September 24, 2003

Majority of Baghdadis support Saddam’s ouster, Gallup says

Gallup has conducted what it describes on its website as “possibly the most challenging project in Gallup's history,” conducting hour-long face-to-face polls with 1,178 people in Iraq's capital. Unfortunately, detailed results of the poll are available only to subscribers to Gallup’s premium service. The polling company did, however, release a few interesting numbers: -- Some 62 percent of those polled think ousting Saddam was worth the hardships they’ve suffered since. -- Only 33 percent say the country is now better off than it was before the coalition invasion, while 47 percent say it is worse off. However, those polled were optimistic about the long-term: 67 percent said they believed the country would be better off five years from now than it was before the invasion, while only 8 percent said it would be worse off.

Posted by tbrown at 02:36 PM

The puppet talks back

This willl never do. Ahmed Chalabi, the current president of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, is asking that Iraqis be given actual power to govern themselves. Now you might suppose that this would not be such a radical idea, given all the rhetoric about liberating the Iraqis and making their country a shining light of hope for the Middle East. But there are some problems with Chalabi’s proposal. One of them is Chalabi himself. He’s an Iraqi exile who left his homeland as a teenager and returned, figuratively at least, on the back of an American tank, so it’s fair to question how much support he has among Iraqis. He is also a crook, according to neighboring Jordan, which sentenced him to 22 years in prison in absentia for bank fraud (a charge Chalabi denies). Then there’s the nature of his proposal: "We're saying sovereignty should come before elections . . . It doesn't mean that US troops leave or that [US governor] Paul Bremer leaves. It is symbolic," an anonymous aide told the Financial Times. And very convenient for Chalabi. If this happens on his watch – the presidency of the Iraqi Governing Council rotates among nine of its members – he gets to become the putative president of Iraq without that messy formality of democracy, an election. All of which puts Chalabi directly at odds with President Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and the State Department (as with so many other things that have gone wrong in Iraq, Chalabi’s support comes primarily from neoconservatives in the Pentagon). Yesterday at the U.N., Bush said restoration of Iraq’s sovereignty should be “neither hurried nor delayed by the wishes of other parties” -- a comment that seemed aimed at France and Germany, which want an early handover to Iraqis. But the president may have had Chalabi in mind too; the glossy banker was occupying Iraq’s UN seat during Bush’s address. Chalabi is trying to influence the upcoming UN consideration of what kind of aid to extend to Iraq and what timetable (if any) to establish for the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis. He is also going to testify before Congress next week and is expected to suggest that turning over sovereignty to Iraq sooner rather than later could save U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. So this puts the Bush administration in the uncomfortable position of having to oppose the head of the very government it appointed. And given the mood in Congress over the costs of rebuilding Iraq, Chalabi conceivably might gain some traction there. That could be a bad thing all around, for reasons detailed in this profile of Chalabi which was written nearly a year ago but now seems very prescient.

Posted by tbrown at 01:13 PM