Iraq The Power Struggle: The Man With The Plan

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While some Administration hard-liners may bristle at such talk, the White House is willing to accept those kind of darts in silence. "We love him no matter what he says about us," says a White House aide. U.S. officials, including proconsul L. Paul Bremer and National Security Council envoy Robert Blackwill, have kept a close eye on the Iraqis vetted by Brahimi for top jobs in the government. Another White House aide says Brahimi spent last week working "around the clock" to finalize names of the new government, soliciting opinions from dozens of Iraqi leaders and U.S. advisers. The official says that two weeks ago Brahimi narrowed the list of candidates for the Prime Minister slot to four names and settled on Allawi just as the Governing Council was rallying around him. A senior Administration official calls the selection process a "three-dimensional game of chess."

For all that, Allawi's appointment has stirred up the kind of controversy the Administration and Brahimi hoped to avoid. An imposing secular Shi'ite who remains close to the U.S. intelligence community--the I.N.A. continues to receive CIA funding--Allawi is a reassuring figure to the White House, which hopes to maintain influence over Iraq's future through its ties to the new body's most powerful executive. The CIA has long backed him over his voluble rival, Ahmad Chalabi, to whom Allawi is related by marriage. A Brahimi aide claims that Allawi's appointment also received Sistani's blessing, which the U.S. hopes may earn him some quick credibility. But some Iraqi leaders say Allawi's ties to U.S. intelligence and the widely unpopular Governing Council will undermine him. Says Sheikh Mohammed Basher al-Faidi, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, a powerful group of Sunni clerics: "This is a man who came into Iraq in an American tank. Is there anybody who honestly believes the Iraqi people will respect such a man?"

At this point the U.S. doesn't have anywhere else to turn. The Administration is still betting that by enlisting Brahimi, it may have hit upon a solution to the Pottery Barn problem--Colin Powell's warning to President Bush before the war that if the U.S. "broke" Iraq, it would own it. "If we are helping the occupation do anything," Brahimi says, "We're helping them get out." It's a testament to the state of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq that the Administration is hard pressed to come up with a better definition of success.

--Reported by Aparisim Ghosh/Baghdad; Hassan Fatah/Amman; James Carney, Matthew Cooper, Eric Roston and Adam Zagorin/Washington; Scott MacLeod/Cairo; and J.F.O. McAllister/London