Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  "I'm sure they get it! Turkey intended to show the U.S. that it's up to us!" he said, struggling to keep his typically measured tone. "The State Department acted like this didn't concern them! They're more concerned with pleasing Turkey than helping these people who they invited."22

  IN THE MEANTIME the State Department's plan for the next, larger Iraqi opposition conference was in the hopper. The Middle East Institute had dutifully started organizing an Iraqi version of the Bonn conference, planned for the fall, but the contract suddenly got the ax when the head of the institute committed one of the Bush administration's deadly sins: he publicly criticized the president's "axis of evil" speech. A former ambassador to half a dozen Middle Eastern countries, Ned Walker had thirty-five years of experience in diplomacy, but the Clinton years must have made him a bit too free with his opinions, and the Bush White House took the portfolio away. Walker's real offense may have been sidelining Ahmed Chalabi, who was still divisive enough to bust up Washington, D.C., cocktail parties. The CIA and State Department considered Chalabi a charlatan who had probably squandered all the money they had sent him since the 1990s. In the Pentagon, however, Chalabi had allies. Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, as well as many members of the Defense Policy Board advising Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, saw Chalabi as the only one with the chutzpah to pull off the Iraq transformation they'd envisioned. To them, he was perfect—a secular Shi'ite Arab who could remake Iraq in his own Westernized image. Besides, Chalabi constantly told them exactly what they wanted to hear. It was the beginning of what Barham Salih described as "tribal warfare" between the Pentagon and the State Department over what to do in Iraq and how to do it.

  The warring departments clashed a few times over the summer of 2002. The State Department let it be known that Chalabi's INC hadn't properly accounted for its recent disbursements of funding and put new accounting restrictions on INC programs, complaining that Chalabi was wasting their money. The Pentagon and its advisors had nothing but praise for Chalabi, noting that all the "best" leads on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were coming through his INC. Toward the end of the summer Chalabi went to work again. At the August 8 and 9 meetings in Washington, the group of six had pledged to hold another opposition conference in November 2002, this time somewhere in Europe, without the taint of U.S. sponsorship. The meeting would have fifty or one hundred participants, and they agreed on the breakdown following a rough estimate of Iraq's population and the strength of opposition groups. Thirty-three percent would be Shi'ite Arabs like members of SCIRI and Da'wa Islamiya, another Iran-based religious party. Another third would be liberals and independents, including those from the INA and many Sunni Arab parties. The two Kurdish parties would split 25 percent of the slots, and the remainder would go to Turcomans and Assyrian Christian minorities.23 Chalabi had nodded his assent to the numbers, but he noticed as well as anyone that all the other parties had battle-hardened troops inside Iraq that used to prop up his INC, now less of an umbrella party than a rain gauge. A proven chameleon, Chalabi suddenly became the champion of Iraqi civil society. He started bothering the two Kurdish groups, the INA and SCIRI, to expand the numbers of delegates up toward two hundred, which would have diluted the power of the traditional parties. Within a few weeks of the meeting, scheduled for November 22 in Brussels, Chalabi drew up a list of 376 names and demanded they be included in the name of democracy. He convinced several prominent Iraqi intellectuals to join his call, most notably Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi teaching at Brandeis University.

  Under the pen name Samir al-Khalil, Makiya had written two books about Saddam's Iraq that first publicized the atrocities—including the Anfal campaign. Makiya wasn't easy to pigeonhole. He had a philosopher's habit of trying to challenge any assumptions that looked a bit too comfortable. His second book, Cruelty and Silence, took aim at Saddam but equally at the Arab heads of state whose silence countenanced Saddam's brutality. Makiya had bristled as most other Arab intellectuals fell in line with anti-American rhetoric against the Iraq war. He told an appreciative audience at the American Enterprise Institute in October 2002, "Unfortunately much of the debate over Iraq that has taken place in Europe, in the Arab world, and even in this country has been a selfish one, centered on the threats to the West and its friends on the one hand, and on the moral issues arising from American hegemony on the other. It has been all about 'us' in the West, and not about those who have had to live inside the grip of one of the most brutal dictatorships of modern times."

  Makiya criticized what he saw as the cynical manipulation by Arab regimes of the Palestinian issue that left no room for the plight of Iraqis under Saddam, and in more than one public forum he called antiwar speakers out on the carpet. Chalabi's plan to expand the opposition conference offered Makiya a chance to level his guns at the Iraqi opposition parties, which, to him, seemed theocratic or tribal and certainly corrupt. When the "group of four" pushed back against the attempt to open up the conference, Makiya made their e-mail correspondence public. Few people read the substance of the exchange; instead, anyone paying attention simply concluded that the Iraqi opposition couldn't organize a conference, much less a coup or a constitution.

  "This isn't an election! He didn't need to bring all of his voters," exclaimed an extremely frustrated member of the Shi'ite opposition, who felt Chalabi had put his own personal inclusion above the success of the entire opposition, and over a meeting that most of them saw as merely symbolic.24

  AS THE DRUMBEAT for an invasion of Iraq intensified, the opposition kept postponing their meeting, and it looked like the Bush administration might get its war finished first. Jalal Talabani, ever the big-mouth, predicted war after Ramadan, which in 2002 ended on December 6. At the KDP office in Washington, Farhad Barzani's brief was to get as many journalists into Kurdistan as he could, to witness either a preemptive strike by Saddam or another American double cross. The KDP had just pulled off a coup of sorts, getting a CNN team to set up a permanent office in Erbil. The TV crew took over the entire Hawraman Flotel, right across the traffic circle from the old Sheraton (still pockmarked with bullet holes from 1994). It delighted the Kurds to have a guarantee of the media coverage they thought had saved them in 1991. But after the crew was set up, CNN aired a feature detailing its team's arduous journey into Kurdistan through Syria. The Syrian government's collusion was still supposed to be a secret, even if it was an open one. Damascus slapped the KDP's wrist and shut the Syrian route—a disaster for the Kurdish publicity effort.

  Visa problems and endless delays finally did in the Brussels opposition conference. Instead, the meeting would be held in early December in London, and following Ahmed Chalabi's push to expand the numbers, it had grown to the size of a Rolling Stones concert. London had long been the capital for Iraqi exiles. That December it felt as if they had all woken from a long suburban sleep on the fingertips of London's commuter railway. Ex-Ba'athists came into the city center from Wimbledon, Marsh Arabs from Queenspark, and secular Iraqi intellectuals from Surbiton. Hoshyar Zebari wore a three-piece suit and juggled his cell phone, cigarettes, and coffee cup at the Intercontinental Hotel. Zebari's full, round cheeks and short dark mustache somehow make his face ideal for the transition from schoolboy laughter to threatening disdain. Zebari had spent a decade rushing out to meet every journalist who might possibly get a few inches of news copy for the Iraqi opposition. He had the Kurdish appeal to the world community down pat—he and Barham Salih had written the act. But Zebari is much quicker to let his guard down, or at least give reporters the impression that they're getting past the public relations.

  In spring 2000, at our first meeting, he had ably delivered the set speech about how the international community, in its beneficence, would never let the Kurds be slaughtered again. When the microphone was off, Zebari had exhaled, and said, "Oh my God, but look what they're doing in Chechnya." The Russian military had been flattening Grozny with all the precision of a wounded grizzly bear. The precious international community had done nothing
. In those days the Kurds fully expected Saddam might do the same to them.

  Two years later Zebari had a bit more confidence—perhaps because the secret briefings in Washington had convinced the KDP that the war was a go. He laughed at attempts to poke holes in his optimism. The conference just needed to show a tiny measure of unity, he said. Chalabi needed to get used to the fact that he simply didn't have boots on the ground; that's why he was pushing so hard to form a transitional government in advance—he wanted to cash in his chips before everyone got to Iraq and discovered the INC had no support inside the country.

  On December 13, a chilly Friday, the Iraqis took over the Hilton Metropole Hotel on Edgeware Road in North London. Half the businesses on the block bore signs written in Arabic anyhow, and the sheikhs in full regalia looked no more out of place than the lobbyists, the government operatives, and the horde of journalists. Everyone expected to spend a long weekend watching the parties battle it out, but the fight started early, before the conference officially began, with a preemptive strike by Ahmed Chalabi.

  That Friday afternoon, Chalabi, along with Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein and Kanan Makiya, held a press conference in the grand ballroom and handed out an agenda for the conference. The document was bold and idealistic, outlining a vision for a new pluralistic Iraq. The only problem was, it wasn't really the agenda. The stack of paper was a report on the "Transition to Democracy in Iraq," largely authored by Makiya as part of a State Department initiative called the Future of Iraq Project. Makiya joined the project reluctantly, complaining that the diplomats would always sacrifice principle for consensus. Once inside, he just about took over the subcommittee on Transition to Democracy, and he seemed intent on ruffling as many feathers as possible among the traditional parties. By late 2002, the Future of Iraq Project completed a thirteen-volume report detailing every single thing that should be done after Saddam fell. Some of the project's members had presented their findings at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington that November. They appeared to have covered every contingency, some of them eminently practical (one presenter talked about the two gauges of railway line in Iraq and how they should be standardized), and others positively Disneyland—the suggestion, for example, that the new free Iraqi government might want to adopt Linux as a computer operating system. But few ever read the Future of Iraq Project report, just as the journalists assembled in London never read Kanan Makiya's agenda/manifesto.

  For a moment, though, Chalabi looked like he would pull off his first coup. His panel never said it represented the entire Iraqi opposition, but most of the assembled press corps had no idea that wasn't the case and didn't know the characters well enough to note the absence of the Kurds and the Shi'ites. Reporters started asking questions as if the panel spoke for a unified opposition leadership, and Chalabi wasn't about to disabuse them of the notion. But during the questions, Kanan Makiya tipped his hand. When the reporters' concerns didn't seem to focus on the boldness of his document, Makiya proclaimed, "This is a fighting document! We intend to fight for it!"

  Makiya's earnest timbre sounded out of key among the chorus of slick politicians. Suddenly ears pricked up. His pledge to fight gave the first clue to the assembled press that this agenda was not yet a fait accompli. As I walked out of the back of the ballroom, I saw Hoshyar Zebari coming in the doorway with some urgency, and I suggested that Chalabi might have hijacked the conference. "Nonsense," Zebari said. "They have no authority." Zebari kept smiling but he stepped up his pace to get into the room before the press corps left to file the day's story. A hint of doubt crept into his demeanor—to know Chalabi is to wonder if you've somehow become a cog in his latest machine. Zebari told everyone he could grab that the conference hadn't even started and that decisions would be made over the next several days. In the end, Chalabi's move was too clever by half. The next day the newspapers led not with the declaration by his pro-democracy intellectuals but with confusion and discord surrounding the conference before it even began.25

  The next morning the party leaders sat smiling again on stage in the main ballroom of the Metropole. In front of the 330 delegates and countless hangers-on, they gave the sort of unquotably bland speeches designed to make an impression of official unity. Hoshyar Zebari introduced each of the main speakers, among them Talabani, al-Hakim, Chalabi, Sharif Ali, and Ayad Allawi. One woman sat among the big players, Safia al-Suhail, the heir to an important Sunni tribe who also happens to be married to Bakhtiar Amin, a Kurdish human rights activist. Masoud Barzani was hard to recognize in a suit and tie, instead of his usual Kurdish tunic and sash. The atmosphere of warmth and respect on stage just proved how unrealistic the entire process was, as each member's lackeys badmouthed one another in the lobby and the bar. No one in the audience cheered or booed, but they did occasionally perk up. Shi'ite leaders like al-Hakim and Bahr al-Oulum, in turbans and priestly robes, began their speeches with a long religious greeting in Arabic. The Shi'ites in the audience returned the greeting, and the Sunni Arabs in the crowd contracted bodily.

  Zalmay Khalilzad addressed the assembly the next day, promising that Iraq would soon have a democratic government that protected minorities. He got the most audience response when he promised no "Saddamism without Saddam," going on the record to allay a common fear at the conference—that the United States would prefer another Iraqi strongman in place. That evening in a closed session he went a step further and said what the Shi'ites and Kurds had been waiting to hear, that "1991 was a mistake." The language, still somewhat coded, was designed to send a message back into Iraq that if the people rose up this time, they wouldn't be left hanging. After the speech, Khalilzad walked out with his phalanx of security guards and aides and retired to the hotel's fourteenth floor, which the U.S. delegation had taken over.

  In response to a few questions in the elevator, Khalilzad downplayed the opposition's infighting. "It's a natural process—that people talk about how [the new Iraq] should be formed. We don't want any interference in Iraq. And we want a free Iraq where everyone's rights are respected," he said. Asked if that noninterference extended to the Turks, who already had demanded to send their own troops along if they allowed Americans to pass through their country, Khalilzad said the United States flat out wouldn't allow Turkey to interfere in Iraq.

  Back in the hotel café Kanan Makiya still fumed to the concentric circles of reporters who had gathered around him about forming a technocratic leadership that would put the traditional parties out to pasture. "The parties are not competent enough to do otherwise," he said. "Let them be the symbols—but they're incompetent. They do not have the people to do what needs to be done."

  Then Makiya's anger ticked up a notch, and he lashed out at his real enemy of the moment, the U.S. State Department.

  "The U.S. State Department wants to give control of this to Iran!" he said. The statement seemed so outlandish that few stayed to hear his longer explanation about how the State Department had given too much weight to the Shi'ite religious parties living in exile in Tehran. In fact several delegates had complained that each minor decision sent the Shi'ite parties out of the room to consult with Tehran before they could make up their mind. In any case, the journalists began to move away from where Makiya had settled on one of the café's couches.

  Late that night, Jalal Talabani, despite his sixty-nine years, was one of the last delegates still in the conference rooms. Asked what he thought about Makiya's criticisms of the traditional parties, Talabani waved his hand. "The role of anyone in the opposition is according to his sacrifice," Talabani said, searching for the right words after a grueling day of discussions in three or more languages. "It's not for an intellectual living far away from Iraq to send orders to us."

  By Monday all the adrenaline was gone and anyone not in the thick of the arguing had forgotten exactly what the dispute was. The conference had only booked the hotel through Monday. Hoping to restore a little punch to the event, Khalilzad and Bill Luti, Douglas Feith's deputy at the Pentagon, convene
d a meeting in the small hours of Tuesday morning with the four traditional parties plus Chalabi and Sharif Ali, and rumors trickled out that the two representatives from the White House had upbraided the leaders for missing a simple deadline to produce a completely bland statement of unity.

  Both Luti and Khalilzad were in the neocon camp, but Luti's Office of Special Plans over at the Defense Department had been cultivating much closer ties to Chalabi's INC. His late arrival to the conference, as well as the presence of the neocons' "prince of darkness" Richard Perle, gave rise to rumors that Luti had come to make a last-ditch push for Chalabi. Khalilzad denied that any interagency rivalry played out at the meeting, for which he had pretty low expectations from the start. At the time, he said, the U.S. government opposed Chalabi's push to set up some sort of government in exile and that both he and Luti wanted to avoid the appearance of an American anointment of the next leader of Iraq. The Kurds, he said later, formed a special part of the core group, because they needed to be on board to host the follow-up meetings—scheduled for Salahudin in mid-January26

  "These meetings were called 'meetings of exiles,'" Khalilzad recalled. "But we had to remind the media that some were exiles, but not all—there were powerful groups such as [the Kurds] that were in Iraq."

  Still, Chalabi expected to get more of a boost in London, and his supporters at the Pentagon probably expected he would make a better showing. A subtle shift permeated the attitude of the INC delegates at the conference. At the beginning they had welcomed the appointment of Khalilzad as ambassador to the free Iraqis. By Sunday evening they were dropping hints about him in their typical style, implying that he had a lot to learn, that he might not be in his post for long. Chalabi's people also made free with the information that the CIA was now permanently on the ground in Erbil and Sulimaniya, referring to it indelicately as a "non-Pentagon agency of the U.S. government that sometimes carries out lethal operations."