Free Republic

CHALABI CHATTER Like everybody else, I've been trying to get a handle on Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader, who some people would like to see as the new President of Iraq, despite some rough edges. Chalabi is also the focus of the latest unfortunately public Pentagon-State tiff. I must admit, it annoys me that he doesn't have a totally clean slate. Seems like it just makes things that much more difficult. The anti-war elites are in desperation mode because their "quagmire" predictions didn't materialize and they brought out the knives for this guy without skipping a beat (none...

The assassination of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, elder son of the late Ayatollah Khoei, opens the way for the Islamic regime to increase its influence in any future equation related to the Iraqi Shi-ites. Al Khoei family is know for rejecting the Islamic republic regime policies and ideology and the funeral ceremony of the late Ayatollah Khoei, organized 2 years ago, turned into a mass protest and demonstration against the Iranian regime as he was opposed to both dictatorships in Iran and in Iraq. The Islamic republic regime supports Ayatollah Hakim and has armed and trained hundreds of its extremist Iraqi...

Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a key U.S. ally in southern Iraq is murdered, and the power struggle intensifies By TONY KARON The power struggle among Iraqis to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime may have claimed its first victim Thursday when Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei was stabbed to death by unknown assailants inside the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine, in the city of An Najaf. According to press reports, al-Khoei was killed during a meeting with a rival cleric backed by Saddam's regime over control of the shrine. The reports said al-Khoei had...

<p>UMM QASR, Iraq — The vanguard of an interim government arrived in southern Iraq yesterday, rolling up in dusty sport utility vehicles after driving from Kuwait City, to establish a civil administration for postwar Iraq.</p> <p>About three dozen retired officers, bureaucrats and technical experts set up the first Iraqi field office of the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which will fund and guide the initial rehabilitation of Iraq's human services and infrastructure.</p>

Rapidly, decisions are being made about the governance of postwar Iraq. While debate rages in the press and in Congress, George W. Bush has decided that the United States, not the United Nations, and the Defense Department, not the State Department, will be in charge of Iraq once hostilities have been concluded. Last Wednesday, Colin Powell informed the European foreign ministers that the United Nations would not be in charge. Also on Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Donald Rumsfeld had rejected eight State Department nominees for positions in postwar Iraq. On Thursday U.S. News broke the story that Rumsfeld...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States is beginning to build a new Iraqi army even before Saddam Hussein's forces are defeated, deploying some of the nation's exiles and internal dissidents around the country. Several hundred soldiers of the Iraqi National Congress exile group were flown to an area near the city of Nasiriyah, the group said Sunday. "These are Iraqi citizens who want to fight for a free Iraq, who will become basically the core of the new Iraqi army once Iraq is free," said Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. More will be...

NEW YORK: In the first major step towards establishing a physical Iraqi presence among coalition forces in their final surge towards Baghdad, the US military has begun airlifting Iraqi opposition fighters into southern Iraq. The airlift, which began Friday night, will put about 1,000 Iraqi opposition forces into a base in southern Iraq controlled by coalition forces, ABC television reported on Sunday. The force is under the control of the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi, who will accompany his troops into Iraq. The opposition forces will also attempt to help set up liaison between US-led forces and...

Opposition mobilises free Iraqi force AMONG their ranks were an Iraqi American who had abandoned his grocery store in Missouri and a former nightclub bouncer from London. Hundreds of Iraqi exiles, assembled under the banner of the Free Iraqi Force, opened a new front in the battle to oust Saddam Hussein yesterday after flying to the south of the country on a perilous mission to incite rebellion in its cities. Guided by Colonel Ted Seel, a grizzled American Vietnam veteran and expert in psychological warfare, the force will use tribal contacts and guerrilla attacks to trigger uprisings in southern cities...

Washington is searching for a successor regime to Saddam Hussein. It is an exercise in political science. Can an even passably democratic government be devised to take the place of a dictator who has stripped his people of decency and trust in others? Iraqis of all sorts are putting themselves forward: dissidents and exiles, former army officers who fled from Saddam in fear of their lives, men of substance certainly. But how representative are they? Why should Iraqis have confidence in self-selected and evidently ambitious leaders whose legitimacy is questionable? This is where the Hashemite family comes in. The last...

Pentagon chief charged with the rebuilding of Iraq tells Toby Harnden he wants to hand over to the people even if Saddam is still there What happens after Saddam Hussein is toppled? Critics of the man overseeing post-war plans have already accused him of trying to turn Iraq into an American fiefdom - complete with colonial-style viceroy - and mocked him for imagining that he can transplant "Jeffersonian democracy". Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy head of the Pentagon, shrugs off these contradictory charges. As the first senior government official to advise that "regime change" in Iraq had to be a primary...

New Delhi, April, 4, IRNA - India's Attorney General, Soli Sorabjee   said on Friday that US war on Iraq to rationalize regime change from  outside in the name of democracy is disgusting.                           Sorabjee while chairing the seminar titled 'Iraq War-Legal and    Ethical Implications' at Indian Law Institute here said that the US   war on Iraq is for oil.                                                   In a well packed S. N. Jain Memorial Hall, Sorabjee said, the US  war on Iraq has opened a grave situation where a foreign country (can) invade another country and dictate democracy to liberate its people   (while this) is unjust...

Saddam's Regime is a European ImportBy Bernard LewisNational Post | April 4, 2003 In the Western world, knowledge of history is poor -- and the awareness of history is frequently poorer. For example, people often argue today as if the kind of political order that prevails in Iraq is part of the immemorial Arab and Islamic tradition. This is totally untrue. The kind of regime represented by Saddam Hussein has no roots in either the Arab or Islamic past. Rather, it is an ideological importation from Europe -- the only one that worked and succeeded (at least in the sense...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. CAIRO (Reuters) - With U.S. troops rattling at the gates of Baghdad, leading experts believe Washington may end up having to rely on former members of President Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath party to run post-war Iraq. The Bush administration has talked ambitiously of reshaping Iraq into a democracy that would be a beacon to the Middle East after an initial period of military rule. But Arab and Western analysts say that seems unrealistic in a divided country with no democratic tradition that has endured 34 years of totalitarian rule built on...

Leave Iraq to US Neither the French nor the UN should have any part in drawing up a new Iraqi constitution, says Mark Steyn New Hampshire In Punditstan and Armchairiya it may be a quagmire. But in the sands of Mesopotamia this war’s going very well. The late Mr S. Hussein seems to have resigned to spend more time with his ancestors, his army is taking casualties at a rate 100 times greater than the Great Satan’s, and the increasing Anglo-American control of his territory means the French, Germans and Russians are going to have a much harder time getting...

CBS) What is going to happen in Iraq after the war? The Pentagon has an ambitious plan in the works to rebuild the country, and it has brought together an elite group of Iraqi exiles to plan and carry it out. Vicki Mabrey reports. The plan for post-war Iraq is being plotted by one of the architects of the war itself, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. His task, he says, is to write a blueprint for a free self-governing Iraq, with a functioning government as soon as possible. “And if anyone thinks you can write a blueprint for that, they've...

A key Iraqi dissident group that has backers from every major religious faction in the country is being snubbed by the Central Intelligence Agency in what one newspaper describes as a bid to cover up intelligence mistakes made during the 1990s. The decision to marginalize the Iraqi National Congress, carried forward into the Bush-era under Clinton appointed CIA Director George Tenet, is making the task of liberation more difficult, the Wall Street Journal said Monday, by complicating efforts of U.S. forces to gain the trust of the Iraqi people. The Iraqi National Congress is the only opposition movement that...

<p>Following a quarter-century of staggering misrule and the squandering of nearly unimaginable economic opportunities under Saddam Hussein, the reconstruction tasks awaiting his successors in Iraq will be undeniably substantial. But, unlike the rebuilding effort facing the 27 million people of Afghanistan — who, as White House Budget Director Mitchell Daniels Jr. recently observed, were essentially "starting from scratch" — Iraq's soon-to-be-liberated population of 24 million will be able to draw upon massive resources to help finance the reconstruction of the nation that will soon be returned to them.</p>

This is how Berlin must have been in the worst days of the Cold War. Spies in the shadows, intrigues in the hotel lobbies, discreet meetings in cafes, as the would-be successors to Saddam Hussein jockey and maneuver for position.It is the same in Tehran, in Amman, in Ankara and in Damascus, as all Iraq's neighbors try desperately to work out who will run the place when the dust finally settles.Throughout this region, politicians and generals and media assume that the Americans will pick Iraq's next ruler. This is the Middle East, where nobody believes the American protestations that the...

No U.S. territorial ambitions in Iraq RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, April 2 (UPI) -- U.S. Ambassador in Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan affirmed that his country has no territorial ambitions in Iraq but will stay there as long as its presence is needed. Jordan said, in comments published Wednesday, that the United States was also "working hard to avoid casualties among civilians." Jordan who made the comments Tuesday in front of the Saudi Shura (consultative) Council said the U.S. forces "will remain in Iraq as long as it is necessary to consolidate security and stability and the Iraqis have to decide which...

Dangerous WatersWill the U.S. nurture an Islamist Iraq? A proposed first meeting of the Iraqi opposition on Iraqi soil has been delayed by disputes between Kurds and Turks, the late arrival of the U.S. delegation, and opposition leaders' criticism of American plans to install a temporary postwar military government. Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, fears the U.S. will leave Saddam Hussein's followers in charge. Kanan Makiya, an adviser to the Congress, says the U.S. may shunt aside those "who have invested whole lifetimes, and suffered greatly, fighting Saddam Hussein." However, another aspect of plans for Iraq...