Whatever the Bush administration decides to do about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein–attack him, contain him, harass him or try to ignore him–the first hints of the policy could well surface inside an anonymous row house in the shadow of the Capitol.
Here, in a cluster of Spartan rooms furnished with cheap desks, fake Persian carpets and security cameras, the men who would overthrow the Iraqi dictator are waiting impatiently for their chance, hatching plots and lining up support.
Depending upon which U.S. officials you ask, these Washington representatives of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi opposition groups, are either Keystone Kop cadres riven by internal dissension and infiltrated by Iraqi spies, or brave freedom fighters who could form the vanguard of a U.S. assault against Hussein, much as the Northern Alliance served as a proxy force in the American-led operation to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan.
Most of Congress and much of the Defense Department want to support the Iraqi dissidents. But the CIA and the State Department harbor grave doubts. That is why what happens to the Iraqi National Congress could be a harbinger of the president’s decision whether to take the war on terrorism to Iraq, where Hussein has long sought to develop arms of mass destruction, including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
“The bottom line is the American commitment to overthrowing Saddam,” said Entifadh Qanbar, director of the Iraqi National Congress office in Washington. “The first indication of this will be how we are treated. We are the test that will make people understand if the U.S. is for overthrowing Saddam or not.”
Hussein certainly seems to find the threat of U.S. action to be a useful domestic political weapon. The official Iraqi News Agency reported that he met with senior aides Sunday to discuss how to thwart “the malicious, hostile plans that the rulers of America are brandishing against our people.”
The Iraqi National Congress, like Hussein himself, is part of the unfinished business of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, when the first Bush administration turned back Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait but opted to leave the Iraqi dictator in place. The United States encouraged and supported internal Iraqi opposition groups, but when Kurdish fighters backed by the Iraqi National Congress launched an armed insurrection in 1995, U.S. forces did not block Hussein from crushing them.
The group was driven into exile in London and Washington in 1996. Since then, it has been plagued by internecine rivalries and intermittent financing. It says it can readily muster 5,000 men under arms and holds 25 percent of Iraqi territory, the latter claim attributable to the two Kurdish factions that continue to control parts of northern Iraq and are at least nominal members of the congress.
Despite the group’s outwardly ascetic offices, critics deride the exiles as armchair warriors who have grown too accustomed to luxury hotels and first-class airfares. In testimony to Congress last year, the former U.S. Central Command leader, Gen. Anthony Zinni, now a Middle East envoy, called them “some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London” whose plans for overthrowing Hussein would lead to a “Bay of Goats.”
“You are dealing with a very small group with uncertain forces that has never demonstrated any of the capability that they claim and blame the U.S. for their mistakes,” said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I have no doubt it is seriously penetrated by Iraqi intelligence.”
Exile group claims successes
But the Iraqi National Congress and its supporters counter that the group runs successful propaganda and humanitarian campaigns inside Iraq. The group also claims to play a key role in smuggling dissident Iraqi scientists and security officials to the West, where they have provided valuable intelligence about the extent of Hussein’s development of weapons of mass destruction and training camps for terrorists.
“Just as in Afghanistan, where the Northern Alliance played a large role, the same is true in Iraq,” said a Republican congressional aide involved in efforts to support the Iraqi National Congress. “In a perfect world, there would be a perfect opposition. But there are no George Washingtons in that part of the world to support.”
Congress has signaled its desires clearly, passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that was supposed to allocate $97 million to the Iraqi National Congress in support of guerrilla training. That year, leading conservatives, including current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the Bush administration’s new envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, signed a letter to President Clinton urging U.S. support for an Iraqi insurrection.
But most of that $97 million, as well as other money that was intended to be disbursed by the State Department, has not been distributed because of a bitter policy disagreement. The Iraqi National Congress wants to center its operations inside Iraq and prepare a new insurrection; the Bush administration wants the group to prove its viability and unity by working outside Iraq first.
“The test for us is inside Iraq,” said Qanbar, an engineer who fled his country in 1990 after being arrested and was granted asylum in the United States. “People unite when there’s a mutual goal. Shouldn’t I recruit from inside Iraq? That’s what makes the Iraqis believe it is serious.”
Earlier this month, the State Department suspended nearly all remaining money for the Iraqi National Congress, contending that an audit had revealed serious problems with the group’s finances.
`Impossible’ constraints
To the Iraqi National Congress, the audit was merely another effort by the State Department to discourage its work.
“The State Department wants to apply requirements that will make it impossible for them to operate,” the congressional aide said. “The Iraqi National Congress guys in the region are basically spies. They carry cash across the border in backpacks. If they have to fill out expense receipts, then the next thing, someone will make a [Freedom of Information Act] request and they’ll be exposed.”
What critics fear most about sponsoring Iraqi National Congress actions in Iraq is that the group could drag the U.S. into a new military confrontation with Hussein before the Bush administration has decided it is ready, by staging a provocation or triggering an Iraqi military reaction.
So far, the Bush administration has stuck with diplomacy as its favored weapon against Hussein. That is the preferred approach of Secretary of State Colin Powell, a principal architect of the 1991 gulf war and a leading voice in the decision not to try to topple the dictator. Powell has been joined by key analysts in the CIA in arguing that a military assault against Hussein could cost substantial U.S. casualties and would risk fracturing the country into Kurdish and Shiite and Sunni Muslim enclaves, provoking destabilization across the crucial oil-producing Persian Gulf.
But many in the defense establishment, led by Wolfowitz, have argued for an Afghanistan-style assault against the regime, employing the Iraqi National Congress in the role of the Northern Alliance.
“It would be very simple to oust Saddam. Everybody in Iraq hates Saddam,” Qanbar contends. “They will change sides in a matter of minutes if they have the chance. If people in Iraq know that America is with them this time, is serious this time, they will rise up tomorrow. I don’t know any Iraqi who wants to die for Saddam.”
