Word: saddamism
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...easy. For one thing, the decision to involve even low-level members of the former regime is deeply controversial among Iraq's majority Shi'ites, who suffered hugely at the hands of Baathists under Saddam. Brahimi has yet to secure the backing of Iraq's most important Shi'ite, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, who has so far refused to endorse any of the plans for creating a new Iraqi government. Brahimi has conferred with Sistani's son; Brahimi's spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, does not rule out the possibility that Sistani will demand guarantees that, among other things, the future...
...wrong," says Salah Hassan Habib, 22, a butcher in a Shi'ite neighborhood in Baghdad. "The next government should be elected." The U.N.'s reputation in Iraq is hardly lustrous: ordinary Iraqis suffered for more than a decade under sanctions enacted in the U.N.'s name. Also, since Saddam's fall, the newly free Iraqi press has uncovered evidence of massive corruption in the U.N.'s oil-for-food program...
Once upon a time, Ahmad Chalabi had friends in high places. The M.I.T.-educated Iraqi exile was the odds-on choice of a powerful coterie inside the Bush Administration to run Iraq once Saddam Hussein was gone. In the fall of 2002, well before the U.S. invaded, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith was trying to get Congress to release $97 million earmarked for groups, like Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), that were agitating for regime change. The Administration was relying on Chalabi's sources to provide intelligence on Saddam's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction...
...while, those ties paid off. In April 2003, on the day Saddam's statue was toppled, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and his 600-man militia, dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces, into southern Iraq. Chalabi's operatives helped U.S. forces track down members of Saddam's regime and collect troves of valuable documents, and the U.S. rewarded him with a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council. But as U.S. stature in Iraq plummeted, so did Chalabi's fortunes. With Iraq's political future increasingly in the hands of the United Nations, Chalabi faces being cut out. U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi...
...Washington, Chalabi's light has dimmed as more and more experts like David Kay, former Bush chief weapons inspector, blame the I.N.C. for painting a bogus picture of Saddam's arsenal. Chalabi tells TIME, "It is unfair and astounding that I would be given such powers to affect a system. It's election season, and people want to seek scapegoats." But U.S. intelligence officials doubt the credibility of many of the sources provided by the I.N.C. An informant purported to have worked on underground storage sites for biochem weapons greatly "embroidered" his tales, a senior U.S. intelligence officer says. Another...