Iraqis Agree to Agree on a New Government

Seeking to nudge their nation toward normality, hundreds of Iraqis from varied walks of life met for several hours here Monday in a spirited if occasionally confused session, ultimately agreeing to another meeting within four weeks to form a transitional government.

“Hopefully we will have this national meeting which will select or elect this interim authority,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush’s envoy, who was one of the meeting’s moderators.

The daylong event marked the second attempt by U.S. officials since the fall of Baghdad on April 9 to bring together a broad-based mix of Iraqis to develop a process for creating a credible interim administration.

It came as Bush sought to assure Arab Americans -- and television viewers across the Middle East -- that the United States had “no intention of imposing our form of government or our culture” on Iraq.

Bush, speaking in Dearborn, Mich., vowed that “as freedom takes hold in Iraq, the Iraqi people will choose their own leaders and their own government.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that with Saddam Hussein’s regime gone, the United States planned to reduce its presence in the Persian Gulf region.

“Iraq was a threat in the region, and because that threat will be gone, we also will be able to rearrange our forces,” Rumsfeld said in Doha, Qatar.

On what would be his 66th birthday, Hussein’s fate remained unknown. A U.S. official said Tarik Aziz, Iraq’s former deputy prime minister, told American interrogators that Hussein survived March 20 airstrikes on a building where the Iraqi leader was believed to be sleeping. “Does he know? Is he telling the truth? We don’t know,” the official said of Aziz.

Hussein loyalists in Tikrit, the region of his birth, danced and sang of their passion for the ousted president, but small street parties were broken up by U.S. Bradley fighting vehicles and soldiers patrolling with M-16 rifles.

About 300 delegates took part in the Baghdad meeting, including Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Kurds, Turkmens and expatriates -- a far larger and more diverse group than attended the April 15 session in Ur, which drew only about 80 delegates and was criticized for lacking inclusiveness.

But high-minded concepts of representative democracy were overshadowed for many delegates Monday by more pressing day-to-day concerns.

“First we must have security,” said Fayez Zigan, a delegate from Baghdad. “There is no democracy without security.”

Opinions varied for many Iraqis on the crucial question of how long the allied forces should stay in the nation, but many said the Americans and the British had a responsibility to put the country back together.

“It’s urgent that the coalition forces stay -- for security, for everything,” said Sheik Ahmed Ali Khalady of Diwaniyah, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

The meeting’s organizers declared the session a success, noting that although no decisions had been made, a process had been started that would help Iraqis begin to understand the challenges and the options that lay ahead.

It also allowed those who came into the country -- expatriates and Westerners -- to begin to reconcile their ideas of democracy with the realities on the ground.

The meeting was held in the old Palace of Conferences, a forum once reserved for Baath Party loyalists on the west side of the Tigris River. About six months ago, Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, the Hussein regime’s top executive body, sat on the center platform and announced that 100% of all eligible Iraqis had voted to give Hussein another term as president. It was far easier to draw a consensus in those days, when one man called the shots and opposition was punishable by death.

The Iraqis who gathered in the hall Monday, though united by a common goal, could not have been more different from one another. Expatriates who had spent years in the West sat side by side with tribal leaders, Shiite clerics and Kurds from the north.

“We who have been in the West have had the opportunity to think freely,” said Feisal Isra Badi, an expatriate attorney who lives in London. “That is something that has been absent here. We cannot expect it overnight.”

Despite disagreements among the delegates, there was an enormous sense of excitement and a craving to air opinions, complaints and ideas -- all of which were forbidden under the previous regime.

The differences in perspective created a heated dynamic inside the hall. In the end, the delegates united behind a set of core principles -- a step that may prove more an exercise in reaching agreement than in moving forward the process of creating a new government.

The delegates approved a statement that, in addition to setting a conference for next month, called for allied forces to step up security efforts, for the United Nations to lift sanctions and for the international community to forgive Iraq’s debts, including war reparations owed to Kuwait.

Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy, said that several ideas were floated about the shape of an interim authority but that no conclusions were reached. One idea, used by Iraqis during past power shifts, would be to elect a leadership council of three to five people and appoint an executive to act as administrator.

Despite the diversity of the assembled, it was not clear to what extent the groups represented a cross-section of Iraqi society. Organizers could not say how individual delegates were selected -- or why others were not. Those elements could prove crucial if final decisions are to be accepted by the populace.

Many individual Shiite Muslims attended the meeting, but representatives of the most influential Shiite organizations were missing. The United States has been leery of allowing the organizations much influence for fear they will push for an Islamic state similar to Iran’s. It is difficult to tell who represents Iraq’s Shiites, who make up more than 60% of the nation’s 24 million people.

Earlier in the day, more than 1,000 demonstrators converged on the Palestine Hotel, a center for foreign journalists, chanting slogans and complaining that Iraq’s most respected Shiite institution, Al Hawza al Ilmiya, was not represented at the conference.

Among other Shiite organizations, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was represented only by lower-level members, and the Al Dawa Party had no representatives.

The meeting began with a reading from the Koran and a greeting by the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner.

“Today, on the birthday of Saddam Hussein, let us start the democratic process for the children of Iraq,” he said.

When the conference ended, some delegates said they were confused about what they had agreed to. Several said they were angry because, as they understood it, all of the decisions were put off for four weeks -- a perception the organizers said was mistaken.

“We have not accomplished anything,” said Khalady, the delegate from Diwaniyah. “We have not accomplished security, and formation of a government has been postponed.”

Even those who came away with a more positive feeling acknowledged that a tremendous amount of work needed to be accomplished and that the first step would be figuring out a process to select interim rulers.

“What we need now is to find a process,” said Ibrahim Aloloum, an oil dealer living in London. “There is a need to include all political parties. To have an interim government is a must.”

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen in Dearborn and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report, and Reuters was used in compiling it.