Word: brahimi
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...government's basic task sounds deceptively simple: hold Iraq together, and lay the groundwork so reasonably fair elections can be held just seven months down the road, in January 2005. Getting there won't be easy, but after a year of U.S. stumbling, the Brahimi plan may well be the last chance to cement Iraq together as a relatively stable country. At this point, concedes a British official, "there is no plan...