One Iraqi's Insights

LONDON -- Amid the confusing parade of Iraqi politicians vying for influence these days in Baghdad, a little-known figure named Ayad Allawi deserves a special hearing -- for the simple reason that he has been right about the big issues affecting postwar Iraq.

Allawi has argued for more than a decade that a stable Iraq is possible only if most Iraqis believe they have a place in the new order. The only people he would exclude from this big tent are those who were directly involved in Saddam Hussein's regime of torture and repression.

This strategy of inclusion may seem obvious, but it was rejected in the early days of the U.S. occupation, with disastrous consequences. With Iraq now in disarray, Allawi, in a recent interview here, outlined his views about how to stabilize the country.

Allawi is a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, chairing the committee that handles security issues. He previously headed an exile group called the Iraqi National Accord, but he's much less well known in the West than his flamboyant fellow exile, Ahmed Chalabi.

Where Chalabi was the Pentagon's man, the burly, moon-faced Allawi has been described as an ally of the CIA and British intelligence. Though trained as a doctor, he spent much of the past two decades running intelligence operations against Saddam Hussein. His group failed in a 1996 CIA-backed military coup, but it maintained contacts with dissident Iraqi officers and helped persuade some units not to resist the U.S.-led invasion last March.

Allawi has consistently urged the United States to work with honest military officers and civil servants from the old regime in the transition to a new Iraq. He told me in March 2002 that the United States needed to reassure Iraqis that it didn't want to destroy the country, humiliate its army or punish ordinary Iraqis who cooperated with the Baath Party because they had no choice.

That strategy was clearly correct, in hindsight. Unfortunately, it was abandoned when U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer decided last May to disband the Iraqi army. This decision is now widely viewed as America's biggest mistake in postwar planning.

Allawi says he warned a meeting of top U.S. generals that disbanding the army would create a dangerous "vacuum" in the country. The generals seemed to agree, but soon after, Bremer decided that the army should be dissolved, apparently on the advice of Chalabi and others.

The postwar power vacuum proved as dangerous as Allawi and others had feared. Foreign fighters slipped in across the open border, and in the chaos were able to set up safe houses and links with operatives from the old regime. Their network was bolstered by some of the cashiered Iraqi soldiers, who "started to organize themselves in clusters," Allawi says.

Another unfortunate "twist," says Allawi, was that disbanding the army and the Baath Party destroyed two power centers for Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, and convinced many Sunnis they had no place in the new Iraq. They began to revolt in the now-infamous "Sunni Triangle" north and west of Baghdad. Asked to describe the enemy, Allawi frankly blames "our own creation of the problem, changing Iraqis to be against us."

So how can the U.S.-led coalition rebuild trust and security in Iraq? Allawi urges the Bush administration to fix past mistakes and build strong, inclusive Iraqi institutions.

The Iraqi army should be rebuilt quickly, to a force of up to 250,000, he contends. Officers from the old army should be vetted and retrained in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and perhaps Turkey. No members of the old Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard need apply, but most others would be welcome, he says.

A new Iraq will need an intelligence service, and Allawi urges a force of several thousand people. The coalition should continue with its plans to train about 140,000 members of a new civil defense force to help police Iraqi cities, roads, bridges and pipelines. Within that force, Allawi wants a 700-man counterterrorism brigade recruited from the militias of the five leading political factions -- to draw the militias under the wing of a new Iraqi state.

Allawi, a 58-year-old Shiite Muslim, says he has been working hard this past week to persuade the Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to drop his demand for early elections -- which he fears would only add to Iraq's instability.

Allawi has made his share of mistakes, and he's better suited for life in the shadows than atop a political podium. But he got the big issues right, and he can help the Bush administration now as it struggles to fix the Iraq mess.

davidignatius@washpost.com