US makes U-turn on Iraq council

Nearly two months since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, US authorities here say they will personally select 25 to 30 Iraqis to staff an interim political council. The new process is a detour from earlier plans to assemble a large convention of Iraqis who would democratically choose a new generation of leaders and decide the shape of their future government.

Although the decision expedites the creation of an official Iraqi leadership team, coalition administrators still need to navigate a morass of political, cultural, and religious considerations to create the group. And because the US-dominated coalition will create the list, disgruntled groups may hold America directly responsible for a defective or unbalanced council.

The sharp shift in gears touches on the frustrations of the Iraqis, who have been growing increasingly impatient with the glacial return to basic public services and the lack of progress in forming an interim Iraqi authority.

It also addresses the concerns of US and British officials, who have been struggling to come up with the right formula for a transitional body that will calm the country's precarious security situation and be representative of Iraqis as a whole.

The council, which would be formed within six weeks, will be chosen by the US and British governments "through a process of consultation" with various Iraqis. Later, a much wider group of Iraqis would be drawn together to hold a constitutional convention, where delegates would draft the dimensions of the country's new government and pave the way to elections.

This new picture for the future of postwar Iraq is more of an emerging portrait than a paint-by-numbers plan for how to remake a nation unhinged after 35 year of totalitarian Baath Party rule. It represents the clearest acknowledgment yet of a drift emanating from the occupation powers here for several weeks.

The new plan means that the seven parties who call themselves the "leadership council," primarily representing Iraqis who were living in exile or otherwise outside the grasp of Mr. Hussein's regime, will not be permitted to assume sole control of an interim governing authority as they had expected to do.

Some representatives of the seven groups, often dubbed the "G-7" here, have been grumbling with disapproval over what they feel is a far different approach than the one they were led to believe the Bush administration would take when they signed onto its regime-change regimen ahead of the war in late March. The seven, who include the two main Kurdish factions in northern Iraq led by Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress of Iyad Alawi, the Shiite Muslim movement of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the Shiite Dawa Party and the new democratic movement of Nasir al-Chadirch, were to have met Monday to formulate a joint response to the new plans announced by US and British officials, acting jointly as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

But L. Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, told reporters Monday that the appointment of a political council did not signal the rolling back of plans to pass on governing powers to the Iraqis themselves.

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