From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider's Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam

By Hamid al-Bayati and Peter W. Galbraith

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Today, Hamid al-Bayati serves as Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. But for many years he lived in exile in London, where he worked with other opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime to make a democratic and pluralistic Iraq a reality. As former Western spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and as a member of the executive council of the Iraqi National Congress, two of the main groups opposing Saddam's regime, he led campaigns to alert the world to human rights violations in Iraq and win support from the international community for the removal of Saddam.

An important Iraqi diplomat and member of Iraq's majority Shia community, he offers firsthand accounts of the meetings and discussions he and other Iraqi opponents to Saddam held with American and British diplomats from 1991 to 2004. Drawn from al-Bayati's personal archives of meeting minutes and correspondence, From Dictatorship to Democracy takes readers through the history of the opposition.

We learn the views and actions of principal figures, such as SCIRI head Sayyid Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakeem and the other leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi and his Kurdish counterparts, Masound Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Al-Bayati vividly captures their struggle to unify in the face of not only Saddam's harsh and bloody repression but also an unresponsive and unmotivated international community. Al-Bayati's efforts in the months before and after the U.S. invasion also put him in direct contact with key U.S. figures such as Zalmay Khalilzad and L. Paul Bremer and at the center of the debates over returning Iraq to self-government quickly and creating the foundation for a secure and stable state.

Al-Bayati was both eyewitness to and actor in the dramatic struggle to remove Saddam from power. In this unique historical document, he provides detailed recollections of his work on behalf of a democratic Iraq that reflect the hopes and frustrations of the Iraqi people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780812290387

Book preview

Introduction

This book tells the inside story of the Iraqi opposition, from its evolution during the 1990s to its first contact with the West and the United States, and, ultimately, Saddam’s fall in 2003. The book also sheds light on the transformation of political thinking in Iraq among the country’s different ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups. For thousands of years these groups lived in peace and harmony in Iraq; indeed, Iraqis never asked one another about ethnic, religious, and sectarian backgrounds, but, rather, they felt that being Iraqi was enough to be considered brothers and sisters.

In fact, we Iraqis believe in what the Qur’an says: O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another (Al-Hujurat 49:13). This echoes the biblical verse, So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:26–28). We believe that, regardless of their differences, all humans are one family, from one grandfather and one grandmother, Adam and Eve. So in Iraq when I talk about Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, Muslims, Christians, and those of other religions, it is because I want to explain their different beliefs rather than to divide the Iraqi people.

I was born in a Muslim family, but my father did not distinguish between Muslims and Christians. He sent me to a private Christian school (the Virgin Mary School) when I was young. The school was adjacent to a church and a hospital in the Karrada neighborhood of southern Baghdad. I used to tell my family stories about Mary and Jesus I had heard in the church. When I started to study the Qur’an, I learned that Islam considered the Virgin Mary a pious worshiper of God, and that God had miraculously sent Jesus to her. My family did business with Christians and Jews, and they received Western businesspeople in our house from the 1950s until Saddam’s rise to power two decades later.

Our neighbors—from all different ethnic, sectarian, and religious groups—were like our brothers and sisters. But Saddam’s regime followed a policy of divide and rule that played on ethnic, religious, and sectarian differences. When he fought the Kurds, Turkmen, and Assyrians, he played the ethnic Arab nationalist card, fighting as an Arab leader against the non-Arabs. When he fought the Shiites, he played the sectarian card as a Sunni hero to gain the support of Sunnis in the Muslim world. When he fought the Christians and other religious groups in Iraq and confronted the West, he played the religious card, claiming to be a Muslim hero against the Crusaders.

Shifting Alliances and the Iran-Iraq War

This book will recount how regional powers refused to meet with the Iraqi opposition in the 1980s because most of these countries supported Saddam’s regime during the Iraq-Iran war (1980–1988). With Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, however, alliances rapidly shifted, and the regional heads of states began to receive the Iraqi opposition leaders.

These years also witnessed dramatic shifts in Western policies toward Iraq. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. and other Western governments refused to meet with the Iraqi opposition, U.S. and UK representatives began to reach out to many of these groups after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

Perceptions shifted along with policies. In the 1980s, the world believed Iraqi Shiites were allied with Iran, because Iran had served as the base for Islamic Shiite groups fleeing Saddam’s oppression when other nations in the region denied them refuge. (Major Iraqi Kurdish groups, too, such as the Kurdistan Democratic Party headed by their historic leader Mulla Mustafa al-Barzani, relocated to Iran following the Algiers Agreement, signed by the Shah of Iran and Saddam in 1975, which ended the Shah’s support for the Kurdish military movement against the Baath regime and signaled the collapse of the Kurdish revolution.) In the early 1990s, however, the world began to comprehend that Iraqi Shiites were independent, patriotic, and loyal to their own country and no other.

The Iraqi Shiites, for their part, felt betrayed by the West in general and the U.S. in particular. In March 1991, they were encouraged by President George H. W. Bush to rise up against Saddam after the invasion of Kuwait, only to see the United States stand idly by as Saddam brutally crushed the uprising, which had liberated thirteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. As a result, the Iraqis had strong doubts about U.S. policy and its commitment to opposing Saddam’s regime. It would be many years before these doubts could be dispelled.

When I started to meet U.S. officials after 1992, I would speak about the uprising and how the Iraqi people were upset by the U.S. decision to allow Saddam’s forces to crush the uprising. The officials agreed that it was a mistake, and that President Bush regretted not removing Saddam’s regime. When I later met Assistant Secretary of State David Welch in London and spoke about the U.S. decision, Welch said, We are sorry, but we are not apologizing. However, U.S. officials promised not to repeat the mistake and to finish the job they had not finished in 1991.

The Work of the Supreme Council

Between 1992 and 2003, I was the representative in London of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, ISCI). The Supreme Council was one of the few major groups to oppose Saddam’s regime. It encompassed many political Islamic movements and included Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen, Sunni, and Shiite members. When I attended the last meeting of the council’s General Assembly before the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2002, around seventy representatives in the Assembly elected a Central Committee of around twelve, which in turn elected Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim as President.

Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim, the highest religious authority in the holy city of Najaf from 1955 to 1970, was himself a prominent religious scholar and well-known political leader throughout not only Iraq but also the entire region. I returned with him to Iraq on May 10, 2003, after living in exile; when we traveled through Basra, Nasiriyah, Samawa, Diwaniya, Najaf, and other cities, towns, and villages, millions of Iraqis came out to welcome and greet the leader.

The Supreme Council’s military wing, called the Badr Corps, consisted of thousands of Iraqi army officers and soldiers who had defected during the Iraq-Iran war, the invasion and liberation of Kuwait, and following the popular uprising of 1991. Among them were military officers from all sectarian and ethnic groups, including for example General Ali Fikri and Brigadier Faris al-Jadir, and many other Sunni officers who had defected from Saddam’s army.

I went to great lengths to convince the Supreme Council and Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim about the new U.S. policy against Saddam’s regime, even while acknowledging that the U.S. had let down the Iraqi people during the 1991 popular uprising. The Supreme Council came to play a leading role in changing Iraqi political thinking, especially among the Shiites, and in convincing them to meet and work with the U.S. and other Western powers.

I recall a meeting of Iraqis in exile with Supreme Council leader Sayyid al-Hakim, during the pilgrimage season in Mecca in 1997. An Iraqi Islamist Shiite living in Germany asked the leader how I could meet with American officials. Al-Hakim answered that my work was to meet officials and diplomats from all over the world to describe the situation in Iraq and Saddam’s crimes against the Iraqi people; my goal was to gain the support of the international community for Iraqis, and against Saddam, and that included meeting U.S. officials.

The U.S. Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 required that President Bill Clinton name Iraqi groups eligible to receive U.S. support. Clinton wrote a letter to Congress naming seven groups, including the Supreme Council. Ultimately, the Supreme Council refused U.S. support, but Sayyid al-Hakim considered the Clinton letter as international recognition for the group and our struggle against Saddam’s regime. My role was instrumental in getting that recognition.

Still, many of the Supreme Council leaders were hesitant to visit the West and meet Western officials because they were afraid of criticism or thought these meetings would achieve nothing and get nowhere. I had difficulty convincing my colleagues that these visits and meetings were important for helping the West understand our views. I felt strongly that the world needed to get to know our leaders if we were to gain the support we would need to protect the Iraqi people against Saddam’s oppression.

When Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a brother of the Supreme Council leader Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, visited the U.S. for the first time in August 2002, he was worried that he would be criticized if he did not achieve any tangible results. He told Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani that he felt dragged into this visit. At the end of the trip, however, he told Talabani it had been a good decision. I have to admit that I failed to convince the Supreme Council leader during our meetings in July 2002 to send his brother to Washington, but Mr. Talabani managed to convince them.

Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim was assassinated in the holy city of Najaf on August 31, 2003. Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim succeeded him as President of the Supreme Council. Despite criticism from some Iraqi quarters, he visited the U.S. several times after taking the leadership role, attending meetings with President George W. Bush and his advisers. On December 12, 2007, his son, Ammar al-Hakim, defended his father’s meetings with U.S. officials as being in accordance with the Qur’an’s instructions that prophets and messengers talk to all people. Sayyid Ammar pointed out that Moses, too, was ordered to go to Pharaoh and carry out a dialogue with him. Furthermore, with the great numbers of countries vying to gain the ear of the U.S., it is only right that the Iraqi view also be heard: Are not we supposed to go and express our views in order that these views push for the right decisions which serve all the Iraqis?¹

Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim died of lung cancer on August 26, 2009, and his son Ammar was elected by the Central Committee as President of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). Although Sayyid Ammar is young, he is a very well-educated, open-minded religious scholar with practiced leadership skills. His uncle Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim had been grooming him to lead the Supreme Council since he was young. Indeed, when, on his return from exile, Sayyid al-Hakim was to address his followers in Diwaniya on May 11, 2003, he grew too tired to speak, and asked his nephew Sayyid Ammar to take his place.

Continuing the Conversation

I also worked as a member of the Executive Council of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), headed by Dr. Ahmad Chalabi between 1992 and 1998, and as a member of the Group of Four (G4) after 1998, in which the Supreme Council, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headed by Massoud Barzani, son of Mulla Mustafa al-Barzani, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) headed by Jalal Talabani, and the Iraqi National Accord (INA) headed by Dr. Ayad Allawi were represented. We together managed to convince Western officials that the Iraqi people were united in opposing Saddam’s regime; that, especially with the alliance between the Supreme Council, the two Kurdish parties, and the INA, they were strong enough to remove Saddam if the international community helped them by implementing UN Security Council resolutions. We also convinced the Western governments that the Supreme Council was a moderate Islamic organization that believes in the unity of Iraq as a land and as a people; in the unity of the Iraqi opposition; and in a constitutional, democratic, pluralistic future for Iraq. That identity was part of the criteria for groups selected by President Bush in his letter to Congress.

I led a campaign from London to make the UK, U.S., and UN aware of the regime’s violation of human rights in Iraq. I also aimed to raise awareness of the importance of action against Saddam, such as implementing UN resolutions that demanded Saddam stop the repression of the Iraqi people (Resolution 688) and that prevented him from using his army and heavy weapons against them (Resolution 949). I participated in meetings with officials, diplomats, members of parliament (MPs), academics, journalists, and the public in London, across Europe, and in Washington and New York, and I published a weekly English newsletter about the regime’s crimes and the struggle of the Iraqi people to remove Saddam from power.

Over the course of my activities, I witnessed how the political thinking of the Kurds and other groups in Iraq evolved. Since 1900, the Kurds’ national dream had been to establish an independent Kurdish state. But at the end of the 1990s, they began to feel they were better off as a part of Iraq, playing a role in governing from Baghdad rather than being isolated in the mountains of Kurdistan.

In our first meeting with U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer after his arrival in Baghdad on May 16, 2003, the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said, Talabani and I are in Baghdad, and our presence is a message for everyone that we have a share in this country; it is our country.

The role of the Sunnis in Iraq, too, evolved. Since the establishment of the modern nation of Iraq in 1921, the Sunnis had ruled Iraq and controlled its major political and military positions. During the 1990s, however, many Sunni officials and military officers defected from Saddam’s regime and worked with both the Shiites and the Kurds as part of the opposition movement.

After 2003 the majority of the Sunnis in Iraq began to oppose the new post-Saddam government, and a large number fought alongside terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia against it. The majority of Sunnis also boycotted the elections in Iraq in 2005. After the 2005 elections, some Sunni political parties joined the national unity government, which included Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, and Christians. In the 2009 provisional elections, Sunnis participated in larger numbers than in the 2005 elections, and they participated even more in the elections of March 7, 2010, with 73 percent participation of the eligible voters in Salah al-Din province, 66 percent in Ninawa, 62 percent in Diyala, and 61 percent in Anbar.²

In the chapters that follow, I will also highlight the Iraqi opposition’s plans to liberate the country from the dictatorship and oppression of Saddam Hussein before the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. These plans were based on mobilizing the Iraqi people, building the Iraqi opposition’s capabilities, and gaining the support of the international community. The Kurds had thousands of fighters called Peshmerga (literally those who face death), and SCIRI had the Badr Corps. These forces, with the cooperation of the INA, the Iraqi army and various tribes, could have removed Saddam’s regime decades earlier had the dictator not been supported by the governments of the region and the world in the 1980s.

We requested the support of the international community to implement the Security Council resolutions passed after 1990 and tried to set up an international tribunal to indict Saddam and his top aides for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, similar to the one set up by the Security Council for former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. I was a board member of INDICT, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) chaired by British MP Ann Clwyd, which collected evidence to indict Saddam and his top aides. We tried also to raise cases against Saddam in national courts. Yet we felt that there was no political will in the West for these proposals. U.S. and UK officials told us that their policy was containment and then containment plus, with limited military strikes that did not remove Saddam’s regime during the 1990s. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, the U.S. and its allies adopted a new approach: invasion and war.

Invasion and Occupation

The September 11 attacks were a major factor in President Bush’s decision to remove Saddam’s regime. The U.S. military doctrine regarding rogue regimes and organizations such as the Taliban, Saddam’s government, and Al Qaeda before September 11 had been containment and deterrence. After September 11 the doctrine changed to preemptive attacks and the war on terrorism. Al Qaeda operatives had enjoyed a safe haven with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan when they attacked American forces in Riyadh in 1995 and in Al Khobar in 1996; when they bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and when they deployed suicide bombers against the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000. Although Al Qaeda killed dozens of U.S. citizens and people of other nationalities and injured hundreds, the U.S. continued its policy of containment and deterrence. It was only after September 11 that the U.S. attacked the Taliban regime and tried to capture or kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

There are, however, different theories about precisely when President George W. Bush decided to go to war against Saddam’s regime. Some believe Bush was planning to remove Saddam’s regime before he became President in January 2001; others say he decided immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This book will detail the talks when U.S. officials told us the President had decided to remove Saddam’s regime.

Some Iraqi opposition groups encouraged the idea of waging war against Saddam’s regime and supported the decision after it was made. We in the Supreme Council, however, opposed the war because it would result in civilian casualties, destruction of infrastructure, and occupation. We advised the U.S. planners against occupation and encouraged them to set up an Iraqi government immediately after Saddam’s fall. The grave U.S. mistake, I believe, was in not listening to the Iraqis, thereby turning Iraq’s liberation into occupation.

After the fall of Saddam’s regime, we opposed UN Security Council Resolution 1483, approved May 22, 2003, which recognized the specific authorities, responsibilities, and obligations under applicable international law of these states [U.S. and UK] as occupying powers under unified command (the Authority). Ambassador Bremer, who was appointed the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), said that the resolution gave him the power to choose a Governing Council as an interim administration, and a Constitutional Council to write a constitution.

We asked Bremer to hold an election for the members of the Governing Council so it would not be perceived as a U.S.-appointed body. When Bremer refused, we suggested that members be selected through conferences in each province so the people could choose their representatives; again, Bremer refused.

When the U.S. decided to hand sovereignty back to the Iraqis in June 2004, we recommended that elections be held so that an Iraqi government could take on that sovereignty. But Bremer refused to hold elections before June 2004. He insisted on transferring sovereignty to a nonelected government. Bremer later wrote:

I told the group that … I hope to set up an Interim Iraqi administration by mid-June. But we’re not going to rush into elections because Iraq simply has none of the mechanisms needed for elections—no census, no electoral laws, no political parties, and all the related structure we take for granted. We’ve also got to get this economy moving and that’s going to be a helluva challenge. A stable Iraq will need a vigorous private sector.³

Yet in 2005 Iraq was to have two elections and a referendum without a census, without laws governing political parties, and with a worsened security situation.

Bremer also restricted the Islamic and Shiite groups from holding certain important positions in the interim government, including those of Prime Minister, Minister of Interior, and even Minister of Education. It was obvious that Bremer wanted to bring specific groups to power in Iraq.

But Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, the highest religious authority in the holy city of Najaf, insisted that a constitutional council be elected directly by the Iraqi people so the resulting constitution would reflect the aspirations of all Iraqis, no matter what their different ethnic, sectarian, and religious backgrounds might be. Bremer could not challenge the Grand Ayatollah, the most humble and also the most powerful person in Iraq, so he tried to find a different solution to his dilemma. He proposed an interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, or TAL.

Bremer handed Iraqi sovereignty back to Ayad Allawi and a nonelected government in June 2004. In January 2005 Iraqis elected a General Assembly, which drafted a constitution that went on to be approved by a general referendum in October 2005. In December 2005 Iraqis went to the polls to elect the first Iraqi government based on a permanent constitution since 1953.

My Journey

In Iraq I had been imprisoned and tortured several times because I joined the Al Dawa Islamic Party, before I joined SCIRI and had secret activities against the regime. When I refused to confess to the crimes of which Saddam’s intelligence agents accused me, they released me. They threatened, however, that the next time I was arrested I would be executed. I fled Iraq when Saddam’s regime tried to re-arrest me.

I settled in London in 1992 and became part of the city’s active Iraqi opposition movement in exile, which was lobbying the world—especially the U.S., UK, and UN. Saddam’s regime, meanwhile, arrested many members of my family. Eight of my family were executed in three campaigns. Many others were imprisoned and tortured; we suspect some were also poisoned, which was a usual weapon the regime used against the opposition and their families.

In 2001, my mother, three brothers, and a sister, whose husband had been executed, were forced to appear on Iraqi television as a threat to me in London, after I had announced the Supreme Council responsibility for the attack on Saddam’s Presidential Palace with four Katyusha missiles. At that time, most Iraqis were afraid to openly oppose Saddam’s regime, let alone to attack his palace with missiles.

The regime even encouraged the tribes of opposition members to kill their own people. Saddam’s newspaper Thawra once published an advertisement from someone called Abbas Hijar al-Bayati, who claimed to be the sheikh of the Bayati tribe in Baghdad; al-Bayati declared that my tribe decided to shed my blood. Saddam claimed that it was his tribe that killed his two sons-in-law when they returned to Iraq in February 1996 after their defection to Jordan in August 1995, despite having been granted amnesty.

Saddam sent many intelligence officers to assassinate opposition leaders in London, including myself. Thankfully the would-be assassins were discovered and deported by the British police before they could commit their crime. Several times during the period 1993-2003, I was warned by the British police that I was on Saddam’s list for assassination.

Saddam next sent an Iraqi agent with a message from the Director of the Presidential Palace that I was hurting the regime. He asked that I stop opposing Saddam; if I refused, they would kill me, and my family would be in danger. When I persisted in my duty to publicly oppose the regime, the agent came back with another proposal: I could continue to oppose the regime and criticize the government, but I could not mention Saddam’s name. From that point on I knew exactly what to do: I focused on Saddam as the sole source of the problems in Iraq, the region, and the world.

I returned to Iraq on May 10, 2003, a month after the fall of Saddam’s regime, in the company of the leader of the Supreme Council, Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. We traveled through Basra, Nasiriyah, Samawa, Diwaniya, and Najaf. The leader remained in Najaf when I went on to Baghdad. Millions of Iraqis from the towns, cities, and villages we passed through came out to welcome us. Thousands of people recognized me from my appearances on various Arabic and English TV channels attacking Saddam’s regime for violating human rights and oppressing the Iraqi people. They greeted me as the voice of the oppressed Iraqi people and said they had been jubilant when I appeared on TV; I had given them comfort and confidence by giving voice to their suffering.

Sayyid al-Hakim was assassinated by Al Qaeda and loyalists to Saddam’s regime on August 31, 2003, in the holy city of Najaf, after he finished the Friday prayer in the holy shrine of Imam Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, the fourth Caliph for all Muslims, and first Imam for the Shiites.

After I settled in Baghdad, I managed to get my file from Saddam’s intelligence services. I discovered that all the members of my family had been under surveillance, with their telephones bugged and their mail watched. Moreover, I learned that Saddam’s intelligence had sent people to watch me from London, Paris, Pakistan, Iraq and other places. I found assassination plans with maps of my office in London, the address of which was not public, and my parking place.

Building a New Iraq

In April 2004 I became Iraq’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. In October 2005, while he was fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, my eldest brother Hasan was kidnapped outside his home in the Karrada neighborhood of southern Baghdad. The kidnappers phoned his wife and told her that he had confessed to doing dangerous things and providing me with information about Baath Party members. This was untrue. Hasan was a businessman who was not involved with politics and not a government employee, but his captors held and tortured him for three months before shooting him twice in the head. They dumped his body with a note that read, This is the fate of the traitors and agents. They accused Hasan of being a traitor to Iraq and an American agent.

In meetings with U.S. officials before 2003, I had stressed the importance of establishing an Iraqi government after Saddam’s regime; if the regime fell and there were no Iraqi government, Iraq would be under occupation, which would not be acceptable to the Iraqi people. Occupation, moreover, brings resistance, which costs lives. In May 2003, Iraqis managed to convince Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush’s Special Envoy for free Iraqis, and retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), to set up an Iraqi government. Bremer, head of the CPA, pushed both men aside and refused to set up an Iraqi government.

Bremer wrote about Jay Garner’s intention to appoint an Iraqi government in his book, My Year in Iraq:

As I drove to work at the Pentagon, the lead story on the 6:00 A.M. news had been that Jay Garner had announced his intention to appoint an Iraqi government by May 15. I almost drove off the Washington Parkway. I knew it would take careful work to disabuse both the Iraqi and American proponents of this reckless fantasy—what some in the administration were calling early transfer of power—animated in part by their aversion to nation-building. I mentioned to the president that giving Iraq a stable political structure would require not just installing democratic institutions, but also creating what I called the social shock absorbers, institutions which form civil society—a free press, trade unions, political parties, professional organizations. These, I told the president, are what help cushion the individual from an overpowering government.

Bremer also wrote about Khalilzad’s promise to turn over power to the Iraqi Leadership Council (ILC), which consisted of Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Massoud Barzani, Jalal Talabani, Dr. Ayad Allawi, Dr. Ahmad Chalabi, Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and Nasir Kamil al-Chadirchi:

Following the president’s instructions, the CPA wanted to be certain that we put together an interim government broadly representative of the Iraqi people.

In short, we wanted more control over creating the interim government than the ILC wanted us to have. The situation was complicated by the fact that in his last meeting with the council two weeks earlier, then Presidential Envoy Zal Khalilzad had left them with the impression that we would turn over governing power to them by mid-May.

And regarding our view to form an Iraqi government, Bremer wrote:

The council members now spoke more assertively, beginning with Talabani. While we sincerely thank the Coalition for all its efforts, we have to warn against squandering a military victory by not conducting a rapid, coordinated effort to form a new government. Hamid Bayati, representing the Shiite SCIRI, spoke for the first time. Ambassador, you must hasten the political progress. The ‘street’ is waiting for the freedom you promised. I would learn that the Iraqi politicians love to invoke the mystical Arab street on almost any argument. With respect, Ambassador Bremer, Chalabi said, I must remind the CPA of the promises made in the past month about the establishment of a transitional government in a few weeks’ time. He smiled benignly at Jay Garner.

Clearly Iraqis wanted to establish an Iraqi government after the fall of Saddam’s regime, and they had managed to convince both Khalilzad and Garner of the idea. But unlike his colleagues Garner and Khalilzad, Bremer did not listen to the Iraqis. Thus we witnessed the strong insurgency and the strong presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Neither in his articles nor in his book did Bremer write about the gravest mistake committed after the war of 2003, which was occupation. He wrote instead about the two laws he issued. Before the war, in meetings with U.S. officials in Washington, London, Ankara, and Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, we had urged them to set up an Iraqi government immediately after the fall of Saddam’s regime.

We had warned that there would be resistance from Iraqi groups, such as the Saddamists and extremists, and from non-Iraqi groups, such as Al Qaeda, which would use the occupation of Iraq as provocation: an occupation of Arab and Muslim land. We added that Osama bin Laden had used the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait to recruit suicide bombers by claiming that it was an occupation of holy lands in Mecca and Medina. I do not have any personal problem with Ambassador Bremer, who was respected by all the Iraqi leaders who tried their best to help him succeed in his work. However, in his book Bremer blamed and criticized everybody but himself.

In December 2003, I participated in a delegation headed by Sayyid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim which met with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed al-Nahyan, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When Bremer heard about the trip, he rushed to visit Sayyid Abdul Aziz and express his concerns about our visiting countries that had opposed the war against Saddam’s regime. Al-Hakim answered that he intended to visit these countries to convince them to forget their past differences about the war and to come forward to participate in Iraq’s reconstruction.

The meetings were important. We wanted to change the views of world leaders, to show them the Iraqi leadership’s vision for Iraq, and to prove our willingness to have good relations with the whole world and a balanced relationship with the East and the West. We discussed the future of the political process, security issues, and reconstruction in Iraq, and we encouraged these countries to forget the past and come forward to invest in Iraq.

During our years of campaigning to defend the Iraqi people against Saddam’s regime, I and other opposition figures managed to meet with and gain the support of many people in the UK, throughout Europe, and in the U.S. and the UN. Among them were legislature members, officials, academics, journalists, and others. In the UK I worked with MPs such as Emma Nicholson and Ann Clwyd. I also managed to meet and gain the support of UK dignitaries including H.R.H. Charles Prince of Wales, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and others. I worked also with Ambassadors and officials in the Foreign Office such as Julian Walker, Robert Wilson, Martin Hetherington, Barry Lewin, David Manning, John Sawers, and others.

In the U.S., we managed to meet with and gain the support of many members of Congress and officials such as Jesse Helms, Benjamin Gilman, Sam Brownback, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Thomas R. Pickering, Douglas Feith, Marc Grossman, Martin Indyk, David Welch, Richard Perle, Bruce Riedel, Kenneth Pollack, and others.

I also met and worked with ambassadors, officials, diplomats, and coordinators such as Mathew Tueller, Ethan Goldrich, Yael Lempert, Andrew Morrison, Frank Ricciardone, Peter Galbraith, David Phillips, Stephen Rademaker, Fred Axelgard, Thomas Krajeski, Phebe Marr, Laurie Mylroie, and others.

I worked with academics and scholars in think tanks, institutes and universities such as David Mack, Robert Satloff, Carole O’Leary, and Judith Yaphe, among others.

After 2003, I worked with Ambassador Paul Bremer, Ryan Crocker, Meghan O’Sullivan, Scott Carpenter, and with military commanders such as Generals David D. McKiernan, Ricardo S. Sanchez, George W. Casey, and David H. Petraeus.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who was appointed President Bush’s Special Envoy for free Iraqis in November 2002, played an important role in Iraq before and after 2003. Other members of the Supreme Council and I had meetings with him in London, Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, and Ankara before the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003. I worked later with Khalilzad when he became U.S. Ambassador to Iraq; I had the pleasure to receive his credentials while I was Deputy Foreign Minister in 2005. We also worked together when he became U.S. Ambassador to the UN in 2007.

Officials from the UN who played an important role in supporting Iraq and the Iraqi people included Jan Eliasson, Max van der Stoel, Jamal bin Omar, Ahmad Fawzi, Sérgio Vieira de Mello and his team, Lakhdar Brahimi and his team, the UNAMI team in Iraq and New York, Ashraf Qazi, Stephan de Mistura, Ad Melkert, and Secretaries General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Kofi Annan, and Ban Ki-moon, among others.

This book is based on my personal archive, which I kept safe for years. Much of the information is based on the minutes I wrote during official meetings, letters and memos from officials and from Iraqi political groups, and material from media coverage of the events. In many cases these notes and correspondence have been translated from Arabic. This archive covered the events I was part of and reflects my views, but there are many other views represented here in the struggle to liberate Iraq from dictatorship and to build a new, democratic Iraq that respects human rights.

I cannot list all my meetings and all the people with whom I have worked with and whose valuable assistance I have had, but I want to thank all those who have supported me and the Iraqi people against the extreme brutality of Saddam’s regime. I want to thank, as well, all those who helped Iraq rid itself of repression, totalitarianism, and terrorism, and to build democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. I thank every one of them, and as a token of appreciation and gratefulness for their support and friendship, I will pray until the end of my life for them and for their families and friends. I will donate the royalties of this book to the widows and orphans of Iraq as a gift to them all.

1

The Birth of the Iraqi Opposition

The Baath Party came to power in Iraq through a military coup on February 8, 1963. Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim, the man who had led the July 14, 1958, revolution against the monarchy in Iraq, was killed in the coup. Abdul Salam Arif, a military officer and a former partner of Qasim, assumed presidency after killing Qasim, while Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, another military officer and Baath leader, became Prime Minister. The Baath party ruled cruelly for nine months, oppressing the Iraqi people through unjust arrests, torture, and murder. Located in western Baghdad, the Palace of the End, Qasir al-Nihaya, became a detention center where many executions took place, while party members also raped women in prison. These crimes were revealed after the first fall of the Baath regime in November 1963.

I conducted a study about the coup based on British documents in the National Archives in London, which were revealed thirty years after the event. I concluded that the coup was supported by the West; evidence showed that Western governments feared Iraq would fall under the control of communism after Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim made the Iraqi Communist Party legal because it was banned during the monarchy. Moreover, Prime Minister Qasim issued Law No. 80, under which the Iraqi government took back 95.5 percent of the Iraqi lands not explored by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). The IPC was owned by U.S., British, and other European companies, and had a concession to explore for oil throughout Iraq for seventy-five years.¹

The Baath party returned to power on July 17, 1968. Al-Bakr became President, and in 1969 Saddam Hussein became Vice President. Saddam was in charge of the regime’s intelligence apparatus, which used extreme brutality against different political groups and all the Iraqi people. The Palace of the End was used again as a detention and execution center, with Saddam in charge. The Iraqi people continued to oppose the regime, and many military coup attempts and uprisings were viciously crushed in the 1970s and 1980s.

After studying the secret U.S. documents in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.—revealed nearly thirty years after the 1968 coup—I concluded that the overthrow of Abdul Rahman Arif (the Iraqi President who succeeded his brother Abdul Salam after the latter’s 1966 death in a helicopter crash) was supported by some Western countries. Abdul Rahman had been acting against U.S. and British interests in attempting to get French and Russian companies to explore for oil in the lands taken back by Abdul Karim Qasim under Law No. 80.

Abdul Rahman also wanted to give sulfur concessions to France and to enter an agreement with Dassault Arms Company to buy 54 advanced Mirage jet fighters. This contract was canceled by the Baath regime after the coup. In his first press conference, on July 23, 1968, the post-coup Foreign Minister, Nasir al-Hani (later assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence forces), announced that the contract was not signed and the Iraqi government had not paid a deposit, so there was little hope that the new government would continue the contract.²

Both Shiite and Sunni religious scholars opposed the Baath regime. Hundreds were arrested, tortured, and killed, including Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Badri, a Sunni religious scholar in the Tobchi neighborhood of Western Baghdad, who was kidnapped and killed in 1969. Many religious Sunni movements, including the Al Tahrir Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, were crushed by the regime. Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim in Najaf³ opposed the Baath party and sent his son Sayyid Mahdi al-Hakim to President al-Bakr to protest Baath policies. The regime accused al-Hakim of being a Western spy and plotting with military officers and tribal chiefs to overthrow the regime; they attempted to arrest him, forcing him to flee.

Muhsin al-Hakim was put under house arrest and surrounded by security forces until his death in 1970. Millions of Iraqis attended his funeral in protest, using the occasion to express their anger with the Baath regime. When President al-Bakr tried to join the funeral, the people shouted at him, Listen, Mr. President, Sayyid Mahdi is not a spy.

Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim had been the highest religious authority in Najaf between 1955 and 1970. He defended all Iraqis against the successive dictatorial regimes in Baghdad. In 1966, for example, President Abdul Salam Arif wanted to carry out combat operations against the Kurds in Northern Iraq, so he arranged for a conference of Muslim religious scholars from Iraq and many Arab and Muslim countries to issue a religious decree (fatwa) allowing the government to kill the Kurds. Many Muslim scholars attended, and they issued a fatwa based on a Quranic verse, which reads, The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief on earth is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off from opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter (Al-Maeda 5:33). Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim was invited to the conference, but he refused to attend; instead, he issued a fatwa against killing the Kurds. This decision cemented ties between Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa al-Barzani and al-Hakim that have since ensured the strong relations between the Kurds and the al-Hakim family.

When the Christian community was oppressed in the 1960s by the dictatorial regime in Baghdad because its members lived in the same areas as the Kurds in Northern Iraq, they appealed to Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim, who issued a fatwa against the repression of Christians in Iraq. The relationship between the Christians and al-Hakim and his family has also remained strong ever since. Indeed, Iraqi priests and archbishops used to participate in Islamic festivals and celebrations in Baghdad, Basra, and other provinces, and Muslim scholars frequently visited Iraqi churches to join Christians during their celebrations.

The Jewish community in Iraq also received al-Hakim’s benevolence. Meer Basri, an Iraqi Jewish scholar who later found refuge in London, republished the History of the Jews of Iraq, written by Yusuf Ghanimah at the beginning of the twentieth century. Basri added a supplement on the history of the Jews of Iraq in the twentieth century in which he wrote: the circumstances of Jews worsened after the 1967 war, as they were subjected to killing, kidnapping, and arrest in a way which is not acceptable by manhood and humanity. Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim, the highest religious authority for the Shiites, issued a religious decree ‘Fatwa’ that it is a duty to treat the Jews well and to remove injustice and oppression against them.⁴

A large uprising against the Baath party took place in 1977, when the regime tried to prevent Shiite pilgrims from going on foot to the holy city of Karbala to visit the holy shrine of Imam Hussein on the occasion of Arbaeen (the fortieth day after the Ashura, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein commemorated on the tenth day of the lunar month of Muharram). The regime deployed military forces, tanks, and armored vehicles to stop the pilgrims, but the Iraqi people insisted on practicing their rituals no matter what the sacrifice. (Centuries before, the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties also attempted to prevent people from visiting the shrine of Imam Hussein through arrests, torture, and killing, but devout Muslims have insisted on performing these rituals for hundreds of years.) Iraqis peacefully began their unarmed marches toward Karbala a few days before the religious observance, but they were faced with the Baath regime’s military might. Sadly, thousands of people were arrested and tortured, while others were executed and killed in the streets.

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr dispatched Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a son of