GLOBE EDITORIAL
Politics Iraqi styleNOTHING WENT exactly as the United States or the United Nations had planned in the selection of a transitional government for Iraq. Candidates who were better suited to serve as prime minister and president until elections scheduled for January 2005 were shunted aside. Nevertheless, the unruly selection process generated two phenomena the Bush administration should welcome: a show of independence by Iraqi politicians rejecting US or UN preferences and a bout of pure politicking.
There are sound reasons to be wary of the prime minister who emerged from a triangular tussle among UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, US administrator Paul Bremer, and the 24 members of the Iraqi Governing Council. Iyad Alawi, the new head of Iraq's transitional government, has an ugly past as a Ba'athist apparatchik until 1971 and, since at least the mid-90s, as the favorite coup plotter of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is to Brahimi's credit that he favored Hussein Shahristani for interim prime minister. Shahristani, an eminent scientist, spent 12 years in prison for his refusal to work in Saddam's nuclear weapons program. A Shi'ite, he also had what one Iraqi called "Islamically unimpeachable" credentials. Shahristani would have been the technocrat without political ambitions Brahimi said he was seeking. But the disparate groups represented in the now-dissolved Governing Council wanted to perpetuate their interests in the new government. They spurned Shahristani and also rejected Adnan Pachachi, the respected 81-year-old former foreign minister whom Brahimi and Bremer wanted as president. Instead, the Iraqi council imposed as its choice for president Sheik Ghazi Yawar, a head of the Shamar tribe, which includes more than a million Iraqis, Shi'ites as well as Sunnis.
These are political choices made by politicians. Still, they are Iraqi choices. Bremer, who has not been adept at allowing Iraqis to govern themselves, will be gone from Iraq in a month. For the sake of Americans as well as Iraqis, the US ambassador who supplants him in Baghdad, John Negroponte, must do a better job of heeding Iraqis' ideas about their country's future. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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