Plan: US general to run Iraq

The US plan also imagines, in Feith's words, a "Constitutional commission ... to draft a new Constitution and submit it to the Iraqi people for ratification."

Zalmay Khalilzad, the US envoy to the Iraqi opposition, briefed leaders of three groups opposed to Hussein about the plan in Ankara, Turkey, last week. In interviews here, Chalabi and Mr. Makiya said they were unable to attend because the US gave them just 18 hours' notice, but added that they have been told about the discussions from opposition figures who participated.

Mr. Khalilzad met with the two Kurdish parties - the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the PUK - that administer areas of northern Iraq outside Hussein's control. A leader of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which represents major elements of the country's Shiite community, also took part in the Ankara meetings.

Both Kurds and Shiites rebelled unsuccessfully against Hussein after the Gulf war, thinking the US would defend them. Instead the US stood back as Hussein crushed the uprisings. But for more than a decade US and British warplanes have kept Iraqi planes from flying over both areas, a limitation that has offered Kurds, in northern Iraq, and Shiites, in the south, some protection from Hussein's military.

The Kurds and Shiites are important to the US in part because both have men under arms. But they are also groups that may pose complexities.

Long disenfranchised by Hussein, despite their majority status, the Shiites want to see a more just distribution of power in a new Iraq. This desire makes the US wary, since SCIRI, the main Shiite group, is supported by Iran's theocratic rulers. The US would like Iran's role in Iraq kept to a minimum.

Makiya asserts that installing a US military ruler "is certified, guaranteed to make [SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim] a major player in Iraq because he's gong to run in ... elections, along with the rest of the opposition, on an anti-occupation platform."

The Kurds want at least to preserve the de facto autonomy they have gained over the past decade, and have insisted that the new Iraq adopt a federal system of government. But federalism makes Turkey anxious, on the theory that an autonomous Kurdish area in a federal Iraq might inspire Turkey's Kurds to seek something similar. The Turks have relentlessly suppressed Kurdish nationalism.

At the same time, Turkish cooperation is an important feature of US war planning, which may explain why US officials "told the Kurds to be very, very careful and very realistic about federalism," in Chalabi's rendition of events in Ankara.

Rather than allying itself with Iraq's opposition, an ambitious and fractious collection of exiles and dissidents, the US seems to be gambling that large segments of the Iraqi establishment will cooperate in a American-led effort to rehabilitate the country and reform its political system. Makiya says with evident disappointment that years of collaborative effort with US officials - including US funding, an act of Congress promoting Iraq's "liberation," and a "democratic principles working group on Iraq" backed by the State Department - are "all down the drain."

But the US approach may increase the comfort level of some US friends in the Arab world, who preside over autocratic regimes and who may be uneasy with an effort to create a Western-style democracy in their midst.

"What concerns us a lot," Chalabi says, "is the perception of the Arab governments and their friends in Washington about the effect Iraq could have by its example on the future of the Arab world."

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