LIFE IN THE BULL'S EYE: Baghdad's Strong Man Struggles to Keep His Grip

September 19, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ayad Allawi will have his right wrist in a cast when he arrives in the United States this week for his first visit as Iraq's interim prime minister, and it will provide the 59-year-old neurosurgeon with a powerful talking point. Asked about the wrist in an interview here as he prepared to leave for London, New York and Washington, Dr. Allawi joshed: "I've been shooting people, didn't you know?"

Shortly after he took office in June, stories circulated of Dr. Allawi visiting a detention center in the Baghdad suburb and shooting several detained insurgents dead. The story quickly faded, with American officials saying they had no information to confirm it, and Dr. Allawi dismissing it as a "ridiculous" fiction. But a curious thing happened: many Iraqis who heard the story told friends they would not be unhappy if it were true, because it would show that Iraq finally had a strongman at its helm again, one who might restore order.

In the interview on Thursday at his heavily guarded residence in the Green Zone compound in Baghdad, Dr. Allawi went on to give another explanation. What really happened, he said, was that he lost his temper at his Iraqi aides and pounded the table so hard that a bone snapped. "I was angry," he said.

The issue, aides said later, was that Iraqi government spokesmen had reported that a man arrested by American and Iraqi troops in Tikrit was Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's second-in-command, but a DNA test proved them wrong. An embarrassed Dr. Allawi seems to have concluded that, for that moment, he had been made to look less like a square-jawed sheriff than a bungler.

Now, as he makes his first trip to the United States as America's chief partner in Iraq, Dr. Allawi finds himself at a tipping point.

Twelve weeks after Americans transferred sovereignty to Iraqis, he is more endangered than ever. If Dr. Allawi was popular among moderate Iraqis in the first weeks after his interim government took over in June, it is plain now that his grace period has expired.

In the suicide bombings and attacks on American military vehicles in the last week in Baghdad, at least 75 Iraqi civilians, policemen and police recruits were killed. One constant was the fury that survivors turned on the Allawi government, accused of being the creation of the American troops who brought miseries to Iraq, and of failing so far to stem the growing violence.

Visiting Dr. Allawi at his sprawling residence is a short course in just how bad the situation has become for anybody associated with the American purpose in Iraq. To reach the house is to navigate a fantastical obstacle course of checkpoints, with Iraqi police cars and Humvees parked athwart a zigzag course through relays of concrete barriers. An hour or more is taken up with body searches and sniffing by dogs, while American soldiers man turreted machine guns. A boxlike infrared imaging device can detect the body heat of anybody approaching through a neighboring playground. The final security ring is manned by C.I.A.-trained guards from Iraqi Kurdistan. If Dr. Allawi were Ian Fleming's Dr. No, no more elaborate defenses could be conceived.

This is the man who has been chosen to lead Iraq to the haven of a democratic future, but he is sealed off about as completely as he could be from ordinary Iraqis, in the virtual certainty that insurgents will kill him if they ever get a clear shot.

Even his opponents would not contest that Dr. Allawi is brave. He flies aboard American helicopters to the most dangerous cities in Iraq: Najaf, last month, at the height of the insurrection there; Samarra, more recently, to negotiate with tribal chiefs.

Yet it is increasingly hard to see how he can avoid becoming an Iraqi Kerensky, an interim figure fated to be overwhelmed by forces that seem, increasingly, to be beyond the power of any reasoned effort to contain them. Much of his effort is now dedicated to creating the conditions for elections in January to choose an assembly that will frame a permanent constitution.

The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, has said he finds it hard to see how an election could be held under current conditions, but Dr. Allawi, in the interview, said he remains unwaveringly committed to the January vote. So are American officials.

The immutable fact, acknowledged by all, is that much blood will have to be spilled in American-led offensives if any election is to be possible. The plan that American commanders and Dr. Allawi have laid out is to regain control of predominantly Sunni Muslim cities - Falluja, Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba, among others - and to do so with Iraq's newly retrained security forces acting as the point of the spear. Simultaneously, they aim to root out the potential for recurrent uprisings in the Shiite population centers that lurks in the shape of the Mahdi Army of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

In post-occupation Iraq, the Americans now advising Dr. Allawi have begun speaking not of insisting on a Jeffersonian democracy but of creating a "working democracy" that excludes rabble-rousers like Mr. Sadr, of building Iraqi forces who can help crush the cleric and other enemies, and of getting out.

For these purposes, Dr. Allawi - the man who waved that gun about the Baghdad campus 35 years ago, the man who pounds his desk when aides embarrass him - is considered a safe pair of hands. His favorite undertaking is to travel with American commanders to review the new Iraqi battalions that will soon be asked to march into the rebels' guns and to exult in what they, together with American soldiers, may accomplish.

In recent days, Dr. Allawi toured a base near the Baghdad airport with Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American officer now charged with righting the mess that had been made of training Iraq's new fighting units, many of which mutinied or disintegrated the moment they were asked to go up against rebels in the spring battles at Falluja and Najaf.

American officers concede that the true mettle of the thousands of Iraqis now pouring out of the training camps will not be known until they are asked to fight for real, but Dr. Allawi, watching recruits attacking mock terrorist safe houses and staging helicopter-borne assaults, could hardly contain his enthusiasm. As smoke cleared from a mock attack, he turned to his new security adviser, Qassim Daoud, and asked, "Qassim, Why do you keep telling me we don't have anything?"

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company