Meanwhile, INC liberals, desperate to unseat Saddam, say they haven't been in a position to be picky about their backers. "We did not ally ourselves with the conservatives. The conservatives decided to support the Iraqi liberals in liberating their country and building democracy," says Adil Awadh, a member of the INC who met with President Bush last week.

"I am a hardcore liberal, and I'm puzzled that the opponents of the Iraqi liberals are the American liberals," Awadh says. "Unless the liberals question the credentials and the devotion of the Iraqi liberals to their cause, I cannot understand their position. I hope they engage the Iraqi liberals in a dialogue, and try to understand the dilemma of the Iraqi people. We would like to look at ourselves as independent, but the Pentagon is supporting the INC and we think that the Pentagon is the best option to handle the reconstruction of Iraq."

Yet Farhang expresses a widely held sentiment when he says it's impossible to consider the INC irrespective of its unsavory alliance with the Pentagon.

"These people have reactionary positions on domestic politics and on foreign policy going back to Vietnam," he says. "People like Rumsfeld and the Weekly Standard crowd, they were the supporters of the Vietnam War. They were always in favor of using force. They ridiculed the idea of pushing human rights in the past. If you look at the background of these people, one is plagued with the irony and paradox that suddenly they have become promoters of democracy in the Middle East region."

As a result of these strange alliances, "People are torn," he says. "It's such a paradoxical situation."

Complicating matters further is that the INC's backers are also the staunchest supporters of Israel's right-wing Likud party. James Woolsey, the ex-CIA director whose name was floated for a ministry position in the interim Iraqi government, is a major INC supporter who sits on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which Lind describes as "The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby."

JINSA even claims direct links with Chalabi and his opposition group. In a 1997 report, it said, "JINSA has been working closely with INC leader Dr. Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office and a subsequently democratic future for Iraq."

All this is why Al-Taee of the Iraqi American Council, a lobbying group that holds itself aloof from the organized opposition parties, says, "Ahmed Chalabi represents Israel's interest."

And it's why some say the Iraqis and their neighbors will never accept the INC. "That affiliation will sow suspicion not only in Iraq but in the broader Arab world that the war and the postwar Iraqi government are being done for Israel," says Chris Toensing, editor of Middle East Report magazine. Indeed, the suspicion does not need to be sown: Most of the Arab world believes that the war was fought in large part for Israel's interests, as well as for oil.

Farhang says that all this makes the INC, for all its idealism, damaged goods. "People like Kanan Makiya and Ahmed Chalabi and their friends, they made the removal of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his regime an absolute and urgent necessity, and therefore any means necessary was justified to remove him," he says. "They searched for the people in Washington who supported that perspective, and the support came from the most right-wing elements of the government. They identified with this perception that Saddam is the ultimate evil. Both groups became extremely callous about the means they had to use to get him," the means being war at all costs.

Now, Farhang says, a similar absolutism in pursuit of Western democracy could backfire. "Makiya says Iraq should be a country where ethnic identity, religious identity and Arab identity all should be discarded and there should be a country named Iraq and all the people who live there should be Iraqis," he says. "This is a wonderful idea. Very few human communities in the world could live up to it."

He believes that if instituted too quickly, federalism, in which the government would represent proportional sectors of the population, will give way to simple sectarianism. In other words, it will become a so-called confessional system, in which competing religious and ethnic groups are awarded various political positions: the prime minister might always be a Shiite, the president a Sunni, etc. "This was the system in Lebanon, and it collapsed," Farhang says.

Yaphe, too, agrees with Makiya's goals, but doesn't think he'll achieve them through an alliance with the neocons. "I like to think what [Makiya] is saying is right in terms of democracy and freedom, but I'm not sure that the way to get there is through the path that he's chosen," she says.

Right now, Chalabi and the INC are riding in on the military's coattails. The Pentagon gave the INC a leg up last week by airlifting Chalabi and a few hundred supporters into southern Iraq to serve as translators and peacekeepers. Makiya wrote in the New Republic Friday that his group is pushing the military to have these forces take over policing in southern Iraq. "[T]he Free Iraqi Forces being assembled by the Iraqi National Congress in southern Iraq are the nucleus of a new Iraqi police force," Makiya wrote. "It is a force that needs to grow, quickly, from its current strength of 700 or so men, with the help of the coalition forces. I shudder at the thought of Americans and Britons policing Iraqi cities. That task must be taken up by Iraqis. Let us make the mistakes that will inevitably occur."

The State Department, though, has no intention of giving the INC that opportunity, and it's won a few victories in the war over the peace. Last week, Congress gave the State Department control of the $2.5 billion it allotted to reconstruction in an emergency war-spending bill, with the Senate explicitly forbidding the Pentagon use of the money, a move Makiya described as a loss for "the forces of democracy."

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld's vetoes of some State Department appointees to oversee the interim Iraqi authority were themselves vetoed. The reconstruction effort will still be led by retired Maj. Gen. Jay Garner, who reports to Gen. Tommy Franks, but the administrator of Baghdad will be Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen whom the Pentagon tried to block.

The larger staff is coming from State as well -- the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that "administration officials said a dispute between the Pentagon and State Department over the assignment of foreign service officers to Garner's team of roughly 200 people has been resolved in favor of the State Department."

This is a good thing, according to Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former general counsel to the CIA and dean of the University of the Pacific Law School, because the State Department is more capable than the Pentagon of managing the competing claims of Iraqis inside and outside of the country.

"In Iraq, you immediately see where these very deep fissures are going to be between the groups who are available to step in and try to create some kind of civil government," she says. "You can imagine the animosity and tension that will be based not only on different religious persuasions, different notions of what kind of governmental structure one wants, but perhaps most importantly, the predictable tension between the group that has toughed it out in Iraq vs. those that have been out of the country in a situation where they're divorced from the reality on the ground.

"These are the kinds of things that the State Department really has the expertise in dealing with," she says.

But those who urge immediate moves toward representative democracy in Iraq are wary of the State Department. Many in the INC have argued that the State Department has scorned them because it disdains their idealistic vision. In December, Makiya told Salon, "The Department of State and the CIA are particularly slow in supporting any genuine democratic initiative. They're among the democrats' weakest supporters. They seem to reserve their support for Islamists and former Baathists."

He's not wrong, says Farhang. "The State Department people are not at all as optimistic about prospects for democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. They think Iraq is a fragmented society and the idea of creating a sense of unity and solidarity in post-Saddam Iraq is extremely difficult to accomplish and no matter what the United States does the consequences could be counter-productive."

Of course, they may well be right, but because they're more worried about stability than the ideologically driven Pentagon, they're more inclined to trust ex-military men to run the country, Farhang says.

"Some military people who defected from Saddam's regime after the 1991 war, many of these people are close to the CIA and the State Department," he says. "Even though they have a dark background, the State Department thinks they probably are more capable of maintaining order and creating some kind of stability than the liberal exiles."

Recent Stories