Saddam's Heirs: Who Will Call The Shots?

Compared with the gilded Baghdad palaces from which Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, the bombed-out remains of an air-defense base a few miles outside the southern city of Nasiriyah don't look much like a headquarters for the country's next government. The only intact building is a dusty, flea-infested warehouse that had no windows, no running water, no bathrooms. But that is where Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial leader of the once exiled Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), set up shop last week after the Pentagon airlifted him and some 600 fighters of his newly named Free Iraqi Forces into the heart of liberated Iraq.

Whether he was immersed in planning sessions, taking late-night sat-phone calls from the Pentagon or pacing pensively back and forth across the ramshackle warehouse, Chalabi operated like a man on a mission. He issued a statement calling on Iraqis to "join with us" in flushing out the rest of Saddam's regime. He insisted that he was not expecting to run Iraq. "It is what the Iraqis want that I think is most important," he told TIME. But the preparations around him--a Pentagon liaison briefing his bodyguards on how to usher him in and out of crowds, religious leaders organized to stump for him before he spoke--bore all the hallmarks of a presidential campaign.

The Shi'ite exile, 58, has spent the past quarter-century positioning himself as the leading opponent of Saddam. In the process, he has accumulated as much contempt as admiration. Last week's stage-managed arrival made it look as if the U.S. was anointing Chalabi to lead Iraq. Yet if his supporters in the Pentagon hoped to convert him into a ready-made replacement for Saddam, Chalabi's very appearance on the scene sparked sharp resistance. Some State Department officials who have long regarded Chalabi as a divisive, untrustworthy figure charged that he is more popular on the Potomac than on the Tigris.

As the war for military control of Iraq comes to a close, the struggle for political control is just beginning. For two decades, Saddam ruthlessly eliminated political opponents, leaving Iraq with no recognized leader-in-waiting. War planners had hoped that some resistance hero might surface during the fight or that top army officers would defect to form the nucleus of a new regime. Neither happened, and now dozens of powerful tribes, religious organizations and ethnic groups, as well as exiles, are jockeying to fill the vacuum. The U.S. has to be careful. It's just possible that the worst thing Washington could do is handpick a winner, who would be tainted as an American puppet. The dangers of that were apparent in Najaf, where the mob murder of a pro-American Shi'ite cleric last week showed how lethal such an image can be.