BY FALEH A. JABAR
The once moribund Iraqi National Congress (INC) has apparently gained a new lease on life. After weeks of intensive talks in Washington, Ahmad Chalabi — leader of the self-appointed Iraqi opposition in exile — visited Iran to establish a base for sending roughly 100 INC operatives into northern Iraq to gather intelligence and distribute "humanitarian aid", all at US expense.
The INC, widely distrusted in the Arab world and known to have seriously mismanaged its funds, has been unable to convert the millions of dollars in US aid granted by the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 into a credible threat to the Iraqi regime. Still, the INC and its Pentagon and Congressional champions clamour for increased aid.
Controversy over the INC has overshadowed deep social crises in Iraq that may in time produce the kind of opposition to Saddam Hussein that the INC exiles never can.
Fractious coterie
The INC, formed in Vienna in 1992, has been the focal point of US-sponsored schemes to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Almost all the major Iraqi opposition parties — old and new — were represented on the INC's executive committee at the beginning, giving it an air of legitimacy that it has never recovered.
With CIA backing, the INC was based in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan from 1992-1996, ostensibly to rally a unified military opposition in the north. The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and its main rival the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — splitting over control of lucrative oil smuggling revenues — began fighting each other in 1993.
This culminated in KDP leader Masoud Barzani's invitation to the Iraqi army to help him crush the PUK. The Iraqi army seized the opportunity to crush the INC's military aspirations as well. When Saddam Hussein's forces took Erbil in 1996, the INC's operations came to a standstill and many of its members were killed.
Even before this defeat, coalition members — the KDP, the Iraqi Communist Party, the Islamist group known as al-Da'wa, Muhammad Baqir Hakim's Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution — had pulled out as the INC's inadequacies became evident.
The US tried to rejuvenate the INC in 1999. Its executive committee was expanded and the first installments of the $97 million promised by the Iraq Liberation Act were paid.
Yet the INC remains a far cry from representing a reasonable, let alone a comprehensive, cross-section of Iraqi opposition forces. It certainly has no measurable constituency on the ground in Iraq.
Today, the INC is a fractious group with Chalabi's coterie of liberals at its core. The small Wifaq movement — led by ex-Baathists with connections to middle-ranking army dissidents in exile — and the even smaller Constitutional Monarchist movement round out the membership. A few Shiite clerics also sit on the INC's board.
To forestall allegations of financial mismanagement by Chalabi, the US now pays the INC's rents, salaries and other expenses directly. Despite being routed in 1996, the INC still aims to mount a military campaign against the Iraqi government. Military experts have long criticised this plan, partly because the KDP and PUK, who share control of Iraqi Kurdistan, refuse to participate.
Realistically, the INC's future role seems confined to providing moral support to whatever opposition effort may emerge inside Iraq. However, the regime's opponents inside Iraq are certain to decline the INC's help given the INC's connections to the CIA and shady financial dealings.
Nationalism
The Iraqi regime has long been ruthless in its suppression of opposition from communists, Islamists, Kurdish rebels and dissidents inside the ruling Baathist party.
The greatest obstacle opposition forces encountered flowed from the Iraq-Iran war, which provided the regime with its most powerful instrument of mass control: Iraqi nationalism. Nationalism far surpassed the previous system of kinship ties as a way of ensuring loyalty to the government. Sunni tribes from provincial towns were made to feel "Iraqi" and the Baathist cadres manufactured a mass political party, eventually peaking at some 1.8 million members. Oil revenues were instrumental in buying Iraqis' consent to the protracted war.
While the 1991 uprisings after the Gulf War heralded the end of unity between official and popular nationalisms, US-led sanctions and bombing campaigns have exerted contradictory effects on Iraqi politics. Iraq's international isolation reduced the military and economic power of the regime, but at the same time rendered the people more dependent on the state for their daily provisions. Hunger and hardship, including that caused by the authorities, are easily blamed on foreign powers, particularly the US and Britain.
Nonetheless, there is undoubted opposition to the regime inside Iraq. There is no way of accurately measuring popular discontent in Iraq, in the absence of opinion polls or free elections. High levels of party defection, army desertion, violent crime and assassination attempts may indicate a silent majority of opposition simmering beneath the surface.
Opposition
If nothing else, the high level of both ordinary and political crimes indicates how far the central state's power has weakened. Antipathy toward the regime is so widespread that, as one ex-Baathist cadre put it, "It is not a matter of who hates the regime, but of who does not".
The historical opposition, often dismissed by the media, has grown during the last decade. Kurdish nationalists, radical Islamists of every strand, leftists and ex-Baathists have formidable clandestine networks, armed wings and wide constituencies.
Several Baathist operatives and security officers have been assassinated in recent years. The apparent abortive coup attempt by General Muhammad Mazloum, which resulted in his execution in 1995, triggered mass demonstrations and turmoil in his home province. There was an attempt on the life of Uday, Saddam Hussein's eldest son, in 1996. Underground Islamist and leftist activists report growing opportunities to mobilise and recruit dissidents in rural and urban areas.
According to official figures, more than two million pilgrims (almost 10% of the total population and 20% of the Shiite population) headed to Karbala to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 1999. These figures should be read against the background of the activities of the late Ayatollah Muhammad al-Sadr, who was assassinated together with his two eldest sons in 1999.
Al-Sadr was a handpicked government appointee, but he grew publicly critical of the Baath regime in his widely attended sermons. For the first time in a generation, a Shiite imam built vast networks of followers among the peasants and the urban middle classes, and forged an alliance with influential urban merchants and tribal chieftains, who have gained relative social power from the acute economic polarisation that has accompanied 10 years of war and sanctions.
When radical political change will occur in Iraq is unknown, but it is clear that even the inner circles of the regime are contemplating a change of some sort. The single party system has lost its effectiveness as a means of control and the economy cannot remain shut off from the global market forever. The regime has made a series of gestures toward a tightly controlled liberalisation of the political sphere.
A new constitution was drafted and published in 1992 that contained the appearance of political pluralism, a free press and freedom of association. Contacts with the Kurds have resumed, even, at one point, with Barzani and PUK chairperson Jalal Talabani. A shadowy group of unnamed "opposition leaders" were invited to Baghdad in 1999.
Concurrently, the regime has taken steps to coopt the "traditional" political actors who are gaining power as the state declines. In recent general and municipal elections, a greater number of slots have gone to tribal figures who are not members of the Baath party. The estimated share of Baath party members and cadres in the national assembly dropped from 63% in 1984 to less than 25% in the 1996 elections. It continued to drop in the last elections in 2000, while tribally endorsed candidates more than doubled during the same period.
The grip on power of Hussein's extended family — the al-Majid house of the Bejat clan — has never been so tight. The military's elite units — christened as the Army of the Mother of All Battles — are under the command of Hussein's younger son Qusay. As an ex-military commander put it, there are two military establishments, one for the ruling elite, and another for the nation.
Qusay was officially announced as the "caretaker" in case the elder Hussein falls fatally ill or is eliminated. This announcement sent a message to the al-Majid house as well as the Baath party: Iraq's most important tribal chieftainship will be transferred vertically (to sons) rather than horizontally (to brothers and cousins).
The moves to consolidate power may aggravate intra-regime tensions. Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, exchange thinly veiled insults in public. It seems clear that a challenge to the Iraqi regime — when it emerges — will come from either the historical opposition or the internal contradictions of the regime's ruling strategy. Washington's manoeuvres have little to do with either.
Despite these realities, the Bush administration is sticking by the INC. The US State Department's Richard Boucher said on March 19 that the US had chosen the INC to receive Iraq Liberation Act monies merely because it was "first out of the gate". State Department emissaries recently met with Iraqi exiles outside the INC — other "potential grantees" in Boucher's words — but these groups have no more strength inside Iraq than does the INC.
The Pentagon, Republican hawks nesting in Congress and Vice-President Dick Cheney's inner-circle support the INC wholeheartedly, and argue for more aggressive US attempts at "regime change".
[Faleh A. Jabar is a visiting fellow at Birkbeck College, London University. He is author of the forthcoming book Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues: State and Religion in Iraq (Saqi Books). Abridged from a Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) press information note. Visit the MERIP web site at .]