U.S. Plan Would Help Foes of Iraq

Directed by Congress to pursue more vigorous efforts to bring down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Clinton administration has responded with a detailed, 27-page plan to rebuild Iraq’s shattered political opposition and prepare a case for a possible war crimes indictment of Iraqi leaders.

The plan calls for spending $5 million--which Congress already has made available--to train opposition groups in organizing and recruitment techniques, to fund a center for exile activities in London, and to translate and index millions of captured Iraqi documents for possible use as evidence in war crimes prosecution.

An additional $5 million has been used to establish an anti-Hussein “Radio Free Iraq,” run by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and housed in the Czech Republic capital, Prague.

Senior officials also hinted that a parallel and possibly more ambitious covert effort to subvert the regime in Baghdad is under development. They said they had no illusions that their plan will put an end to Hussein’s regime but said they want to support and unify the Iraqi opposition in hopes of fostering an orderly transition to democracy should Hussein fall.

To help implement the program, the administration has invited the two leaders of rival Kurdish factions in northern Iraq--Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK--to visit Washington later this year.

Both are damaged goods politically: Barzani because he allied his forces with Hussein’s army during his 1996 conflict with Talabani in an operation that led to the destruction of a CIA-backed opposition movement inside Iraq; and Talabani because he accepted support from Iran in that conflict. But administration officials said they had no choice but to deal with the Kurdish leaders.

“As long as they are prepared to oppose Saddam Hussein, we are prepared to work with them,” Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk said last week. “We do it with our eyes open and with a realistic understanding of the way in which, in that part of the world, alliances can shift.”

President Clinton, in a report to Congress on June 24, said both Kurdish leaders “have made positive, forward-looking statements on political reconciliation.”

Kurdish leaders also have reason to be mistrustful of the United States, a senior administration official said, because of their sense that Washington encouraged them to rebel against Baghdad after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and then failed to help them.

Whether Barzani will embrace the plan is unclear. His nephew, Farid Barzani, who represents the KDP in Washington, said: “We don’t mind joining the [Iraqi Arab] opposition, but only on condition that the Americans would support the Kurdish people against any regional power,” meaning Tehran as well as Baghdad.

Farid Barzani described the plan itself as “a good start,” a view not shared by key GOP staff aides in Congress, who said Congress might order changes as a condition of putting up any money beyond the $5 million.

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Two staff members of House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), assessed it as a “baby step” that might “lead to a slightly higher profile for the Iraqi opposition abroad but [be of] little help in Iraq.”

A Republican Senate aide who has analyzed the plan called it “fatally flawed” and said some of the 73 listed opposition groups in the administration’s proposal had been “penetrated by Baghdad.”

He said GOP lawmakers asked Indyk at a testy meeting to redirect some of the $5 million to a London-based group called Indict, which is promoting war crimes prosecution of the Iraqi leadership. When Indyk raised legal objections to funding the group, the senators reminded him the bill appropriating the money contained the phrase, “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”

The administration’s plan is built around promoting the religious and ethnic pluralism of Iraq and marshaling the case for indictment of Hussein and his associates.