The Man With The Plan

For a man burdened with the immediate political fate of 24 million Iraqis — and, quite possibly, one President of the United States — Lakhdar Brahimi keeps an office in central Baghdad that is anything but grand. He sits in his windowless office along a hallway in the headquarters of the American-led occupation that once was a cavernous palace belonging to Saddam Hussein. The massive central rotunda so reminds Brahimi of the spaceship in his favorite movie, Star Wars, that when he enters, he mutters, "Aaah, this is the mother ship.'' His working space is cramped, just 10 ft. by 12 ft., with a small, imitation-leather couch and two chairs facing his desk. As the special envoy of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Brahimi, 70, has been holed up in this office

for four weeks, working to piece together an interim Iraqi government by June 30. The assignment has made Brahimi the man to see in Iraq, even as what he calls an "impossible" security situation makes it too dangerous for him to move around. "Sometimes he sighs, and it's like that east wind coming out of his lungs," says aide Ahmad Fawzi. "The longer the day, the longer the sigh. You can see the weight of the world on his shoulders. Sometimes I just want to put my arms around him and tell him it's going to be all right."

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As much as anyone, Brahimi knows that success doesn't come easily in Iraq. He intends to unveil this week the names of the interim-government officials who will run the country after the handover of power at the end of June. The new government will have barely a month to sell itself to ordinary Iraqis as an autonomous body with real authority rather than be seen as a puppet of an occupying power that much of the population no longer trusts. But the selection of the new government has proved to be almost as shambolic as the occupation itself. It forced Brahimi last week to rip up well-laid plans, accede to political pressure and abandon some first principles — including his original intention to appoint a new Prime Minister untainted by association with the U.S. Though the pieces of Iraq's first post-Saddam government may fall into place this week, it's anyone's guess how long it will hold together. "It's a very complicated business," Brahimi told TIME. "And we're doing that against a background of very little communication between the people of Iraq themselves."

Given those constraints, it was inevitable that the makeup of the new government and how it was chosen would invite controversy. When Brahimi returned to Iraq at the beginning of May, backed by President Bush's pledge to hand sovereignty to whatever political arrangement Brahimi could come up with, he made clear his desire to stock the new government with nonpartisan technocrats without links to either the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council or to the man he calls "the big chief," Saddam. But only days before he had hoped to name Iraq's new leaders, that plan was overhauled. Brahimi's first choice for Prime Minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, was leaked early last week to Washington reporters. But Shi'ite members of the Governing Council quickly complained that al-Shahristani, a former nuclear scientist, lacked any political base in the country; non-Shi'ite members of the council said he was too religious. Iraqi and U.N. officials say that after al-Shahristani withdrew his name from consideration, members of the Governing Council advised Brahimi that they had agreed to back one of their own for the new government's most powerful post — Iyad Allawi, a physician and Shi'ite Muslim who is head of the Iraqi National Accord (I.N.A.). By then, Brahimi — who insists his job is to broker a consensus on the new government, not to handpick its members — had little choice but to go along. "Brahimi decided that since this is their choice, he'll work with their decision," says a close aide. "He respects it."