The Allawi story made it into Newsweek, though the White House has dismissed it as an "urban legend." He is certainly in a position to use harsher tactics than we can.
As John Wayne once said, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
g.msn.com
Iraq's New S. O. B.
Prime Minister Allawi may be no democrat, but his tough-guy approach plays well in Baghdad
By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Christopher Dickey
Newsweek July 26 issue - Baghdad's streets are as mean as any in the world, and since Ayad Allawi took office, the stories people tell in them are even meaner. Soon after he became prime minister of the interim government last month, many Iraqis whisper, he ordered two suspected insurgents shot in front of him. Or, goes another account, he shot seven captive terrorists himself, one after another. Or he personally chopped off the hand of a suspect with an ax.
Did he? Officials in Washington say they've heard the amputation story but have no details. White House officials dismiss it as "urban legend." The Australian newspaper The Age reported last week that two anonymous witnesses saw Allawi shoot seven suspected insurgents as his American bodyguards looked on. Asked by NEWSWEEK if he had killed anyone since taking office, Allawi chuckled and said, "This is a big lie, this is not true, I deny it categorically, No. 1. No. 2, we will spare no effort to secure our people."
After 15 months of chaos, Iraqis are desperate for someone who will impose order. Allawi knows that, and plays on it. Only weeks after taking office, he is already flirting with dictatorship. That would be a terrible irony for the U.S. officials who chose him for his seven-month-long mandate. Fortunately, he's not there yet. First he suggested elections might have to be postponed if the security situation didn't improve, but he backtracked quickly. Soon after the June 28 handover of sovereignty to his regime, Allawi's government assumed martial-law powers—though it has yet to use them. The government also agreed to reinstate capital punishment. "We need sanctions that are up to the scale of the crimes," Allawi says. Yet no one has been executed so far.
This tough former Baathist has precious few democratic credentials. He was first groomed in exile by Britain's intelligence service, M.I.6, then by the CIA, to take power from Saddam Hussein, but repeated coup attempts failed. His Iraqi National Accord, an exile grouping, had little support inside Iraq, but as a secular Shiite, Allawi proved acceptable to both the Shiite majority and to Sunnis. U.S. officials feel confident that Iraq's influential Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, will provide a brake on Allawi's ambitions. "He was so clear to us about his commitment to democracy," says a former U.S. Coalition official. "I don't think anybody thought he was going to be a strongman."
Allawi's aim is to show that's just what he is. He has flooded the streets with cops, many of them from the old regime. He's started a new General Security Directorate, otherwise known as the secret police. Every few days his troops attack neighborhoods where criminals have gathered, rounding up men by the hundreds, cracking heads and sometimes fighting running gun battles. Iraqi TV shows footage of exultant policemen firing their guns into the air as they leave the scene of a roundup. Magistrates have been put on 24-hour duty to handle the intake of prisoners—527 from one raid on July 12. "He's tough as nails on security," says the U.S. official. "Tougher than we are."
Police lieutenant Mutaz Abdul Aziz, 26, who's taken part in two raids so far this month, says he has a new sense of pride in his job. He and his fellow cops didn't get much respect when they were working with the Americans. A couple of months ago, for instance, Aziz was bringing a suspected kidnapper to a police station. The perp began resisting at the doorway, and Aziz smacked him around. An American soldier on duty stepped in. "The Americans arrested me!" he says. "It was humiliating. I realized then that the Americans would never understand this country. We know best how to deal with Iraqis."
Saleh is a 32-year-old Baghdad taxi driver who, with his uncle, was dragged from his car by gun-toting kidnappers in broad daylight. He was released after a beating and a ransom payment of several thousand dollars. He blames the Americans for allowing such criminals to flourish. ''These days, when we want to scare the kids in my family, we tell them 'Democracy is coming to get you' or 'Freedom is coming to get you'," he says with a bitter smile. ''The kids don't know what it means, but they run away." Now Saleh puts his faith in the new sheriff in town. "Allawi is the only one who could fix the current situation," he says. "He's a brave man who has survived many assassination attempts. I trust only him." Most Iraqis seem to agree; 73 percent supported Allawi in a poll last month.
"The Iraqis are willing to trade their freedom for security—for now," says Ghassan al-Atiyyah, the executive director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, who has known Allawi for 20 years. Despite the aura of brutality with which he has surrounded himself, there's no sure bet that Allawi will succeed. "In truth, his hands are still empty," says Sheik Muhammad M. Ali, a Shiite cleric from southern Iraq. Allawi's biggest test will be national elections, scheduled to be held by next January. U.N. election officials who are preparing for the polls say security must improve dramatically to make them feasible.
Allawi's concrete accomplishments are few. He has inspired the feeling of progress more than the substance. And U.S. officials say privately that he may actually have planted the stories about summary executions as part of a psychological smoke-and-mirrors game. "He wants to project that dual role—to the West as a committed democrat, and to the Iraqis as a tough guy who got things done," says one diplomat. Yet the bombs keep going off. Just in the past week, the governor of Mosul was assassinated on the highway, a suicide car bomb at the entrance to Allawi's government offices killed 11 Iraqis, and the Iraqi justice minister narrowly escaped a car-bomb attack that killed five bodyguards. If Allawi is really going to impose order, he'll find it ever harder to look like a democrat. ''You can have an overdose of democracy," a young Iraqi translator tried to explain last week to the American colonel he works for. "That was our problem. We need somebody strong." But there's a danger that Iraqis may end up with a pro-American dictator, the sort of banana-republic despot that an American leader once famously called "an S.O.B., but our S.O.B." Then one of the last good reasons to have invaded Iraq will have proved as illusory as those long-lost weapons of mass destruction.
With Michael Hirsh in Washington |
