Gwynne Dyer: Grisly history lesson for Allawi

COMMENT

The last thing Iyad Allawi needed was a photo-op of President George W. Bush congratulating him on becoming Prime Minister of the "sovereign" - but US-appointed - Government of Iraq.

What he must do in order to survive, not only politically but personally, is to put as much space as possible between himself and the United States, so it is just as well that Bush was not able to do the "hand-over of power" in person. Allawi did not mind at all.

Every Iraqi knows what happened to Nuri Said, 14 times Prime Minister and London's main instrument for controlling the British-appointed kings who ruled Iraq until 1958.

When Iraqi nationalists rebelled and overthrew the puppet monarchy, they machine-gunned the young king, who was just playing the role he had been born into.

But when a mob caught Nuri Said two days later, trying to escape Baghdad dressed as a woman, they tore him apart with their bare hands and left his remains in the road to be flattened by the traffic like road-kill. Iraqis do not like collaborators.

The risk of ending up the same way must haunt Allawi, for his position is quite similar.

According to an opinion poll conducted by the Coalition Provisional Authority itself, 92 per cent of Arab Iraqis now see Americans as occupiers, and only 2 per cent as liberators.

Allawi owes his position entirely to the US, depends on US-controlled money for the day-to-day operations of his Government, and must rely on American troops to protect him and fight the resistance.

He is actually more compromised than Nuri Said was, and he knows it.

The situation in Iraq is even worse than it was during the uprisings in April, because the rebels in Fallujah and the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr both effectively won their confrontations with US forces.

Fallujah is now a no-go area for US forces (though they bomb it occasionally), and it serves as haven for the Sunni insurgents who have done most of the fighting against the occupation so far.

The young extremist Sadr was neither killed nor arrested by US forces, as the interim government kept promising. Instead, his influence among the majority Shiites has grown at the expense of his more moderate elders, and Najaf and Karbala have also effectively become no-go areas for US forces.

Half of the newly recruited Iraqi police and Army troops refused to fight fellow Iraqis on behalf of foreigners during the April revolts, and 10 per cent actually switched sides and fought for the rebels.

The spectacular co-ordinated attacks of June 25 - when insurgents stormed police stations and state buildings in five cities, killing about 100 and injuring 300 - show how powerful the Iraqi resistance has become.

To talk of the insurgents as "terrorists" is just name-calling; terrorists do not stand and fight. Nor are they necessarily the "enemies of democracy and of the Iraqi people", as US propaganda insists. They include many Iraqis who believe, rightly or wrongly, that neither genuine democracy nor real freedom is part of the Bush Administration's plans for Iraq.

These are the people that Allawi must convince or marginalise if he is to succeed, or indeed even to survive. That is why, last weekend, he started to emphasise the difference between "foreign terrorists" - the Islamist holy warriors who he and most Iraqis believe are responsible for the indiscriminate suicide bombings that regularly devastate Iraqi cities - and the honest Iraqi patriots who are simply fighting to drive the Americans out.

He didn't put it in exactly those words, of course, since it is the US that pays his bills, but it was clearly the logic behind his offer of amnesty to insurgents who fit the latter category.

An amnesty is obviously the right strategy, but that doesn't mean it will work.

Many, probably most, Iraqis did not see last night's "hand-over" to Allawi's Government as a new beginning.

For the multitude of cynics, it was just the exiles who came back to Iraq on the coat-tails of the US Army re-arranging their deck-chairs once again. Moreover, the insurgents have the bit between their teeth, and people are less inclined to compromise when they think they are going to win.

Allawi himself is a particular problem: he has been a prime CIA "asset" for many years, and admits to having taken money from a total of 15 foreign intelligence agencies.

All in the cause of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, he insists, and it's probably true - but it's not the CV you would choose if your task was to persuade sceptical Iraqi nationalists that your real master is the Iraqi people, not the US.

Allawi is trying to show that he's not a puppet of the American occupation forces - but that is hard when the truth is that he'd be dead in a day without American protection.

Herald Feature: Iraq