Analysis: Not just chaos, but its outcome

Dalal Saoud
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Published April 11, 2003

     BEIRUT, Lebanon, April 11 (UPI) -- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his ruling clique have vanished and the Baath Party regime appears collapsed for good. The post-Saddam era has begun and Iraq and the region are awash in possibilities.
     Unfortunately not all of them are good. The disarray and looting that has rippled through Baghdad, Iraq's second largest city Basra and possibly other areas underscore with heavy lines the need to fill the vacuum of what was Saddam's security apparatus.
     Anarchy fed by revenge and vendetta is a disturbing but real prospect. The U.S.-led coalition, such as it is, got its first taste of it Thursday when Seyyed Abdel Meguid al-Khoei, a prominent Shiite religious leader recently returned from exile and who supported the coalition forces, was assassinated by what were reportedly Shiite rivals in the holy city of Najaf. And in Baghdad, four U.S. soldiers were wounded in a suicide bombing, the third since military operations in Iraq began March 20.
     The British command's efforts to name a tribal chief to run Basra and to propose amnesty for those who would immediately relinquish weapons seems to have run into trouble as well. News reports Thursday described an unruly crowd outside the sheikh's house, purportedly protesting his previous connections with the Baathist regime. British officials have not released the sheikh's name.
     Some 200 miles to the north, in the Iraqi capital itself, looting was widespread the second consecutive day Thursday. Witnesses said almost all government institutions, ministries, Baath Party officials' houses, even the German Embassy and French cultural center, were ransacked.
     ...
     Few Iraqi voices conveyed optimism for what they've heard so far of an interim government, which U.S. and British officials insist will be set up by Iraqis with the help of coalition administrators led by a retired general, Jay Garner. They fear the Americans cannot understand Iraq and its complex, millennia-old fabric of history, tribal and ethnic ties, religious rivalry and myriad interests. The Pentagon's decision to back and send into Iraq this week the controversial leader of a London-based opposition group, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, and 700 of his armed supporters is an example of what many Arabs of the United States' simplistic approach to stabilizing the country.
     While Garner was said to be preparing to move to Baghdad once it's safe to take the lead, Iraqi opposition leaders were divided over whether to support a U.S. rule of the Arab country. Many refuse what they termed "any new dictator regime" and insisted that Iraqis should rule the country by themselves.
     Shibli Mallat, a Lebanese lawyer who became known when he and two Belgian lawyers filed a case against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a court in Brussels, said the Americans so realize "they cannot speak to the Iraqi people and they need the opposition."
     On the interim authority to be set up in Iraq, Mallat summarized the ongoing debate by telling United Press International: "Would it be Garner with Iraqis coming up to assist him or would be Iraqis and Garner supporting them? Iraqis should run the country with the U.S. helping them" -- not the other way around.
     "Everybody should be represented, Arab Sunnis and Shiites as well as Kurds, and it should be the largest national unity," Mallat declared. Not the least to consider will be the perspective of 25 million who remained in Iraq and suffered much of Saddam's iron-fisted regime. That they look with suspicion to the many of the opposition leaders who escaped and lost contact with them years and even decades ago is small surprise.
     With many on the Arab street labeling coalition presence in Iraq as "occupation," Arab countries will again find themselves divided: Should they recognize a U.S.-shaped rule in Iraq?