Who is Allawi then?

[HStorm]

I thought it was high time we dispelled a few myths about how Iyad Allawi is bound to be a more benevolent ruler than Saddam Hussein.

Did you know that Allawi was once a high-profile member of the Ba'ath Party, one of Al Bakr's and Saddam's key allies. He also has a history that is at least as violent, bloodthirsty and intolerant as Saddam's own...


The Truth About The New Iraqi Presdent

Iyad Allawi, far from being a new beginning for Iraq away from the horrors of the Ba'ath Party, was, as a teenager, one of the highest profile members of its underground terror movement in the 1960's, the National Guard of the Ba'athists. He was born to great privilege in Iraq, with his family influential in the dominant Sai'di Party, but he grew up wanting more than just a comfortable life.

Intellectually he was always unremarkable - he was a mediocre student both at School and at Medical College - but he has always been very ambitious. He was one of the Ba'athist agitators during a grand student strike held in 1962, a forerunner for an eventual anti-government coup. During his time as a National Guardsman, Allawi was a key player in various special missions such as assassinations of key figures in the then-Qasem regime, and senior military officers, paving the way for the upcoming coup. (Saddam Hussein himself, it is often forgotten, was in the same division of the party and was wounded in a failed assassination attempt on Qasem.)

Allawi was known as an inadequate student, guilty of frequent sexual harassment against female students, and various thuggish outbursts, including threatening anyone who dared disagree with him with a handgun that never left his side.

The coup of 1963 saw Allawi, still only 19, begin elevation to one of the leaders of the Ba'athist National Guard, and head of Central Security. He was also in charge of interrogation, which amounted to inhuman torture of literally thousands of suspected dissidents, including pro-Qasems, Nationalists, Communists and Democrats.

Allawi stands accused of having personally and publically tortured to death three politically active figures of the time: Mohammed Al Wardi, Faisal Al Hajaj and Sabah Al Mirza, a girl student at the time in the Medical College. All three were then trade unionists and political leaders in the Iraqi Communist Party. They were rival students of Allawi's at the University College of Medicine, and had out-performed him in their studies as well as differed hugely from him in their political ideals.

Allawi was later appointed by Saddam Hussein as a deputy of the new State Security Bureau, the Hanin (which was essentially the Iraqi arm of the KGB, responsible for intimidating or assassinating dissidents). General Ahmed Hassan Al Bakr, Saddam Hussain, Iyad Allawi, and their Ba'athist subordinates worked together to destabilise the remaining vestiges of democracy in Iraq, until in 1968, a new singly-Ba'athist coup toppled the political fabric of the nation, and left all opposition groups completely separated from power, and facing annihilation.

Al Bakr became undisputed President, and it was he, not the University College, who had Allawi's medical doctorate approved. Saddam, AL Bakr's deputy, then assigned Allawi to London, officially to resume medical studies, but really to have him act as an espionage agent against the British Government.

Al Bakr was eventually overthrown by Saddam, and so Allawi, seen as a potential rival for power, was made a permanent exile in the UK. In 1978, Saddam even tried to have Allawi assassinated, since when the two former allies became implacable foes.

Allawi's opposition to Saddam thus is entirely personal and has nothing to do with political ideals, as in truth their ideologies are almost identical. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that he will be any less brutal a leader than Saddam, and all available evidence we have at the moment in fact suggests he may be slightly worse.

Like Saddam, Allawi has a long history of intolerance towards schools of thought that differ from his own, and an unimaginative, brutal approach to settling disagreements. And the only reason he has been appointed the new ruler of Iraq is that after the assassination attempt on him, he became an ally of MI6 and the CIA in providing intelligence against the Ba'ath Party. It has nothing to do with any latent belief he has in justice or democracy - because he hasn't - and everything to do with being a well-connected ally of the West.

[Naselus]

Certainly one of the goodies, then. He's in the CIA too, like most of the US-installed dictators are. He certainly ran the Iraqi National Accord, funded by the CIA and MI6 for general acts of terrorism in Saddam's regime. Not that we'd ever negotiate with or fund terrorism. Oh, no, we're the good guys.

You should probably also know that the INA provided a great deal of intelligence about the WMDs that were found in Iraq. Those new, super-powerful invisible ones.

And of course, he was in the Iraqi murder-group, Mukhabarat,that hunted down exiles living in Europe, too. And he was a consultant to US oil companies. No link between that and his sudden appointment as 'interim' prime minister. Oh, yes, interim. what an odd word for 'permanent'.

Allawi is also alleged to have personally executed six Iraqi prisoners in June 2004 to "send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents". Top first minister material there, then.

In short, he's an amoral, evil little man, who's tried to sieze power on several occasions, who's philosophy only differed from Saddam's in who should be ruler, and he's the head of a terrorist group.

This is what you get from a war on terror.

[HStorm]

Yes, like his Afghan counterpart, Allawi is a former business associate of Texan international oil concerns. And at the head of those concerns was of course one George H W Bush...

[HStorm]

Almost three years to the day since this thread last had any activity, for curiosity's (and old times') sake, I thought I'd post the following; an article from 2005 about the honourable interim leader of Iraq, written shortly before the election went the other way (awww, shame! *Snigger*); -

'Meet Ayad Allawi

To watch the stupid teevee show today, you'd think Allawi was Nelson Mandela, and not a vicious Ba'athist thug who has been playing the British, American, Saudi, Kuwaiti and Iraqi spies against each other for three decades.

Allawi, a secular Shiite from a wealthy merchant family, was a spy and -- maybe! -- assassin for Saddam Hussein. As a high-ranking officer in the dreaded Mukharabat, the Ba'athist secret police, he was Saddam's friend, colleague and eventual rival. His Baghdad medical degree is said to be phony; the Ba'ath Party gave it to him so he could travel Europe on a World Health Organization grant and infiltrate Arab student groups.

Dr Haifa al-Azzawi knew Allawi well in his youth: "No one who studied medicine in Baghdad in the 60s could have forgotten that Ba'athist bully boy. He walked around the campus with a pistol in his belt and chased women students. His medical degree is bogus."

(He later received degrees from medical schools in England, so the "phony degree" charge is up for debate.)

At some point in the 1970s -- accounts vary -- he was "turned" by MI6 and allegedly broke with Saddam, possibly over Saddam's habit of rewarding all of his Tikrit relatives with big-shot positions in the Ba'ath Party. There are other stories claiming that the "break" with Saddam was a secret until Allawi was caught spying on Saddam's spies in London.

In 1978, three guys (or one guy) sent by Saddam allegedly got inside Allawi's London apartment and beat him with axe handles. Reportedly, one of the guys used the correct end of the axe and nearly severed one of Allawi's legs. Remarkably, Allawi fought off these three attackers, without killing them, or getting them arrested, or something. The story makes little sense. Many in the Iraqi exile movement have called shenanigans on this and other fantastical parts of Allawi's official history.

It has long been known that he works every side: MI6, the Ba'ath Party, CIA, UN, Saudi intel, Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, oil companies in the region (where he made his personal fortune), Allawi's own Iraqi National Accord, etc. He was supposed to lead a coup against Saddam in 1995 or 1996 (dates vary), backed by Clinton's White House. It was a $40-million operation, with support from the CIA and several MidEast states. Allawi blabbed to the Washington Post that a coup was on the way. This got back to Saddam very quickly, and Saddam tortured and murdered 800+ army officers believed to have some link to Allawi.

Allawi also headed a CIA-financed terrorist group operating within Iraq.. It was responsible for a number of terror attacks in the mid-1990s, including the bombing of a movie theater full of people, newspaper offices and public buses, as well as the usual car bombings. (Yes, he's a terrorist, but he's our terrorist. For now, at least.)

In 2002, Allawi played his crucial role in the war buildup by delivering a frightening (and fake) report to British Intelligence. The report, allegedly from an Iraqi officer, claimed that Saddam could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes.

Allawi's cousin is none other than Chalabi -- the disgraced crook who, with a remarkable assist by the New York Times' war whore Judith Miller, provided much of the phony intelligence that led to the current Iraq War. But Allawi despises Chalabi, and the two of them have led feuding factions of Iraqi exiles for decades. When Chalabi's star began to fade last year, Allawi was named chief of security by the Iraqi Governing Council set up by the United States.

After serving 10 months as head of security for the Iraqi Governing Council that Paul Bremer set up in July 2003, Allawi was named Interim Prime Minister in May of this year. The U.S. State Department considers him the "best of a bad bunch." Chalabi didn't have nearly as good a month. On May 20, Chalabi's mansion was raided by U.S. troops and the new Iraqi National Police. Chalabi was finished, and the White House quickly began pretending they had no idea who he was, even though the entire invasion had been based on his elaborate propaganda. (Before long, both Chalabi and his son would be charged by Allawi's government with a variety of crimes, including murder and fraud.)

Within weeks of Allawi's takeover, the death penalty was reinstated in Iraq. He swore that he would "annihilate" all insurgents. By mid-July, a remarkable story was being told around Iraq: Allawi was such a bad ass that he personally executed suspected insurgents ... right in front of his U.S. security detail. Rush Limbaugh greeted this news with a gleeful, "Good! Hubba Hubba." Other war apologists attacked the Australian reporter who made these stories public. Eventually, a few U.S. papers reported the rumor, saying how such stories were welcomed by Iraqis who pine for the brutal law & order of pre-invasion Iraq. Allawi himself seems to delight in the story. From Sunday's New York Times:

Ayad Allawi will have his right wrist in a cast when he arrives in the United States this week for his first visit as Iraq's interim prime minister, and it will provide the 59-year-old neurosurgeon with a powerful talking point. Asked about the wrist in an interview here as he prepared to leave for London, New York and Washington, Dr. Allawi joshed: "I've been shooting people, didn't you know?"

Weirder still was the "real" reason for the injury: He says he lost his temper while screaming at underlings, and smashed his hand so hard on a table that he snapped a bone.

None of this means Allawi might not make a worthwhile -- and friendly to Washington -- strongman for Iraq. (Although it is never safe to assume a guy will stay on your side just because he's a longtime CIA asset, as we should've learned from Osama bin Laden, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein himself.) He clearly understands the country better than any of the dingbats who "planned" the war. Whether or not he can recover from their gruesome mistakes is not something we can answer today.

For two decades, Allawi had argued that a stable post-Saddam Iraq could only be built on the foundations of the modern state the Ba'athists had created, including the army, police, and secular courts. And Allawi says he warned U.S. officials in May that they would make a terrible mistake if they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of using it to maintain order and begin a process of national reconciliation.

But Bremer rejected that advice, probably his biggest mistake. The army, like other institutions, was swept away over Allawi's protests in a surge of de-Ba'athification.

(For more background on how the CIA "auditioned" various Iraqi exiles for the position of new Iraqi leader, read this heavily detailed piece by Seymour Hersh from March 4, 2002 ... shortly before the invasion began.)

And there you go. Not that this will make a damned bit of difference in the tidal wave of bullshit about Allawi being "leader of a free and democratic Iraq" .... '


You may wonder why I bothered posting this, but I think it makes an interesting contrast. What we have here is a collection of much the same facts, with a few juicy extras thrown in, re-compiled and presented in a completely different arrangement and substantially different tone. And yet, for all the contrast, it still reaches almost exactly the same conclusion.

And it's still important, as recent developments suggest that Nouri Al-Maliki's coalition leadership is on the brink of disintegration. With Dubya making no secret that he will not tolerate Iraq having a policy on Iran that differs in any way to his own, and Al-Maliki himself not very eager to stay in charge, a new election may be in the offing. No prizes for guessing who America's preference will be in that...