One of the people currently rumored to have State Department backing is Adnan Pachachi, an 80-year-old exile from a prominent Sunni family who lives in the United Arab Emirates. A former Iraqi foreign minister who served before the 1968 coup, Pachachi recently formed a new exile organization to serve as a counterweight to Chalabi and the INC. He has the support of Laith Kubba, an Iraqi exile and senior program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington who is widely admired by Iraq-watchers.

But some exiles in and out of the INC deride Pachachi as a tool of the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis, whose agenda includes keeping Iraq's Sunni minority in power.

Al-Taee from the Iraqi American Council insists there will be room for all parties in planning for the future of Iraq. "I think in the future of Iraq, we should include as many people as possible, including all the opposition groups and all the people who are inside and have skills. The INC is one of the groups, but there are also the two Kurdish groups, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Al-Dawa [another Shiite Islamic party] and the Iraqi Communist Party." Yet asked about Pachachi, he's contemptuous.

"Adnan Pachachi is a product of Sheik Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates, and of Saudi Arabia," he says angrily. "They want to bring him in because he will represent their interests. The State Department has people influenced by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those countries finance him. He's a Sunni. These governments, they want to make sure Iraq's government continues to be Sunni. Around Pachachi you have some of the ex-Baathists. They want to stay in power and keep the power in the same category of people."

David Phillips is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who spent last summer advising Iraqi exiles in the democratic principles working group convened by the State Department. He says he has no way of knowing whether Pachachi embraces Saudi interests, but adds, "He's been on the ground in Saudi Arabia for a long time and that will affect his view of the world. To some extent he's a protector of the status quo in Iraq."

Judith Kipper of the Middle East Forum rejects rumors of Pachachi's Saudi influences as "static," but suggests another problem with him. "I don't think he's a tool of anybody," she says. "The main problem is he's very old. He is certainly symbolically extremely important, and might be able to play a role similar to the king of Afghanistan."

As for fears of Sunni hegemony, Kipper notes that the INC has almost entirely excluded Sunnis. "It's very important that he's a Sunni, because Sunnis are poorly represented in the opposition groups."

The United Nations

Pachachi has actually called for the United Nations to oversee the interim authority -- indeed, part of his antipathy for the INC stems from their willingness to attach themselves to the Pentagon. In the Financial Times on March 3, he wrote, "Serving as an advisory body attached to a U.S. military administration would be damaging and unacceptable."

United Nations control over the postwar period is the ideal for many observers, especially those who opposed the war. Clovis Maksoud, professor of international relations at American University in Washington and a former Arab League ambassador, says the reconstruction "should be a United Nations enterprise. It will have much more acceptability, legitimacy and moral influence, which is very important in this case. It should be the transitional authority in the same way it is in Afghanistan and it was in East Timor."

Aid groups also want to see the U.N. take charge. In an April 3 policy paper, Oxfam wrote, "It is crucial that the United Nations is given a mandate that is clear, credible and achievable. This will require a Security Council resolution. Securing this will need leadership in the Security Council from non-permanent members who have preserved good relations with all sides ... An achievable mandate for the U.N. will also require the U.S. government to fully back, both politically and financially, the United Nations, and then Iraqi authorities. If this does not happen, or the U.N. was perceived to be working under a U.S. authority, the U.N. would be set up to fail."

In a certain sense, this is all a moot argument, because American forces have no intention of turning authority over to the U.N. Yet while the U.N.'s role will be subordinate to America's, there's still a question of whether it will be strictly humanitarian or whether it will extend into nation-building.

At a talk at New York's Asia Society Thursday evening, Rachel Bronson, director of Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that France, Italy, Argentina and Spain all have paramilitary forces that are better suited than the American military "for tasks that straddle the blurry line between policing and soldiering." She continued, "We desperately need international cooperation. Somehow we need to get the U.N. involved and endorsing this."

Yet it's not only neocons who are wary of too much U.N. involvement. Phillips, who has served as a senior advisor to the United Nations Secretariat Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, believes that the pre-war diplomatic catastrophe in the Security Council has left some nations "ill-intended" toward American efforts in Iraq. Democratization, says Phillips, "is going to be the key to making this work," but France and Russia "would like it to fail."

Furthermore, he says, it's not simply that the U.S. has shut the international body out -- the Security Council's own internecine fighting has kept it from taking a more proactive role.

"There are some countries that have spite towards this process and who are trying to delegitimize military action," he says. "They are keeping the Security Council as a whole from authorizing any post-conflict reconstruction or governance assistance lest it appear like a validation of the American and British approach."

For example, he says, the French and Russians are trying to keep U.N. Secretary General Koffi Annan from designating a special representative to Iraq "whose involvement would seem to legitimize the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq."

"They want more money out of the reconstruction, they want more contracts and they want to make sure their debt obligations are repaid," Phillips says.

Until this Security Council breakdown is somehow resolved, Phillips says any larger role would be counterproductive. "The U.N. should have a role, but it should have a role which is constructive and based on its capabilities. At this juncture, that's a humanitarian role," he says.

The fear that a faction of the U.N. wants to see democratization fail in Iraq is shared by some members of the Iraqi opposition. "It was a day of jubilation for the Iraqis to see Saddam Hussein's demise, but there will be another day of similar jubilation for dictatorships in the Middle East's non-Iraq radical Islamic groups and maybe some leftists if they see the new Iraqi democratic government failing," says Awadh.

Many of the eternally betrayed Kurds also view U.N. involvement with horror. "Those countries, especially European countries and Arab countries, who stood beside Saddam Hussein, it is not wise to give them an opportunity in the future of Iraq," says Mohammad Sabir, director of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's U.S. office. "We want everything run by the Iraqi people in cooperation very closely with the United States. We want the United States forces to remain in Iraq until stability is maintained."

This isn't just about Kurdish anger over the contretemps at the Security Council. It's based on the belief that, from the international point of view, there's an inverse relationship between Kurdish autonomy and regional stability.

"The U.N. would be least sympathetic to an autonomous Kurdistan," says Farhang. "The Kurds, now that they're making sacrifices to make war on Saddam Hussein, they will only want to expand their power. The U.N. is a lot less sympathetic to that option, because it makes it impossible to have a unified Iraqi state." But the Defense Department, he says, "would be quite open" to Kurdish control of Kirkuk -- after all, the Kurds are their greatest allies in the region. "These are people who have worked with the Defense Department and fought with American forces," he says. (The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the Kurds who took Kirkuk were working closely with the American military, leaving the State Department to reassure Turkey.)

Of course, none of the parties (except, in all likelihood, the Kurds themselves) favors an independent Kurdish state. The debate is about the independence of the Kurds within the new Iraq -- and whether that independence will give ideas to neighboring Kurdish populations.

This leads, once again, to a difficult balance between idealism and pragmatism. After all, if anyone deserves the world's solidarity, it's the Kurds, the world's largest stateless people, sold out by the West repeatedly since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But as Farhang says, "Once the Iraqi Kurds establish their autonomy, then there are the Iranian Kurds and the Turkish Kurds. How do they relate to this autonomy?"

That's partly why, for all the contradictions, Farhang says that if all the horror of the recent past and foreseeable future is going to result in a more just Iraq and peaceful Middle East, "That salvation could only come from the U.N. There's no question that whatever group benefits from American support in post-Saddam Iraq will be unpopular in the region and will become unpopular in the country itself because it lacks legitimacy," he says. Thus a final irony -- only the U.N., he believes, can make the hawks' dreams of a new Middle East come true.

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