Who Will Call The Shots?

By Johanna McGeary

Compared with the gilded Baghdad palaces from which Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, the bombed-out remains of an air-defense base a few miles outside the southern city of Nasiriyah don't look much like a headquarters for the country's next government. The only intact building is a dusty, flea-infested warehouse that had no windows, no running water, no bathrooms. But that is where Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial leader of the once exiled Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), set up shop last week after the Pentagon airlifted him and some 600 fighters of his newly named Free Iraqi Forces into the heart of liberated Iraq.

Whether he was immersed in planning sessions, taking late-night sat-phone calls from the Pentagon or pacing pensively back and forth across the ramshackle warehouse, Chalabi operated like a man on a mission. He issued a statement calling on Iraqis to "join with us" in flushing out the rest of Saddam's regime. He insisted that he was not expecting to run Iraq. "It is what the Iraqis want that I think is most important," he told TIME. But the preparations around him--a Pentagon liaison briefing his bodyguards on how to usher him in and out of crowds, religious leaders organized to stump for him before he spoke--bore all the hallmarks of a presidential campaign.

The Shi'ite exile, 58, has spent the past quarter-century positioning himself as the leading opponent of Saddam. In the process, he has accumulated as much contempt as admiration. Last week's stage-managed arrival made it look as if the U.S. was anointing Chalabi to lead Iraq. Yet if his supporters in the Pentagon hoped to convert him into a ready-made replacement for Saddam, Chalabi's very appearance on the scene sparked sharp resistance. Some State Department officials who have long regarded Chalabi as a divisive, untrustworthy figure charged that he is more popular on the Potomac than on the Tigris.

As the war for military control of Iraq comes to a close, the struggle for political control is just beginning. For two decades, Saddam ruthlessly eliminated political opponents, leaving Iraq with no recognized leader-in-waiting. War planners had hoped that some resistance hero might surface during the fight or that top army officers would defect to form the nucleus of a new regime. Neither happened, and now dozens of powerful tribes, religious organizations and ethnic groups, as well as exiles, are jockeying to fill the vacuum. The U.S. has to be careful. It's just possible that the worst thing Washington could do is handpick a winner, who would be tainted as an American puppet. The dangers of that were apparent in Najaf, where the mob murder of a pro-American Shi'ite cleric last week showed how lethal such an image can be.

For the time being, retired Lieut. General Jay Garner will be in charge as he puts his Pentagon-assembled team of 200 U.S. officials in command of Iraq's day-to-day affairs. But the Bush Administration and, in particular, Pentagon hard-liners want to crank up a new government at a lightning pace so U.S. forces can hand off authority to Iraqis before occupation becomes a dirty word. Garner said he hoped to do that in 90 days. But even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the authors of the U.S. plan and a staunch champion of Chalabi, acknowledged that the process could take six months or more. It's already messy. Hours after the northern city of Kirkuk fell to the Kurds, dozens of political rivals opened shop, spray painting their party initials on walls and posting gunmen at their doors. When British forces tapped a tribal chieftain who formerly served in the Baath Party to organize governance in Basra, rioting protesters surrounded the sheik's house. Just a few days of the post-Saddam era have shown how hard it will be to find new leaders that all Iraqis can accept.

Step One will unfold this week as the Bush Administration convenes the first in a series of regional caucuses to nominate members of the Iraqi Interim Authority (I.I.A.). The Authority is intended to put an Iraqi face on the occupation, advising but not controlling Garner's crew while it attempts to restore the country's civil, social and economic functions. Chalabi jumped the gun by scheduling the first meeting. But shortly afterward, U.S. officials pointedly asserted control over the timing, location and guest list.

That list will include well-known opposition figures who have significant followers and a military presence on Iraqi soil. The sometimes fractious Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani will surely attend, but Tehran-based Shi'ite leader Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, who runs the powerful Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, may decide not to grace a U.S.-run conclave if it offends his Iranian backers. Along with Chalabi, another key exile could be a seasoned Iraqi minister from pre-Saddam days, Adnan al-Pachachi, 80. Long based in London but much admired in Arab circles, he is expected to send three representatives. Another potential player is the Iraqi Republican Group, an organization of anti-Saddam political and military leaders who say they organized covertly during Saddam's rule and claim a part in his downfall.

Chalabi may be the most controversial of them all. A British official told TIME that President George W. Bush had privately promised British Prime Minister Tony Blair weeks ago that Chalabi "would not be parachuted in to run Iraq." But there he was, and the Pentagon was clearly aching to promote him. The White House seemed to recognize that the more the U.S. tried to boost Chalabi, the greater the chance he would be rejected as an American stooge. All week long the U.S. found itself fighting the public perception that it intended to dictate Iraq's new political makeup. Eventually the Adminis-tration started hitting the right notes. As Wolfowitz put it earlier, "The goal is not to have any one particular group or leader to be the favored choice of the Americans. That is for the Iraqis to decide."

The image of hands-off supervision would be easier to sustain if not for the emergence of an exile so favored by the Pentagon. Chalabi has been preparing for this moment almost from the day his wealthy, politically prominent family was forced to flee after Iraq's monarchy fell in 1958. An elegant scholar with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, he helped found the umbrella opposition I.N.C. in 1992, and his political savvy earned him pre-eminence in anti-Saddam exile circles. To his passionate supporters, who include Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he's a selfless democrat steeped in Western ways who could guide Iraq out of decades of repression.

But his confidence and aristocratic manner can come across as arrogance, especially when he's out cultivating popular support. As he stood in Nasiriyah last week listening to farmers and teachers detailing their complaints and needs, his gaze would wander over their shoulders. To detractors, especially in the State Department and the CIA, he's an opportunist, a shameless self-promoter and an embezzler. He opened a bank in Jordan that grew into the country's second largest, then was expropriated by the Jordanian government in the late '80s amid charges of fraud. Chalabi was convicted in absentia by a Jordanian military court after friends, said to include Jordan's then Crown Prince Hassan, sped him out of the country. Chalabi has always maintained his innocence. Many State Department officials say Chalabi has been good at lobbying Congress for money but poor at accounting for his spending. These officials also argue that he has no political constituency in Iraq. When Chalabi made public appearances around Nasiriyah last week, he was heavily guarded by U.S. special forces.

Back in Washington, the Pentagon has been grooming some useful backup for Chalabi. Two subway stops from downtown, upstairs from a McDonald's, are the offices of the seven-week-old Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council. A pet project of Wolfowitz's, the organization consists of a group of exiled Iraqi technocrats sympathetic to Chalabi who have been feverishly planning how to restart everything from irrigation to trash collection to oil production as soon as the fighting stops. When they get the word from Garner, they will deploy as liaisons between his temporary American ministers and those Iraqis deemed salvageable from Saddam's sprawling bureaucracy. Over a period of three to six months, the U.S. bosses will hand over their ministries to the I.I.A. as they show their ability to work on their own. That means Chalabi supporters will hold key oversight positions in much of Iraq's government, at least until elections can be held.

None of this guarantees that Chalabi will emerge at the top. Several U.S. officials say they hope to institute a rule that those who serve on the I.I.A. cannot run for office in the first elections. In the end, the Defense Department, according to a senior aide to Rumsfeld, is more interested in leaving Iraq quickly than in picking its future leaders. "There will be people with credible claims to be able to lead various parts of the country," he says, "and our view is, Great, let them sort that out." Sorting out Iraq's fractious polity will challenge the skills of anyone, let alone a man exiled for 45 years. --Reported by Brian Bennett/Nasiriyah, Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington, Meenakshi Ganguly/Kuwait City and J.F.O. McAllister/London

With reporting by Brian Bennett/Nasiriyah, Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington, Meenakshi Ganguly/Kuwait City and J.F.O. McAllister/London