Iraqi Opposition Faces a Test of Unity

From his suite at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking Georgetown, Sharif Ali bin Hussein spoke passionately last week about bringing the royal family back to Iraq--and putting himself on the throne.

“Our belief after 40 years of failed republics is that the people want a return of the monarchy. This is what we’re being told by Iraqis themselves,” said the dapper chief of Iraq’s Constitutional Monarchy Movement, who fled Baghdad at age 2 after his cousin King Faisal II was assassinated in 1958.

Across town, in the Ritz-Carlton at Pentagon City, legendary Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani relighted a half-smoked cigar after a working breakfast and opined about a new Iraq that is democratic and parliamentary--and provides “more than autonomy” for the beleaguered Kurds.

As the United States begins plotting Iraq’s future after the anticipated fall of President Saddam Hussein, the biggest challenge may be designing and sustaining a new government that embraces the spectrum of Iraqi society.

Such a government has never existed in modern Iraq, a nation with artificial borders delineated by colonial masters. And, despite the new show of unity during talks with the Bush administration last week, Iraq’s widely diverse opposition still has widely diverse visions of the future.

“A military operation in Iraq will be comparatively easy. The hard part will be constructing a truly representative system afterward. It will take long-term U.S. hand-holding to keep Iraqis focused on the prize,” said Henri J. Barkey, a former Iraq expert in the State Department who is chairman of Lehigh University’s international relations department.

“This is not your dad’s Germany or Japan,” he said. “It’ll be much harder to politically rebuild Iraq.”

Yet the Bush administration now holds out hope that the opposition can be crafted into a viable force--and a potential weapon against Hussein. U.S. officials, including some who once criticized the opposition for its squabbling, pettiness and questionable accounting, were almost giddy with enthusiasm last week after a session with Iraqi opposition leaders.

“It’s a turning point, absolutely,” said a senior administration official who requested anonymity. “Certainly those of us sitting in the room were all impressed with the dynamic of coordination and consultation among the six groups.”

Even the failure of Massoud Barzani, leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, to attend the Washington talks did not discourage either the Americans or the opposition. Barzani stayed away, citing logistical reasons, despite an offer of a U.S. aircraft, according to the White House.

Iraqi sources said he was also concerned about backlash from Hussein against his region, in the north of Iraq, for participation in the talks. Instead, he sent a representative.

Otherwise, the Iraqis surprised even themselves in their new ability to cooperate. “We are in a new era,” Talabani said.

Over the next two months, the six leading opposition groups face a series of tests to prove their recent words--and their future worth, according to U.S. officials.

First, the opposition must expand its reach. The administration met with six groups: two Kurdish movements, a Shiite Muslim religious party, the monarchists, an umbrella group led by a U.S.-educated Shiite businessman and a smaller coalition led by a Sunni Muslim.

The administration wants the six to embrace dozens more elements from Iraqi society, including military defectors, professionals who could help rebuild Iraq, various tribes, and other ethnic groups, such as the Turkmens and Assyrians.

Widening the opposition base will be a key goal of an international conference tentatively scheduled for September somewhere in Europe. The U.S. also is calling on the opposition to take the lead in persuading the world to support an American-led effort to oust Hussein.

“We told them to get out and make the case for regime change, especially in the Arab world,” the administration official said. “We’d like to see a joint delegation moving around the region. It’s important to get Iraqis out there so it’s seen as their mission, not just ours.”

It’s a role that the opposition claims it is ready to assume. “We know we need to explain our cause--and in one voice. It will make a big difference in what others think and do,” said Talabani, the Kurdish leader.

After the conference, a joint delegation will fan out to persuade skeptical governments, he added.

Further, the opposition must set out the framework for a new Iraq. With U.S. guidance, a number of working groups are forming specifics of a new constitution.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell last week called on the opposition to “help the Iraqi people come up with a representative form of government that will reflect the best values of the 21st century world and not the criminal values represented by Saddam Hussein.”

Most important, the disparate groups have to hold together.

“We have to convince the world that we are a viable organization that will prevent the breakup of Iraq and not slaughter each other at the first opportunity and that we aren’t going to disintegrate into a civil war after Saddam is gone,” acknowledged Hussein of the monarchist movement, who hopes to restore the Hashemite kingdom to Iraq.

Specifically, the diverse opposition groups must stop sabotaging efforts by individuals or smaller groups to outline the specifics of transferring power, said Judith Yaphe, a former intelligence analyst now at National Defense University in Washington.

Iraqis counter that divisions within the opposition were in part a product of divisions in Washington. Now that the U.S. government has come together around a common objective, reflected in the array of once-squabbling U.S. officials at the first round of talks Aug. 9, “unity of purpose” also will prevail among the opposition, said Barham Salih, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government. How long the unity will last is open to question. Ties remain tenuous.

The only thing that has changed during the last few divisive years is a serious prospect of ousting the Iraqi president. “So it’s still a marriage of convenience,” Barkey said. And a post-Hussein period also could lend itself to a new round of squabbling for spoils.

But in some ways, the immediate goal of unity contradicts the long-term U.S. objective.

“It’s nice to have them working together, but you can’t expect total uniformity now if you don’t expect it later--and the goal is to open up Iraq to all its diversity,” Yaphe said. “You want to have them feel they can transfer their diversity to a free Iraq.”