the U.S. with speeches by people in the administration and Congress, things would be different. We would come out of there with united leadership, with a strategy and with a program that clearly has the support of the United States. I believe that would generate a great deal of interest in the region, and in Iraq, if we can keep the momentum going, and we intend to. A game was played . . . of blaming the victim, that the opposition is feckless, corrupt, and useless, sitting in London doing nothing, unable to generate any interest, and of great questionable support in Iraq--that the only people who have any support are people who are bad, fundamentalists. That's the game that was played--blame the victim. So people thought that we could not work together. The answer is, "Build it, and they will come. Get things together, and people will come." Our problem in the past two weeks here is to deflect and reduce the number of people who want to come to attend this conference, from all parts of the opposition.
Many people from Iran's Islamists are coming to the Congress now. They are fighting to increase their representation. Some Iranians do ask why the United States has not made a breakthrough in negotiations with Iran. But many Iranians are coming to the meeting.
If you got military support, where would you launch an attack from?
From inside Iraq.
Which party would let you do that?
We will not do it. The north is not the area to launch an attack against Saddam. The north will support an effort that starts somewhere else. We cannot call upon the Kurds to make a move against Saddam, knowing that there are three and a half million people living there will be under immediate attack by Saddam. We must not make the security of the Kurdish people into the enemy of operating against Saddam. No, we must launch the attack against Saddam from another part of Iraq, in the south and the west. Let us not get into details of military scenarios. There are possibilities.
But politically, without giving the details, you would need the support of other nations in the region.
We would like the support of other nations. But it's not a dealbreaker if it's not provided.
How is that?
There is potential to do this with the assistance of the United States. If the United States is willing to exert its political weight to support such an effort, you would find that many countries who show reluctance now would be persuaded of this effort
What do you think the chances are of that kind of support coming from America?
It's a lot better than it was last year, and much, much better than it was in 1997.
I talked to some people who were prominent in various administration--CIA people, senior people--who say, essentially, that the situation regarding the whole security of the region is actually probably the best we can do right now. Saddam is contained, and yes, the Iraqi people suffer the sanctions and his repression and all that, but really the opposition has no chance of overthrowing him-- and it's best just to let things remain as they are. How do you respond to that?
I respond to that by saying the president signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which says it is the policy of United States to help those people in the opposition who want to work to overthrow Saddam Hussein, by providing them with weapons and training to do so. And that's the response. This is the policy of the United States.
Yes, but a lot of laws are signed that, in fact, are not implemented as vigorously as they could be, because people feel that they're not in the national interest.
They are in the national interest because they're implementing the law. They're training people, they're providing equipment, and Congress is not letting up.
The bigger strategic question behind that is, this really doesn't matter if Saddam remains in power for a while. How do you respond to that?
If you're a cynic, then the answer is yes. Saddam is weak, contained, and in his box. But there's another aspect to this. Saddam is getting more money. He is developing weapons of mass destruction, and he is oppressing the Iraqi people. When do you get the wake-up call--when Saddam perpetrates something really horrible? And what is the response of the United States? How long can the United States keep tens of thousand of troops in small countries who reject the presence of foreign forces, especially countries such as Saudi Arabia? They feel that continued American military presence and using their country as a base of bombardment on a daily basis of another Arab country threatens their own situation. How long can the United States keep this up? How long is the United States prepared to spend billions of dollars every year, shuffling troops back and forth, so that they can push a policy which, at best, is immoral, and cannot be shown to be effective.
I don't know the answer. But when you meet officials who are ingrained in a certain mind-set, and who are committed to a certain concept of people in the Middle East as people who are querulous and cannot reasonably govern themselves in a decent way, that they deserve what they get--this is essentially a racist view. Then they can say . . . that is the policy to follow. With our cynic, we now have the moral high ground. Saddam is an evil, and not only that, but from a geopolitical point of view, he is a threat at a level that the United States engagement in the region cannot contain for any length of time. The United States is using the diplomatic battle in the United Nations right now to pursue its policy. The policy, if it is only keeping sanctions on, is essentially immoral. Sanctions are not a policy. Sanctions are a very blunt instrument. Saddam is degraded. However, the situation of the Iraqi people is degraded more, because Saddam has first call on any resources that come into Iraq.
The disparity in resources between Saddam and the Iraqi people is growing. The United States is having trouble maintaining sanctions on Iraq in the United Nations. Many people in the opposition are calling for the lifting of sanctions. Many people are not thinking of the geopolitical significance of enabling Saddam by giving him huge resources. But nevertheless, the tragedy of the Iraqi people is sufficient to blind them to this geopolitical threat, and they could support the lifting of sanctions. Most countries in the Security Council now support the lifting of sanctions. It is perhaps only the United States and Britain who say no, keep the sanctions on. So the United States is not making headway in its policy. It is a policy of diminishing returns.
To what extent did a coup seem to be a more desirable option in the 1990's by the Clinton administration--more desirable than the kind of overthrow change that you were pursuing?
The Clinton administration saw co-option as the most plausible way to get rid of Saddam, and the cheapest way, and they took on this task. This started in the NSC. There was a policy directed in early 1994, early 1995 on this, and it continued and culminated in failure in the summer of 1996. They thought this was the plan to follow, and they did not succeed. As a result of this, they are gun-shy.
Who is gun-shy?
The intelligence agencies of the United States say they have a five-year plan--that we must develop new sources of human intelligence and infrastructure inside Iraq, before we can do anything about the regime. That's a long process. Essentially, they say, don't do anything now.
And what level of support do you get from them now?
Nothing. Zero. We have no support from them.
Is there an Iraqi opposition leader who is capable of providing the personality to lead the Iraqi people in the future?
The Iraqi people never had a personality that galvanized them, and around which they gathered, throughout the eight decades of Iraqi history.
November 28, 2004 at 01:12 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Six days on and still they chant, still they march, still they seek to overturn the election result that cheated them. The crowds and the momentum are on their side, but, say Andrew Osborn and Ivan Lozowy in this special report from Kiev, nothing in Ukraine is that simple
28 November 2004
28 November 2004
Six days after they first poured on to Kiev's icy streets to demand a change of government, an orange-clad mass of would-be revolutionaries swarmed up through the capital's by now slushy avenues yesterday to lay siege to Ukraine's parliament.
Many were chanting the surname of Viktor Yushchenko, the man they believe has already won a presidential election despite official results which declare the contrary, while others whistled, hissed, waved flags and sounded klaxons.
"There are many of us. We are together and you can't defeat us!" ran the mantra over and over again. "You can't hold back freedom!" was emblazoned upon many of their bright orange bin-bag-like rain smocks. Drums banged in the background and the sound of the three-syllable 'Yu-shchenk-o' being chanted by thousands of people again and again - a ritual that has been kept up almost continuously for the last 120 hours - was deafening.
Behind the parliament's modernist façade jittery MPs were holding an emergency debate that culminated in a vote of no confidence in the country's Central Election Commission, the same body which sparked fury when it declared the country's pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, to have won last Sunday's election. The MPs also passed a resolution saying the election result was "at odds with the will of the people".
The commission said the bear-like Mr Yanukovych had beaten the pro-Western Mr Yushchenko by 2.85 per cent and should therefore become Ukraine's next president, succeeding Leonid Kuchma, the pro-Russian incumbent who handpicked his premier to take over his mantle months ago. Western election observers, the United States, the EU and Yushchenko supporters cried foul immediately, saying the ballot was a fix marred by irregularities and cheating.
Almost a week later Ukraine is in truly uncharted political territory. Pressure is building on the nation's Supreme Court to declare a re-run of the election. But the lack of violence so far should blind no one to the combustible possibilities. The pro-government side, supported by millions who voted for them, may, if backed into a corner, react accordingly.
For now, the momentum is running Mr Yushchenko's way. Hundreds of thousands of his supporters have seized control of central Kiev, occupied public buildings, camped out in its main avenue - the Kreshchatyk - and its main square, the fittingly named Independence Square, refusing to go home until their candidate is declared president.
This highly organised exercise in mass civil disobedience has been peaceful so far but, as the days have passed, tension has progressively ratcheted up, and the prospect of violent clashes with outnumbered, increasingly embittered Ya