Iraqi President Elevates Office’s Profile

Iraq’s equivalent of the West Wing was abuzz Wednesday as President Jalal Talabani and his staff raced to finalize details of his high-profile trip to Washington to shore up U.S. support for the war in Iraq. But there were a few glitches.

Rats had gnawed away the TV antenna cables in Talabani’s “war room,” leaving just one of the four sets working and curtailing his media team’s access to the outside world.

His chief of protocol, responsible for arranging state visits and diplomatic niceties, lay in a hospital with a broken leg and arm after his car was struck by a U.S. military Humvee along the airport road Tuesday.

Then came word that security officials wanted everyone accompanying Talabani to the U.S. to have their bags packed and ready the night before for inspection. The demand sparked a minor panic among the president’s aides and advisors, who worried about having to hurry home and get their luggage.

Despite such problems, Talabani said he planned to present Americans a positive picture of Iraq as it moves toward several milestones, including a referendum on the recently drafted constitution and the start of the trial of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein in October, and, if the charter is adopted, parliamentary elections in mid-December.

“I’d like to explain the realities of Iraq,” Talabani said Wednesday in an interview in his Green Zone offices. “Not all of it is Fallouja,” the violence-torn city west of Baghdad that has been a hotbed of the insurgency.

Talabani acknowledges that Iraq still faces serious problems nearly 2 1/2 years after Hussein’s ouster, including electricity and gasoline shortages and insurgent attacks. But the 72-year-old president is loath to dwell on the negative and says life in Iraq today is better than under Hussein.

“When Iraq was liberated from dictatorship, the economic life was liberated from the monopoly of the state,” he said. “We have free markets, free trade, and the standard of living has risen. We are going without any stop in our democratic process, regardless of all the difficulties that we are facing.”

Although Iraq’s presidency has much less power than the prime minister’s post, Talabani is trying to make the most of his position. In addition to visiting Washington next week, he will head Iraq’s delegation to the U.N. General Assembly.

Talabani, a rotund and bespectacled leader of Iraq’s mostly pro-American Kurdish minority, said he wasn’t coming to Washington “to make propaganda” for President Bush amid mounting criticism of his handling of the war. Nevertheless, he said he planned to shower Bush and the U.S. with gratitude for overthrowing Hussein.

“I consider President George W. Bush as one of the greatest leaders of the United States,” he said, “and he’s the hero of the liberation of Iraq.”

Though Bush may be pleased with such sentiments, Talabani’s gratitude is not limited to Washington. It extends to other countries that the U.S. considers adversaries, such as Syria, which sheltered Iraqi dissidents during Hussein’s rule, and Iran, which provided Kurdish rebels sanctuary and support during their years of armed struggle against the Baghdad government.

Talabani even fondly recalled Iran’s new hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been scorned by Washington. “Once together we prepared some kind of battle against Saddam Hussein,” he said, declining to provide details.

Talabani did not outline any specific promises he hoped to extract from Bush or other American politicians when he meets with them. At the United Nations, he said, he hoped to bolster international support for Iraq’s fledgling government.

“I will do my best to explain facts and figures to friends from both parties,” he said. “It’s up to them to choose to accept it or reject it.”

A gifted raconteur who is fluent in English and Persian as well as Kurdish and Arabic, Talabani became active in politics as a law student in Baghdad during the 1950s. A few years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, he became a leader of the Kurdish uprising against the central government.

After the collapse of that movement in 1975, he formed his own party. He and his fighters later escaped to Iran, and during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war they staged sporadic attacks on Hussein’s forces.

When Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated northern region gained de facto autonomy after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Talabani became leader of the eastern half of the territory. After the election in January of this year, his longtime Kurdish rival Massoud Barzani became president of the Kurdish region, and Talabani became president of Iraq.

Talabani relishes the spotlight and often shoots from the hip. This week, he caused a stir when he announced in a television interview that he had been told that Hussein, held by U.S. authorities in a special prison, had admitted to investigators that he had committed crimes.

But in the interview Wednesday, Talabani said Hussein had merely acknowledged that he had ordered military operations, including the use of chemical weapons in 1988 on Kurdish residents of the northern town of Halabja, as measures “necessary to protect Iraq.”

“He killed people to protect them,” Talabani said sarcastically. “He put hundreds of thousands of people in mass graves to protect Iraq.”

Since assuming the presidency, Talabani has expanded the duties of office far beyond the largely ceremonial post it had been under his predecessor, Ghazi Ajil Yawer, analysts say.

Talabani has staffed his office, which sits on the ground floor of a palace that once belonged to one of Hussein’s associates, with mostly young, energetic image-makers, lawyers and advisors.

He has set up a website, www.iraqipresidency.net, that enables citizens to check up on current events, hear his speeches and news conferences and e-mail him questions.

Iraqis write to ask him about jobs, imprisoned relatives and other matters. A third-year agronomy student wrote to tell Talabani he needed a laptop computer. Charmed by his gumption, the president ordered his staff to get him one.

“Day by day our duties are expanding,” said Ava Nadir, 33, the president’s assistant chief of staff.

On Wednesday, Talabani met with Yawer, who is now a vice president, and Adel Abdul Mehdi, Iraq’s other vice president, in a weekly meeting of the three-member presidential council. As Iraqi TV cameramen jostled for position, the three held a moment of silence for the nearly 1,000 Iraqis killed in a stampede last week in Baghdad. Afterward, the president met with British Ambassador William Patey.

“There are a lot of jobs for the president of the country to do,” Talabani said. “He represents the sovereignty of Iraq. He must participate in all policies, foreign and internal.”

Talabani’s newfound national stature has upset some Sunni Arabs who view him as a traitor and an ally of Iran. But the president notes that before Hussein’s rule, Kurds had regularly held prestigious positions in Iraq.

“Even in the time of the monarch, many Kurds became prime minister,” he said. “Many Kurds became chief of staff. Kurds even participated at the time of the Ottoman Empire as prime minister.”

Still, Talabani said he had never harbored such ambitions before Iraq’s tumultuous politics pushed him into armed struggle. “I was planning to be a professor of a university,” he said, “not to be president of the republic.”