Iraq: Wanted: a Strong Leader for a Broken Land (Not You, Saddam)

By Lisa Beyer

They gathered to demonstrate their unity to the world. Yet in the breaks between their formal sessions of solidarity posing at Beirut's Bristol Hotel last week, the disparate members of the Iraqi opposition could not resist heaping scorn on one another. Someone noted that before Youssef al-Durrah joined the Democratic Movement, he served as Saddam Hussein's press director. A rival pointed out that Hassan Alawi of the Arab Independents once worked as Saddam's speechwriter. And that communist, Naziha Doulaimi? Well, a critic readily volunteered, she had once been a full member of Saddam's Cabinet!

Given their zestful animosities, it was no wonder the delegates in Beirut failed to convince anyone that they constituted a serious alternative to Saddam's rule. The factions could not even manage to form a government-in- exile, let alone prove they could rule Iraq together in a post-Saddam world.

Even as the opposition leaders pleaded for outside support for the rebellion against Saddam, their bickering underscored just why such backing has not materialized: with no coherent leadership at its head, the uprising was a prescription for Iraq's unraveling. Thus the U.S. and its allies preferred to remain spectators to the insurrection. They continued to hope for a straightforward coup that would replace Saddam with a member of his establishment flexible enough to reconcile with the allies but steely enough to hold the fraying country intact. "Iraq is a violent political culture," said a senior State Department official. "In the long term, maybe it could get by without a tough guy but probably not now."

In its second week the revolt against Saddam staggered but stayed alive. In the south, the heartland of Iraq's Shi'ite majority, which has long been dominated by the minority Sunnis, loyalist troops were able to quiet Basra and other restive cities, but only temporarily. As soon as they moved on to other rebellious spots, trouble erupted again "like fire under peat," as a Western diplomat in Riyadh put it.

In the north, where autonomy-minded Kurds are leading the uprising, the rebels made wild claims, including an assertion that they controlled 75% of Kurdish Iraq. "If we believed everything they said, we would already be witnessing a Kurdish republic," said the diplomat in Riyadh. Still, it was clear the Kurds were putting up a good fight. The unrest even infected Shi'ite neighborhoods in Baghdad. Saddam's government itself acknowledged in a newspaper report that Iraq faced "the gravest conspiracy in its contemporary history."

In a broadcast address, the dictator went so far as to promise a new constitution, an elected parliament and legal political parties other than his own Baath -- all hard to believe but indicative of how much pressure he feels.

There was no letup in terror though. Refugees reported that loyalists were executing captured rebels by hanging them from utility poles and the gun barrels of tanks. Insurgents in the north claimed the army had taken 5,000 Kurdish women and children hostage and was threatening to kill them. Tehran maintained that 30 Iraqis who had fled to Iran were the victims of napalm attacks by Saddam's troops.

The military's use of helicopter gunships against the rebels provoked a warning from President Bush. Under the terms of a temporary truce reached with Iraq three weeks ago, Baghdad is not to fly any fixed-wing airplanes until a permanent cease-fire agreement is signed. Because Iraq's roads and bridges are so chewed up, Baghdad is allowed to use helicopters. But using the choppers to blast rebels, U.S. officials said, violated the spirit of the understanding. President Bush said the issue might stall the withdrawal of American forces from the gulf. His admonition followed an earlier threat by the U.S. and Britain to attack any Iraqi units that used chemical weapons against the rebels.

, That, however, was as far as Washington and its allies were prepared to go in siding with the insurgency. Their fear is that if the central government loses its grip on Iraq, the resulting power vacuum will produce a storm of tumult, with the Shi'ites grabbing the south, the Kurds taking the north and neighboring Iran, Turkey and Syria slicing off bits and pieces of their own. Bush last week warned Tehran that invading Iraq would be "the worst thing it could do."

In Beirut opposition leaders insisted they had a plan to forestall all this. After Saddam's overthrow, they said, popular elections would determine who would rule Iraq. But that was quite a change of heart for the radical Shi'ites, whose aim had always been to create an Islamic regime. "We would like the people to elect us to implement it," explained Abu Bilal al Adib of the al-Dawa party, a sometime sponsor of terrorism. Another Shi'ite representative declared the verbal obeisance to democracy irrelevant. "It is the motivated minority that counts," said he, "and the Islamic movement is the most motivated." Even democracy's true believers doubted its feasibility in Iraq. "Participation in political parties requires a political maturity that is lacking in Iraq," said the Democratic Movement's al-Durrah.

No single opposition figure has yet surfaced around whom the competing factions can easily rally. Among the secularists, the most popular is General Hassan Naqib, 62, a former army deputy chief of staff who broke with Saddam in 1978 and three years later led a failed revolt of Kurds and Muslims in northern Iraq. Like other exiles who have spent many years outside Iraq, however, he may not have a large enough following at home to produce a stable regime.

That is among the reasons Washington still hopes Saddam will be replaced by someone within the Iraqi military. Some of the participants in Beirut also saw that as the best option. According to Bashir Samourai, a member of the Democratic Movement, the opposition has been in touch with the Iraqi military. In the event of a coup, he said, "they would then call us to come and participate." Washington knows that to give tangible support to such a scheme would only doom it to illegitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis. So until the phone call from an Iraqi officer comes, if it ever does, the plotters are pretty much on their own.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, Lara Marlowe/Beirut and Robert T. Zintl/Riyadh