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In July, 2003, two months after President Bush
declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding
down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had
been among the war’s most enthusiastic supporters,
began warning the Administration that the
American-led occupation would face a heightened
insurgency—a campaign of bombings and
assassinations—later that summer. Israeli
intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the
insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence
operatives and other foreign fighters, who were
crossing the unprotected border between Iran and
Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States
to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at
whatever cost.
The border stayed open, however. “The Administration
wasn’t ignoring the Israeli intelligence about
Iran,” Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director
of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and
has close ties to the White House, explained.
“There’s no question that we took no steps last
summer to close the border, but our attitude was
that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts
with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and
thousands were coming across every day—for instance,
to make pilgrimages.” He added, “The questions we
confronted were ‘Is the trade-off worth it? Do we
want to isolate the Iraqis?’ Our answer was that as
long as the Iranians were not picking up guns and
shooting at us, it was worth the price.”
Clawson said, “The Israelis disagreed quite
vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was
very straightforward—that the Iranians would create
social and charity organizations in Iraq and use
them to recruit people who would engage in armed
attacks against Americans.”
The warnings of increased violence proved accurate.
By early August, the insurgency against the
occupation had exploded, with bombings in Baghdad,
at the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations
headquarters, that killed forty-two people. A former
Israeli intelligence officer said that Israel’s
leadership had concluded by then that the United
States was unwilling to confront Iran; in terms of
salvaging the situation in Iraq, he said, “it
doesn’t add up. It’s over. Not militarily—the United
States cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq—but
politically.”
Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who until
last year served on the National Security Council
and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle
East Policy, told me that late last summer “the
Administration had a chance to turn it around after
it was clear that ‘Mission Accomplished’”—a
reference to Bush’s May speech—“was premature. The
Bush people could have gone to their allies and got
more boots on the ground. But the neocons were dug
in—‘We’re doing this on our own.’”
Leverett went on, “The President was only belatedly
coming to the understanding that he had to either
make a strategic change or, if he was going to
insist on unilateral control, get tougher and find
the actual insurgency.” The Administration then
decided, Leverett said, to “deploy the Guantánamo
model in Iraq”—to put aside its rules of
interrogation. That decision failed to stop the
insurgency and eventually led to the scandal at the
Abu Ghraib prison.
In early November, the President received a grim
assessment from the C.I.A.’s station chief in
Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known
internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security
situation in Iraq was nearing collapse. The
document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that
“none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions
and leaders have shown an ability to govern the
country” or to hold elections and draft a
constitution.
A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the
violence and the new intelligence, finally attempted
to change its go-it-alone policy, and set June 30th
as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an
interim government, which would allow it to bring
the United Nations into the process. “November was
one year before the Presidential election,” a U.N.
consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. “They
panicked and decided to share the blame with the
U.N. and the Iraqis.”
A former Administration official who had supported
the war completed a discouraging tour of Iraq late
last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and found
that the Israelis he met with were equally
discouraged. As they saw it, their warnings and
advice had been ignored, and the American war
against the insurgency was continuing to founder. “I
spent hours talking to the senior members of the
Israeli political and intelligence community,” the
former official recalled. “Their concern was ‘You’re
not going to get it right in Iraq, and shouldn’t we
be planning for the worst-case scenario and how to
deal with it?’”
Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who
supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of
Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to
privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that
America had lost in Iraq; according to an American
close to Barak, he said that Israel “had learned
that there’s no way to win an occupation.” The only
issue, Barak told Cheney, “was choosing the size of
your humiliation.” Cheney did not respond to Barak’s
assessment. (Cheney’s office declined to comment.)
In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle
East, and the United States, officials told me that
by the end of last year Israel had concluded that
the Bush Administration would not be able to bring
stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel
needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s
government decided, I was told, to minimize the
damage that the war was causing to Israel’s
strategic position by expanding its long-standing
relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a
significant presence on the ground in the
semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several
officials depicted Sharon’s decision, which involves
a heavy financial commitment, as a potentially
reckless move that could create even more chaos and
violence as the insurgency in Iraq continues to
grow.
Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now
quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for
Kurdish commando units and, most important in
Israel’s view, running covert operations inside
Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels
particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in
the region has been strengthened by the war. The
Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad,
Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service,
who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and,
in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.
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Asked to comment, Mark Regev, the spokesman for the
Israeli Embassy in Washington, said, “The story is
simply untrue and the relevant governments know it’s
untrue.” Kurdish officials declined to comment, as
did a spokesman for the State Department.
However, a senior C.I.A. official acknowledged in an
interview last week that the Israelis were indeed
operating in Kurdistan. He told me that the Israelis
felt that they had little choice: “They think they
have to be there.” Asked whether the Israelis had
sought approval from Washington, the official
laughed and said, “Do you know anybody who can tell
the Israelis what to do? They’re always going to do
what is in their best interest.” The C.I.A. official
added that the Israeli presence was widely known in
the American intelligence community.
The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in
Kurdistan—characterized by the former Israeli
intelligence officer as “Plan B”—has also raised
tensions between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked
bitter statements from Turkish politicians and, in a
major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran,
Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant
Kurdish minorities. In early June, Intel Brief, a
privately circulated intelligence newsletter
produced by Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A.
counterterrorism chief, and Philip Giraldi, who
served as the C.I.A.’s deputy chief of base in
Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties, said:
Turkish sources confidentially report that the Turks
are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli
presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of
Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state. .
. . The Turks note that the large Israeli
intelligence operations in Northern Iraq incorporate
anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity, including
support to Iranian and Syrian Kurds who are in
opposition to their respective governments.
In the years since the first Gulf War, Iraq’s Kurds,
aided by an internationally enforced no-fly zone and
by a U.N. mandate providing them with a share of the
country’s oil revenues, have managed to achieve a
large measure of independence in three northern
Iraqi provinces. As far as most Kurds are concerned,
however, historic “Kurdistan” extends well beyond
Iraq’s borders, encompassing parts of Iran, Syria,
and Turkey. All three countries fear that Kurdistan,
despite public pledges to the contrary, will declare
its independence from the interim Iraqi government
if conditions don’t improve after June 30th.
Israeli involvement in Kurdistan is not new.
Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies,
Israel actively supported a Kurdish rebellion
against Iraq, as part of its strategic policy of
seeking alliances with non-Arabs in the Middle East.
In 1975, the Kurds were betrayed by the United
States, when Washington went along with a decision
by the Shah of Iran to stop supporting Kurdish
aspirations for autonomy in Iraq.
Betrayal and violence became the norm in the next
two decades. Inside Iraq, the Kurds were brutally
repressed by Saddam Hussein, who used airpower and
chemical weapons against them. In 1984, the
Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., initiated a
campaign of separatist violence in Turkey that
lasted fifteen years; more than thirty thousand
people, most of them Kurds, were killed. The Turkish
government ruthlessly crushed the separatists, and
eventually captured the P.K.K.’s leader, Abdullah
Ocalan. Last month, the P.K.K., now known as the
Kongra-Gel, announced that it was ending a five-year
unilateral ceasefire and would begin targeting
Turkish citizens once again.
The Iraqi Kurdish leadership was furious when, early
this month, the United States acceded to a U.N.
resolution on the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty
that did not affirm the interim constitution that
granted the minority Kurds veto power in any
permanent constitution. Kurdish leaders immediately
warned President Bush in a letter that they would
not participate in a new Shiite-controlled
government unless they were assured that their
rights under the interim constitution were
preserved. “The people of Kurdistan will no longer
accept second-class citizenship in Iraq,” the letter
said.
There are fears that the Kurds will move to seize
the city of Kirkuk, together with the substantial
oil reserves in the surrounding region. Kirkuk is
dominated by Arab Iraqis, many of whom were
relocated there, beginning in the
nineteen-seventies, as part of Saddam Hussein’s
campaign to “Arabize” the region, but the Kurds
consider Kirkuk and its oil part of their historic
homeland. “If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the
Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the
Turkomen, and there will be a bloodbath,” an
American military expert who is studying Iraq told
me. “And, even if the Kurds do take Kirkuk, they
can’t transport the oil out of the country, since
all of the pipelines run through the Sunni-Arab
heartland.”
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A top German national-security official said in an
interview that “an independent Kurdistan with
sufficient oil would have enormous consequences for
Syria, Iran, and Turkey” and would lead to
continuing instability in the Middle East—no matter
what the outcome in Iraq is. There is also a
widespread belief, another senior German official
said, that some elements inside the Bush
Administration—he referred specifically to the
faction headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz—would tolerate an independent Kurdistan.
This, the German argued, would be a mistake. “It
would be a new Israel—a pariah state in the middle
of hostile nations.”
A declaration of independence would trigger a
Turkish response—and possibly a war—and also derail
what has been an important alliance for Israel.
Turkey and Israel have become strong diplomatic and
economic partners in the past decade. Thousands of
Israelis travel to Turkey every year as tourists.
Turkish opposition to the Iraq war has strained the
relationship; still, Turkey remains oriented toward
the West and, despite the victory of an Islamic
party in national elections in 2002, relatively
secular. It is now vying for acceptance in the
European Union. In contrast, Turkey and Syria have
been at odds for years, at times coming close to
open confrontation, and Turkey and Iran have long
been regional rivals. One area of tension between
them is the conflict between Turkey’s pro-Western
stand and Iran’s rigid theocracy. But their mutual
wariness of the Kurds has transcended these
divisions.
A European foreign minister, in a conversation last
month, said that the “blowing up” of Israel’s
alliance with Turkey would be a major setback for
the region. He went on, “To avoid chaos, you need
the neighbors to work as one common entity.”
The Israelis, however, view the neighborhood, with
the exception of Kurdistan, as hostile. Israel is
convinced that Iran is on the verge of developing
nuclear weapons, and that, with Syria’s help, it is
planning to bolster Palestinian terrorism as Israel
withdraws from the Gaza Strip.
Iraqi Shiite militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr,
the former American intelligence official said, are
seen by the Israeli leadership as “stalking horses”
for Iran—owing much of their success in defying the
American-led coalition to logistical and
communications support and training provided by
Iran. The former intelligence official said, “We
began to see telltale signs of organizational
training last summer. But the White House didn’t
want to hear it: ‘We can’t take on another problem
right now. We can’t afford to push Iran to the point
where we’ve got to have a showdown.’”
Last summer, according to a document I obtained, the
Bush Administration directed the Marines to draft a
detailed plan, called Operation Stuart, for the
arrest and, if necessary, assassination of Sadr. But
the operation was cancelled, the former intelligence
official told me, after it became clear that Sadr
had been “tipped off” about the plan. Seven months
later, after Sadr spent the winter building support
for his movement, the American-led coalition shut
down his newspaper, provoking a crisis that Sadr
survived with his status enhanced, thus insuring
that he will play a major, and unwelcome, role in
the political and military machinations after June
30th.
“Israel’s immediate goal after June 30th is to build
up the Kurdish commando units to balance the Shiite
militias—especially those which would be hostile to
the kind of order in southern Iraq that Israel would
like to see,” the former senior intelligence
official said. “Of course, if a fanatic Sunni
Baathist militia took control—one as hostile to
Israel as Saddam Hussein was—Israel would unleash
the Kurds on it, too.” The Kurdish armed forces,
known as the peshmerga, number an estimated
seventy-five thousand troops, a total that far
exceeds the known Sunni and Shiite militias.
The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged
that since late last year Israel has been training
Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner
and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most
secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The
initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds,
the former officer said, was to allow them to do
what American commando units had been unable to
do—penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill
off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni
insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether
any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling
was that this was a more effective way to get at the
insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the
growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting
the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same
Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate
and attack in Turkey.”
The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably
expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives
have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by
Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other
sensitive devices that primarily target suspected
Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said,
“Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a
Machiavellian way—as balance against Saddam. It’s
Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds,
Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and
Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the
Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush
Administration.”
Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that
their intelligence community also has evidence that
Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan,
and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and
Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes.
Syrian and Lebanese officials believe that Israeli
intelligence played a role in a series of violent
protests in Syria in mid-March in which Syrian
Kurdish dissidents and Syrian troops clashed,
leaving at least thirty people dead. (There are
nearly two million Kurds living in Syria, which has
a population of seventeen million.) Much of the
fighting took place in cities along Syria’s borders
with Turkey and Kurdish-controlled Iraq. Michel
Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, told
me that while the disturbances amounted to an
uprising by the Kurds against the leadership of
Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, his government
had evidence that Israel was “preparing the Kurds to
fight all around Iraq, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran.
They’re being programmed to do commando operations.”
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The top German national-security official told me
that he believes that the Bush Administration
continually misread Iran. “The Iranians wanted to
keep America tied down in Iraq, and to keep it busy
there, but they didn’t want chaos,” he said. One of
the senior German officials told me, “The critical
question is ‘What will the behavior of Iran be if
there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to
Israel?’ Iran does not want an Israeli land-based
aircraft carrier”—that is, a military stronghold—“on
its border.”
Another senior European official said, “The Iranians
would do something positive in the south of Iraq if
they get something positive in return, but
Washington won’t do it. The Bush Administration
won’t ask the Iranians for help, and can’t ask the
Syrians. Who is going to save the United States?” He
added that, at the start of the American invasion of
Iraq, several top European officials had told their
counterparts in Iran, “You will be the winners in
the region.”
Israel is not alone in believing that Iran, despite
its protestations, is secretly hard at work on a
nuclear bomb. Early this month, the International
Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for
monitoring nuclear proliferation, issued its fifth
quarterly report in a row stating that Iran was
continuing to misrepresent its research into
materials that could be used for the production of
nuclear weapons. Much of the concern centers on an
underground enrichment facility at Natanz, two
hundred and fifty miles from the Iran-Iraq border,
which, during previous I.A.E.A. inspections, was
discovered to contain centrifuges showing traces of
weapons-grade uranium. The huge complex, which is
still under construction, is said to total nearly
eight hundred thousand square feet, and it will be
sheltered in a few months by a roof whose design
allows it to be covered with sand. Once the work is
completed, the complex “will be blind to satellites,
and the Iranians could add additional floors
underground,” an I.A.E.A. official told me. “The
question is, will the Israelis hit Iran?”
Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A. director, has
repeatedly stated that his agency has not “seen
concrete proof of a military program, so it’s
premature to make a judgment on that.” David
Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is an
expert on nuclear proliferation, buttressed the
I.A.E.A. claim. “The United States has no concrete
evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” Albright
told me. “It’s just an inference. There’s no smoking
gun.” (Last Friday, at a meeting in Vienna, the
I.A.E.A. passed a resolution that, while
acknowledging some progress, complained that Iran
had yet to be as open as it should be, and urgently
called upon it to resolve a list of outstanding
questions.)
The I.A.E.A. official told me that the I.A.E.A.
leadership has been privately warned by Foreign
Ministry officials in Iran that they are “having a
hard time getting information” from the hard-line
religious and military leaders who run the country.
“The Iranian Foreign Ministry tells us, ‘We’re just
diplomats, and we don’t know whether we’re getting
the whole story from our own people,’” the official
said. He noted that the Bush Administration has
repeatedly advised the I.A.E.A. that there are
secret nuclear facilities in Iran that have not been
declared. The Administration will not say more,
apparently worried that the information could get
back to Iran.
Patrick Clawson, of the Institute for Near East
Policy, provided another explanation for the
reluctance of the Bush Administration to hand over
specific intelligence. “If we were to identify a
site,” he told me, “it’s conceivable that it could
be quickly disassembled and the I.A.E.A. inspectors
would arrive”—international inspections often take
weeks to organize—“and find nothing.” The American
intelligence community, already discredited because
of its faulty reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, would be criticized anew. “It’s much
better,” Clawson said, “to have the I.A.E.A. figure
out on its own that there’s a site and then find
evidence that there had been enriched material
there.”
Clawson told me that Israel’s overwhelming
national-security concern must be Iran. Given that a
presence in Kurdistan would give Israel a way to
monitor the Iranian nuclear effort, he said, “it
would be negligent for the Israelis not to be
there.”
At the moment, the former American senior
intelligence official said, the Israelis’ tie to
Kurdistan “would be of greater value than their
growing alliance with Turkey. ‘We love Turkey but
got to keep the pressure on Iran.’” The former
Israeli intelligence officer said, “The Kurds were
the last surviving group close to the United States
with any say in Iraq. The only question was how to
square it with Turkey.”
There may be no way to square it with Turkey. Over
breakfast in Ankara, a senior Turkish official
explained, “Before the war, Israel was active in
Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very
dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want
to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it.”
Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb—“We will burn
a blanket to kill a flea”—he said, “We have told the
Kurds, ‘We are not afraid of you, but you should be
afraid of us.’” (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later
was more direct: “We tell our Israeli and Kurdish
friends that Turkey’s good will lies in keeping Iraq
together. We will not support alternative
solutions.”)
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“If you end up with a divided Iraq, it will bring
more blood, tears, and pain to the Middle East, and
you will be blamed,” the senior Turkish official
said. “From Mexico to Russia, everybody will claim
that the United States had a secret agenda in Iraq:
you came there to break up Iraq. If Iraq is divided,
America cannot explain this to the world.” The
official compared the situation to the breakup of
Yugoslavia, but added, “In the Balkans, you did not
have oil.” He said, “The lesson of Yugoslavia is
that when you give one country independence
everybody will want it.” If that happens, he said,
“Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something
happens there, it will be impossible to contain the
crisis.”
In Ankara, another senior Turkish official explained
that his government had “openly shared its worries”
about the Israeli military activities inside
Kurdistan with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “They
deny the training and the purchase of property and
claim it’s not official but done by private persons.
Obviously, our intelligence community is aware that
it was not so. This policy is not good for America,
Iraq, or Israel and the Jews.”
Turkey’s increasingly emphatic and public complaints
about Israel’s missile attacks on the Hamas
leadership in the Gaza Strip is another factor in
the growing tensions between the allies. On May
26th, Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul,
announced at a news conference in Ankara that the
Turkish government was bringing its Ambassador in
Israel home for consultations on how to revive the
Middle East peace process. He also told the Turkish
parliament that the government was planning to
strengthen its ties to the Palestinian Authority,
and, in conversations with Middle Eastern diplomats
in the past month, he expressed grave concern about
Israel. In one such talk, one diplomat told me, Gul
described Israeli activities, and the possibility of
an independent Kurdistan, as “presenting us with a
choice that is not a real choice—between survival
and alliance.”
A third Turkish official told me that the Israelis
were “talking to us in order to appease our concern.
They say, ‘We aren’t doing anything in Kurdistan to
undermine your interests. Don’t worry.’” The
official added, “If it goes out publicly what
they’ve been doing, it will put your government and
our government in a difficult position. We can
tolerate ‘Kurdistan’ if Iraq is intact, but nobody
knows the future—not even the Americans.”
A former White House official depicted the
Administration as eager—almost desperate—late this
spring to install an acceptable new interim
government in Iraq before President Bush’s declared
June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty.
The Administration turned to Lakhdar Brahimi, the
United Nations special envoy, to “put together
something by June 30th—just something that could
stand up” through the Presidential election, the
former official said. Brahimi was given the task of
selecting, with Washington’s public approval, the
thirty-one members of Iraq’s interim government.
Nevertheless, according to press reports, the choice
of Iyad Allawi as interim Prime Minister was a
disappointment to Brahimi.
The White House has yet to deal with Allawi’s past.
His credentials as a neurologist, and his
involvement during the past two decades in
anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the
British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been
widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party
operative while Saddam struggled for control in the
nineteen-sixties and seventies—Saddam became
President in 1979—is much less well known. “Allawi
helped Saddam get to power,” an American
intelligence officer told me. “He was a very
effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc
Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in
the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about
Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man
of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that
he’s a thug.”
Early this year, one of Allawi’s former
medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi,
published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London
raising questions about his character and his
medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a “big
husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and
frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical
students.” Allawi’s medical degree, she wrote, “was
conferred upon him by the Baath party.” Allawi moved
to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his
medical education; there he was in charge of the
European operations of the Baath Party organization
and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its
intelligence agency, until 1975.
“If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his
hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he
does,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A.
officer, said. “He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for
the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.” A
cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled
by the U.S. indifference to Allawi’s personal
history, told me early this month that Allawi was
involved with a Mukhabarat “hit team” that sought
out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout
Europe. (Allawi’s office did not respond to a
request for comment.) At some point, for reasons
that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the
Baathists organized a series of attempts on his
life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin
who broke into his home near London in 1978,
resulted in a year-long hospital stay.
The Saban Center’s Flynt Leverett said of the
transfer of sovereignty, “If it doesn’t work, there
is no fallback—nothing.” The former senior American
intelligence official told me, similarly, that “the
neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of
the hat” in Iraq. “What’s the plan? They say, ‘We
don’t need it. Democracy is strong enough. We’ll
work it out.’”
Middle East diplomats and former C.I.A. operatives
who now consult in Baghdad have told me that many
wealthy Iraqi businessmen and their families have
deserted Baghdad in recent weeks in anticipation of
continued, and perhaps heightened, suicide attacks
and terror bombings after June 30th. “We’ll see
Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis getting out,” Michel
Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information,
reported. “What the resistance is doing is targeting
the poor people who run the bureaucracy—those who
can’t afford to pay for private guards. A month ago,
friends of mine who are important landowners in Iraq
came to Baghdad to do business. The cost of one
day’s security was about twelve thousand dollars.”
Whitley Bruner, a retired intelligence officer who
was a senior member of the C.I.A.’s task force on
Iraq a decade ago, said that the new interim
government in Iraq is urgently seeking ways to
provide affordable security for second-tier
officials—the men and women who make the government
work. In early June, two such officials—Kamal Jarrah,
an Education Ministry official, and Bassam Salih
Kubba, who was serving as deputy foreign
minister—were assassinated by unidentified gunmen
outside their homes. Neither had hired private
guards. Bruner, who returned from Baghdad earlier
this month, said that he was now working to help
organize Iraqi companies that could provide
high-quality security that Iraqis could afford.
“It’s going to be a hot summer,” Bruner said. “A lot
of people have decided to get to Lebanon, Jordan, or
the Gulf and wait this one out.”
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