He’s the Leader of Iraq -- No, He’s the Leader

When Jalal Talabani was sworn in to Saddam Hussein’s old job last April, the veteran Kurdish leader defined himself as a father figure who would use the presidency to bridge Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian divides and conduct its foreign affairs as a traveling head of state.

Since then, his aides say, the 72-year-old interim president has often felt upstaged, slighted or ignored by the Shiite Muslim interim prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, a younger man with less political experience but more formal power in Iraq’s parliamentary system -- and a tendency to monopolize it.

Friction between the two boiled over late last month, adding an intensely personal feud to Iraq’s caldron of troubles. When Jafari, 59, made a foreign trip without informing Talabani, “the president went berserk,” said a person close to him, hastening an open break with the prime minister that has paralyzed efforts to form a new government.

On Friday, the stalemate prompted U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, alarmed by the worst sectarian violence of the post-Hussein era, to propose that the country’s leaders gather abroad for a round-the-clock retreat until they settle their differences. Khalilzad, who was speaking on Al Sharqiya TV, has been trying since Iraq’s Dec. 15 parliamentary elections to broker the formation of an inclusive coalition government.

The immediate problem is that Jafari has won his Shiite bloc’s nomination to serve a full term as prime minister in the new government. But Sunni Arab political leaders, as well as Talabani and his Kurdish followers, oppose his selection.

The Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular parties agreed Thursday to put off a showdown by scheduling parliament’s inaugural session for March 19 -- a week past the constitutional deadline -- despite warnings by Khalilzad that any delay raised the risk of civil war.

“For much of our history, Iraq has been ruled by one strongman or another,” said Mithal Alusi, an independent Sunni Arab lawmaker. “Now we have a democracy and a constitution that divides power. We’re having a lot of difficulty learning how to do that.”

Iraq’s problems are far more complex and intractable than the rift between the top two leaders. But their personalities and differences offer glimpses of the ground-level bickering that has helped fragment Iraq, enabling insurgent and sectarian violence to flourish after U.S.-led forces toppled Hussein in 2003.

Sometimes each goes to absurd lengths to portray himself as the country’s real leader. They led separate official delegations to King Fahd’s funeral in Saudi Arabia in August and to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in the fall.

When Jafari, an Islamic scholar and physician, wanted to lead a state visit to Washington in September, Talabani, a pro-Western secularist, shot him a written reminder that the president is the titular head of state. Talabani got his way, but Jafari ordered ministers not to go.

It’s equally petty at home.

Talabani, who insists that the government leadership includes him and Jafari as well as the parliament speaker and the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, often tries to call “government meetings” at his house in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone. Only two have been held because Jafari ignored the invitations.

Jafari, interpreting the U.S.-written transitional law and Iraq’s new constitution differently, defines the government as the Cabinet he heads. He invites Talabani to some Cabinet meetings but doesn’t let him lead the discussions or sit in a “chair of honor” beside the Iraqi flag, an advisor to the president said.

“Talabani repeatedly tells him, ‘You’re not the government,’ but he behaves as if he is the government,” says one Talabani partisan who insisted on anonymity.

The two took office last April, three months after Iraq’s first free election of a parliament in half a century. The power-sharing accord between the top vote-getters, the Shiite and Kurdish alliances, called for collaborative decision making, a formula pressed on them by the Bush administration to try to quell ethnic and sectarian discord.

Talabani’s camp has since kept score, counting 16 alleged violations of the accord by the prime minister, such as unilaterally slashing federal budget allocations to the Kurdish region. That prompted the president to threaten Jafari with a no-confidence vote last fall.

The prime minister refused to respond, saying he was too busy running the country, and no vote was held.

Jafari’s partisans say the president is not above slighting their man.

In his inaugural address last spring, Talabani failed to mention Jafari until parliament had adjourned and TV cameras left the room. The president hastily returned to the podium to announce Jafari’s formal appointment as premier. Shiite lawmakers saw the slip as intentional.

The two men could hardly be more different in style and outlook, or illustrative of the forces pulling Iraq apart.

Talabani is a rotund, back-slapping raconteur, lawyer and former warlord who led Kurdish uprisings against Hussein’s regime and ran part of northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region under American and British protection after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Born in 1933, Talabani was a teen activist and joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party in 1947, the year Jafari was born.

Jafari is a slight, bookish physician who also spent years resisting Hussein’s rule but never ran anything bigger than his Islamic Dawa Party, a junior partner in the Shiite coalition.

The two men collaborated against Hussein for more than 20 years. But many of Jafari’s supporters hold a grudge against Talabani for having allowed Shiite activists to be arrested in Kurdish areas before he turned against Hussein.

Their recent feuding began soon after they took office and Talabani began testing the limits of his largely ceremonial office.

“The problem is you have a constitution that calls for a relatively weak presidency and then you install one of the country’s most powerful and dynamic figures in that job,” said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat with close ties to the Kurdish leadership. “And you have a prime minister who fails to show deference due the president.”

Moreover, Talabani is secular and close to the West, while Jafari is an Islamist with ties to Iran’s Shiite regime. Jafari favors a strong central government, putting him at odds with Talabani over the Kurdish region’s fundamental goal -- to strengthen its autonomous powers and extend its reach to the vast oil fields around Kirkuk.

Talabani joined the anti-Jafari movement after the premier’s secretive Feb. 28 visit to Turkey, whose leaders also oppose Kurdish ambitions. The president said Jafari had broken a pledge to consult on major decisions and he urged the Shiite alliance to “reconsider” his nomination.

Jafari has denied making any deals with the Turks and tried to play down the split with the president.

“There is no crisis with brother Jalal,” he said this week. “He has an opinion, which I respect even if I differ. In the new Iraq there is opinion and there is counter-opinion.”

Anyone observing the two together might mistake them for friends. Both are gracious men who adhere to Middle Eastern norms of flowery politeness.

At one meeting, Jafari gave the president a necktie. The prime minister remains on Talabani’s gift list of acquaintances who get regular deliveries of honey, cream and yogurt from Kurdistan.

“They don’t meet often or regularly but when they do, they discuss poetry,” said an Iraqi who knows both men. “There’s a lot of chemistry between them on a personal level. But politically it’s a different story.”