Al-Sharq al-Awsat is running exclusive excerpts from the memoirs of former interim Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi this week. Take it as half history, half electoral campaign manifesto, and expect heavy coverage from Allawi-friendly al-Arabiya to go along with this week-long al-Sharq al-Awsat presentation.
Short version: after the war, Jay Garner was very interested in Allawi's ideas - basically, to move quickly to a functioning Iraqi government which would implement gradual changes and then quickly restore sovereignty, and that the US shouldn't try to create a puppet Iraqi authority - but then Paul Bremer showed up and everything went to hell. Bremer is very much the villain of the piece, with Allawi presented as the true Iraqi patriot fighting relentlessly to regain sovereignty and to dilute the impact of Bremer's misguided policies. Today's excerpt leads with Allawi's repeated conflicts with Paul Bremer; future installments include "Yes, Bremer was a dictator" (tomorrow, and no that isn't a joke) and "dissolving the Iraqi army was a mistake" (no surprise there, Allawi's views have long been known on that subject).
The only thing which struck me as novel in this first installment was the level of detail in Allawi's claims about American consultations with him immediately after the war - he claims that Jay Garner, Zal Khalilzad, and Ryan Crocker all spoke with him at length about his ideas, and that Khalilzad told him a few days before Bremer arrived that his (Allawi's) plan for the rapid return of sovereignty to an effective Iraqi government was the only viable course of action. But the basic storyline sounds pretty familiar.
Overall, I didn't see anything especially juicy in the first installment - typical self-aggrandizing memoir stuff, where Allawi was always right and patriotic and well-intentioned and full of foreboding foresight, while his opponents (especially Bremer) always got it wrong, and if only people had listened to Allawi everything would have turned out right. If any of the later installments have anything more exciting, I'll let you know.
UPDATE: al-Arabiya does indeed have a report today, based on an interview Allawi gave to the Observer, in which Allawi says that human rights violations in Iraq today are worse than they were under Saddam:
'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'
In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.
Allawi, who was a strong ally of the US-led coalition forces and was prime minister until this April, made his remarks as further hints emerged yesterday that President George Bush is planning to withdraw up to 40,000 US troops from the country next year, when Iraqi forces will be capable of taking over.
Allawi's bleak assessment is likely to undermine any attempt to suggest that conditions in Iraq are markedly improving.
'We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,' he added. 'A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.'
He said that immediate action was needed to dismantle militias that continue to operate with impunity. If nothing is done, 'the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government', he said.
This is clearly at least in part about winning votes - as the article notes, Allawi has been reaching out to Sunni supporters of the insurgency, and trying to stake out a position as a strong Iraqi nationalist. How he reconciles this Sunni outreach with his Fallujah campaign is unclear. How he reconciles his complaints about human rights violations with their origins in his own tenure as Prime Minister is unclear.
What's most interesting in all this is what it says about Allawi's read of the current Iraqi political landscape. If "Iraq today is worse than under Saddam" is what America's man in Iraq is saying to win votes....
In an interview published in London on Sunday, former interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told The Observer newspaper that abuse of human rights in Iraq is as bad now as it was under Saddam Hussein, if not worse: Allawi accused pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalists in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers- see link below
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1651789,00.html
In an ironic twist, yesterday, following US ambassador John Bolton’s forceful steering of the UN towards a public condemnation of Lebanon’s Hizbullah and other pro-Iranian terrorist organizations, there was an avalanche of articles in Washington and Tel-Aviv celebrating the great moustached macho man’s diplomatic prowess…
One should recall that John Bolton has been the administration's point man on weapons of mass destruction: in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was particularly aggressive in denouncing Saddam's allegedly un-satiable appetite for “yellow cake”, “bacteriological chowder”, “nuclear soufflé” and other deadly delicacies supposedly “supplied to Iraq by greedy French arms makers”!
Too bad Bolton supported the illegal invasion of Iraq, for that country was the sole counterweight to Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, and the only (relatively) secular country in the whole Middle-East: many members of Saddam’s government such as Tariq Hanna Aziz and 30%+ of high-ranking civil servants were actually European-educated Catholics whereas Christians made up less than 4% of Iraq’s total population…
But Bolton, Bush and their Neocon cum Israeli partners in crime favored of a “free and democratic” Iraq ruled by “progressive” Shiite fundamentalists such as Prime-Minister Al-Ja’afari, a bearded Islamist thug of Iranian descent who claims to be an admirer of both Donald Rumsfeld and Grand Ayatollah Khomeini…Go figure.
Anyway, apart from the renegade “Sunni triangle” and the Kurdish Northeast, most of the country in now “fully liberated”, firmly under Persian terrorist influence: in many neighborhoods, from Baghdad’s eastern suburbs to downtown Basra, bearded Iranian agents roam freely in broad daylight while US and British soldiers don’t dare enter.
Ambassador Bolton, thank you so much for fighting for America’s freedom by “sending a strong message to Iran” during that fateful UN security council meeting yesterday!
You’re a real macho with a fully developed thick American moustache, not a dirty, small and less elaborate Arabian tash like that spider-hole wimp Saddam!
As for left-wing human rights activists and other wailing anti-war collaborators who recently condemned the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons by US and British forces in Iraq, well they’re just a bunch of ignorant liberals without any notion of modern nutrition and medicine: White Phosphorus (W.P. in Pentagon parlance) is actually good for brain and nerve formation in children.
Actually, unlike cynical French and Soviet arms merchants who fed you “YELLOW cake” from the BLACK continent (yuck, disgusting!), your “compassionately conservative” liberators have decided to contribute to the edification of a new generation of healthy cum freedom-loving Sunni Ayyrabz : and we even gave your kids premium quality WHITE produce !
Long live freedom!
Long live el Presidente Bush!
Long live Shariaa-based Islamic Law and the institutionalized persecution of second-class citizen such as women, Sunnis and Christians in “Grand” Ayatollah Sistani’s “free Iraq” for which we’ve spent a mere $800 billion in taxpayers money and the life of 2,200+ American kids!
Dr Victorino de la Vega
Chair of the Thomas More Center for Middle East Studies
http://www.mideastmemo.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Dr Victorino de la Vega | November 27, 2005 at 12:07 PM
Allawi's a damn hypocrite. Those abuses were being established while he was Interim Prime Minister. The only difference then was that US forces looked on in approval. I still remember his govt gloating about how many detainees they had. Any "disease" that exists in the Interior Ministry he helped infect it with.
Posted by: elendil | November 27, 2005 at 10:07 PM