Taking Back the Streets
How Iraq's tough new Prime Minister and intelligence chief plan to restore security—with a little help from the Americans

Tough talk is cheap in Baghdad. but if the new interim government in Iraq is going to prevail in what Prime Minister Iyad Allawi vows will be a "showdown" with the insurgency ravaging the country, it will need to put serious muscle behind the bluster. That's where General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, the recently named boss of the newly formed Iraqi Intelligence Service, comes in.

The burly, cigar-smoking al-Shahwani has been in the war business most of his adult life and in the spy game for more than a decade. That's one reason he was chosen for the job: he provides the hard edge the fledgling government needs to combat elusive but ruthless enemies who seem only to get stronger. If they opt for mayhem, blood and death, then al-Shahwani is more than ready to trade fire with them. "We know how to play that game," he says. He also knows the cost of playing it: Saddam killed his three sons a decade ago after uncovering a coup that al-Shahwani was helping to plot.

Iraqis are desperate for an end to the car bombs, gun battles, kidnappings and assassinations that make life in Iraq a fearful hell. Winning "that game" is Job One for Iraq's leaders. The very way the new government took power underscores the need. In a brief, stealthy ceremony improvised two days early to thwart feared attacks timed for the official date of June 30, U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer handed a blue folder to Prime Minister Allawi and with it sovereign responsibility for restoring Iraq to normality. Within an hour, Bremer was gone, his quick departure emblematic of Washington's exhausted efforts to birth a model nation.

Now the Bush Administration is betting that putting Iraqis in charge of their own country will take the steam out of the armed resistance. But many Iraqis regard this second appointed regime as just another set of American puppets. "Nothing has changed," says Harith al-Dhari, head of the Association of Muslim Scholars and a Sunni sheik who some U.S. officials say is linked to insurgents. "This is a government created by the U.S. that cannot exist without the U.S. They cannot make any difference." The only solution, he says, "is to get rid of the Americans." There are currently 138,000 U.S. troops and some 20,000 Americans working on private contracts.

As a nonelected government of unknowns and former exiles, the new men come to power with shaky authority at best. So it was perhaps fitting that they spent most of their first week trading in symbols. Putting Saddam Hussein in the dock was a dramatic way to show that the new bosses mean business, a potent reminder of the tyranny Iraqis have escaped. But the insurgents delivered a few signals of their own: on the night of the hand-off, the group holding Army Specialist Keith Maupin since April said he had been shot dead. And late in the week, rockets exploded near two Baghdad hotels housing foreigners, including many journalists. Amid all the chaos, here's how the new government hopes to turn things around:

Know Your Enemy
On paper, at least, the new government knows what it has to do. The counteroffensive starts with al-Shahwani (who, for security reasons, declines to be photographed). Al-Shahwani brings one main advantage to the job: intimate ties to the CIA. For months, he has been quietly recruiting and schooling Iraqi agents and expanding his network of informants. Since he took the job three months ago, at least five classes have graduated from his covert college. Their prime targets are the global terrorists and foreign jihadis who take their cues from Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian acolyte of Osama bin Laden.

Act Tough
The Prime Minister is moving fast. A mere 24 hours after taking over, Allawi's Cabinet approved three far-reaching security measures. First, it reinstated the death penalty, which Bremer suspended a year ago. It drew up an amnesty plan that is meant to siphon Iraqi nationals from the foreign insurgents. And the Cabinet promulgated a new public-safety law that gives the government broad—some say undemocratic—anti-insurgency powers. The edict stops short of the martial law Allawi had earlier hinted at, but only just. In designated areas—like Fallujah—the government will be able to restrict movement temporarily, set up checkpoints, declare curfews, prohibit public gatherings, set wiretaps and search without warrants. Suspects can be detained for as long as 180 days.

Build Up the Muscle
None of those measures will matter, though, if Iraq cannot put enough of its own boots on the ground. After Bremer disbanded Saddam's 400,000-man army in May 2003, he drew up plans for a different kind of security apparatus—a slenderized 35,000-man military, a 40,000-strong Civil Defense Corps (CDC) and 90,000 police. Opting for quantity over quality, the CDC and especially the police took in droves of recruits who remain undertrained, ill equipped and unreliable.

It has been a frustrating experience for men like police colonel Dawood Salman, a 25-year veteran of Baghdad's city force. He recently requested better arms for the Bab al-Sheikh station, where 103 men share five walkie-talkies and none have bulletproof body armor. The American mps posted as advisers to the station, he says, "laughed at us. They said the guns would be stolen by gangs and used against Americans." Yet he and his men are expected both to crack down on the rampant crime that is terrorizing the city and to face off against insurgents.

For the time being, Iraq's leaders will have to rely largely on coalition troops to carry out counterinsurgency raids and protect police stations and other facilities that are under constant threat of attack. But now, instead of running their own proactive raids, U.S. troops are supposed to draw back inside their bases and play a supporting role. They have been directed to invent partnership arrangements with local forces so that security operations will be conducted jointly by Iraqi and U.S. commanders.

No matter who provides security, the government of Allawi is racing against time—it has just seven months before scheduled elections to convince ordinary citizens that the anti-jihad fight is theirs. And accomplish what the Coalition Provisional Authority (cpa) could not. According to the New York Times, a senior cpa official who returned in late June to Washington confesses that in the past 15 months, U.S. intelligence hasn't cracked the insurgency's command and control or eroded its strength. National Security Adviser Muwaffak al-Rubaie says this is the one area where his people have an edge: "This is our country. We know every single alleyway." That's the basis on which al-Shahwani will try to build a successful counterinsurgency—and a truly sovereign nation.

—from TIME, July 12, 2004

Questions

1. Why was Abdullah al-Shahwani chosen to head the newly formed Iraqi intelligence service?

2. What tough new security measures are being put in place by the interim Iraqi government to improve the situation in Iraq?