Iraqi Regime’s Political Foes Gain Stature

They’ve been decimated by Saddam Hussein, forsaken by Western governments, neglected by neighboring Arab countries and sneered at by many in the foreign policy establishment.

But everyone’s whipping boy--the Iraqi opposition--may be gaining credibility again as more politicians and policymakers come around to the proposition that sanctions, periodic bombings or a “silver bullet option” that would end the dictator’s life cannot substitute for a long-term plan to replace the regime in Baghdad.

The key to removing Hussein and his threat to develop and use weapons of mass destruction is to reinstate Western support for a democratic transition in Iraq, opposition leaders say.

This could involve giving official recognition to a “transitional government,” setting up protected bases in northern and southern Iraq and assisting the opposition to acquire the frozen assets of the Iraqi regime.

During the past few weeks, as President Clinton and his administration worked to establish international support for military strikes against Iraq to force it to allow free access to U.N. weapons inspections, the opposition has started to win important backers again among congressional Republicans and, they say, on the president’s national security staff.

In testimony before Congress, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey this week endorsed some of the opposition’s proposals, such as recognizing the Iraqi government in exile and providing “vigorous air protection” for government foes in northern and southern Iraq. In London, U.S. and British diplomats held a 90-minute meeting with a range of opposition groups to exchange views on the current crisis.

“The only way that the international community can be secure in the knowledge that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction would be by helping the Iraqi opposition get rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein,” said Nabeel Musawi of the Iraqi National Congress.

Abdul Rahim Mouath, a director of another opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord, said in Jordan that getting rid of the regime might be easier than many in the West assume.

If Western governments send planes to knock out Hussein’s television transmitters, he said, and then set up their own to declare that Hussein has been ousted, Mouath believes that the whole country will rally to a successor government.

The only reason Hussein has survived up to now is a ruthless security apparatus that imprisons or wipes out opponents--their families and associates included--the moment they fall under the shadow of suspicion, Mouath said.

Western intentions toward Hussein, however, are perceived by many in the opposition with bitter cynicism.

A widespread opinion among Iraqi exiles is that, if it really wanted, a country as powerful as the United States could easily have killed or removed the dictator at any time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In the conspiracy-minded Middle East, many Iraqis bitterly conclude that the United States secretly wants Hussein in power and Iraq crippled for its own interests--for instance to weaken the Arabs vis-a-vis Israel and to persuade states like Saudi Arabia to spend billions of petrodollars on U.S. weaponry.

Ahmad Chalabi, president of the Iraqi National Congress’ executive council, voiced such a view at a parliamentary hearing in London this week.

“It is clear to most people in Iraq that despite all this confrontation . . . America and Britain want Saddam to stay,” he was quoted as saying.

But if the opposition mistrusts the United States and its Western allies, there is a parallel wariness on the part of Western governments: They fear placing too much faith in an opposition that, over time, has seemed ineffectual, complicated and riddled with bickering and divisions.

The two main Kurdish groups in the north, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, are at each other’s throats, and both are now seeking accommodations with Baghdad.

The Shiite opposition in the south, led by Mohammed Bakr Hakim’s Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has worried the West because its main support comes from Iran.

And both the mainstream, pro-democracy Iraqi National Congress, which emphasizes a broad popular uprising, and the Iraqi National Accord, which favors a small military coup, have failed to make noticeable headway against an Iraqi leader who seems able to sniff out plots and unravel dissidents’ schemes at will.

At times, it has seemed there is a curse on the Iraqi opposition, starting immediately after the Gulf War.

In February and March 1991, after the Iraqi armed forces had been battered by more than a month of allied air assault followed by a lightning ground attack, there was a spontaneous rebellion against Hussein in the north and south of the country.

To the rebels’ astonishment, the allied coalition still occupying a southern wedge of the country permitted Hussein’s tanks and helicopter-borne troops to crush the uprising.

At the time, U.S. policymakers were seized by a fear that Iraq would break apart into separate Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities if the uprising succeeded. Few believed that Hussein would be able to hang on to power for long.

Although U.S. leaders often mock Hussein’s “miscalculations,” opposition leaders say this was a monumental blunder on the part of then-President Bush.

“The international forces could have captured Saddam like catching a mouse,” Mouath said. “It would have been that easy.”

Instead, Mouath believes, tens of thousands died as the regime mopped up.

Another epic defeat came in August 1996 when Iraqi forces pushed into Irbil in Kurdish-run northern Iraq, which had become the main base for the Iraqi National Congress and other groups opposed to Hussein’s rule.

Despite promises of protection that the opposition claims to have had personally from Vice President Al Gore, the United States responded to the Irbil incursion by firing missiles at Iraqi air-defense batteries in the south of the country.

To the opposition, this represents a betrayal comparable to then-President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba.

Although the Americans evacuated 7,000 Iraqis and foreign nationals into Turkey, among them 700 opposition workers, Hussein’s agents rounded up 200 opponents in Irbil. Most of them were executed immediately.

“We were let down, very badly let down,” said Musawi, the political liaison for the Iraqi National Congress in London, in a telephone interview. “Our people ended up being slaughtered.”

Hussein said at the time that he was helping one Kurdish faction against the other, but in retrospect it seems apparent that the Iraqi opposition was the chief target of the incursion. At a recent meeting with Kurdish leaders, one opposition source said, the Iraqi leader was said to have stated: “If I didn’t come to get them in Irbil, they would have come to get me in Baghdad.”

Up until the disaster, the U.S. government had given a reported $100 million in covert aid to the opposition groups, helping them maintain offices, publish anti-regime tracts and operate radio and television stations in rebel-controlled areas.

Now the stations that broadcast into Iraq are silent, except for one that, according to opposition sources, operates from Jordan two hours a day.

Opposition groups also admit that their networks inside Iraq have been depleted by waves of arrests and executions, most recently when hundreds were reportedly put to death at two prisons late last year.

And although the Iraqi National Accord is allowed an information office in Amman and Iran hosts large numbers of Shiite dissidents near its border with Iraq, the other governments in the region do not help the Iraqi opposition groups.

Hussein’s foes, tattered and scattered around the world, believe that they have been treated shabbily, and they have grown weary of hearing academics and other experts on Iraq say that the opposition’s disunity and lack of effectiveness are reasons why efforts to bring down the regime have failed.

“For people to blame the Iraqi opposition . . . is unjust and unfair,” said Musawi, who said it was the United States and its allies who “left the job undone back in ’91.”

“There is,” he said, “a moral obligation on the same people who are blaming the opposition to help them get rid of Saddam.”