Iraq's interim Prime Minister cosy with US power elite

By JUSTIN HUGGLER AND RUPERT CORNWELL in Baghdad

The appointment of Iyad Allawi as Iraq's interim Prime Minister is being seen as an American-backed coup that wrong-footed Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy supposed to be putting together the interim government which will wield "sovereignty" after June 30.

The more that is learned, however, about the sudden emergence of Allawi, a man close to the CIA and MI6, the more it appears the appointment of the new government has been hijacked by the ambitious politicians of the Iraqi Governing Council - the very body it was meant to replace.

The only question is who the council was conspiring with as its members picked jobs for themselves.

But whatever the answer, the appointment of Allawi is the culmination of a series of spectacular u-turns that has given President George W. Bush and his Administration the appearance of lurching in a panic from one flawed policy on Iraq to the next.

Since last November every decision seems to have been made with an eye to one political event alone: Bush's bid for re-election this November.

Originally, it was Ahmad Chalabi the Americans - and in particular Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon - appeared to be grooming as their future tame man in Baghdad, but in recent weeks Chalabi has fallen from grace in Washington. He has now been accused of deliberately duping the US and Britain into war with false intelligence about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction; some even allege he did so at the behest of Iranian intelligence.

Originally the US wanted to hand over sovereignty to an expanded version of the council, mostly made up of former Iraqi opposition leaders who returned from exile with the American tanks.

But the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded elections before any handover.

The Americans called for the UN's Brahimi, who was involved in setting up the transitional government in Afghanistan, to decide whether early elections were possible - in other words, to convince Ayatollah Sistani they were not.

Brahimi duly obliged, and was asked to stay on and find a new interim government acceptable to the ayatollah and Iraqis in general.

He let it be known he would pass over the council's members and choose a government of technocrats, but the council has now announced the appointment one of its own members as Prime Minister. And not just any member, but one who looks distinctly like Ahmad Chalabi Mark II.

Like Chalabi, Allawi heads his own Iraqi opposition group, and has long cultivated links with Western intelligence agencies - first MI6, and more recently the CIA.

He passed intelligence to the US and Britain before the war, including, it is reported, the notorious claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

Some US spokesmen seemed as mystified as everyone else when the council made its move, at first saying Allawi was only the council's suggestion, not a final choice, which would be for Brahimi to make.

The US occupation governor in Iraq, Paul Bremer, was apparently with the council for an hour before Brahimi was summoned to be informed of the decision.

Brahimi's statement that he welcomed Allawi's appointment, which effectively sealed it, sounded like nothing so much as a man relieved to pass the buck on an awkward question. But in outflanking the UN, Bremer and his political masters have sacrificed much credibility for an interim government that is already the subject of huge scepticism both in Iraq and abroad.

Little more than a year ago, the neo-conservatives who dominate US foreign policy were rampant, peddling their vision of a Pax Americana throughout the Middle East, in which the road to Jerusalem and a lasting Israeli-Palestinian settlement ran through a newly democratic Baghdad.

Messrs Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the rest have fallen quiet. Hardly had the Iraq war been declared over than the forced tinkerings began, of which the anointing of Allawi is merely the latest.

Retired General Jay Garner was the official originally named to head reconstruction efforts. But as lawlessness mounted, he was considered ineffectual. After exactly a month Garner was replaced by the former diplomat Paul Bremer, on May 11, 2003, in charge of a new Coalition Provisional Authority.

The US contingent was to have been scaled back to less than 100,000 by now. But Bush now says it will be kept at the present 138,000 for the foreseeable future, and increased if necessary.

LIFE IN EXILE

* Iyad Allawi is a formerly exiled secular Shiite and former intelligence officer.

* Allawi, 58, is the scion of a political family who had CIA backing in a failed 1996 coup to bring down Saddam Hussein.

* He spent more than 30 years abroad, first as a medical student in Britain supporting Saddam's Baath Party.

* Later, as a wealthy exile, he founded the Iraqi National Accord with funds from the CIA.

* Saddam's secret police were sent to assassinate him at his home in London in 1978 after he struck up a relationship with the British secret service.

* Axe-wielding agents burst into his bedroom as he and his wife slept, but fled when his father-in-law appeared.

* Allawi spent a long period recovering and still bears the scars.

* The accord group provided some of the now widely discredited intelligence on Saddam's weapons that formed US President George W. Bush's prime justification for invading.

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Herald Feature: Iraq