CHANGES IN U.S. IRAQ PLAN EXPLORED

Deadline Firm; Other Details Are Negotiable

  Informe de  Robin Wright and Anthony Shadid en “The Washington Post” del 25.01.2004

 The Bush administration has produced a list of possible changes for Iraq's political transition, with some U.S. and British officials acknowledging for the first time that the original plan could even be scrapped altogether if the United States is to preempt the growing clamor for elections.

In two rounds of talks at the United Nations and Washington last week, the United States told U.N. representatives that everything is on the table except the June 30 deadline for handing over power to a new Iraqi government, U.N. and U.S. officials said.

"The United States told us that as long as the timetable is respected, they are ready to listen to any suggestion," a senior U.N. official said.

The United States is publicly talking tough about clinging to a "refined" variation of the Nov. 15 accord signed with the Iraqi Governing Council that outlines the terms of a hand-over. The changes could include expanding participation in 18 streamlined caucuses that would select representatives for a national assembly, which would then pick a cabinet and head of state, U.S. officials say.

But in private conversations with the United Nations and its coalition partners, the administration has begun to discuss the viability of abandoning the complex caucuses outlined in the agreement and even holding partial elections or simply handing over power to an expanded Iraqi Governing Council, an old proposal now back on the table, U.S. and U.N. officials say.

The administration says there is no sense of panic, despite the mounting opposition to the current U.S. transition plan.

"It's complicated, it's not easy, it's not been done in Iraq before, but we'll get the job done. And as we go through the process, there are bound to be different points of view," said a senior U.S. administration official speaking to reporters after Vice President Cheney's speech in Davos, Switzerland. "I suppose on any given day you look over and say, my gosh, we're on the edge of the abyss here, but I don't think so. I think we're in a hell of a lot better shape than we were before."

Yet in a sign of how much control the United States has lost since the Nov. 15 accord, U.S. officials concede that the most important calculations in ending the political crisis will be the positions of two players excluded from the original agreement: the United Nations and an aging ayatollah who has not left his home in six years.

The U.S.-led coalition needs U.N. help to give the process credibility and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's approval to pull off the transition and meet its deadline, U.S. officials say.

Sistani's demand for direct elections has rapidly gained momentum this month in cities from Baghdad to Najaf and Nasiriyah. On the tan-brick walls of the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala, one of Shiite Islam's two most sacred sites, a leaflet reflects popular sentiment: "All of us are with the supreme religious authority in the demand for conducting elections to choose members of the transitional legislative assembly." The call for elections dominates sermons at Friday prayers, the Muslim Sabbath.

For now, catering to the Shiites has become the main consideration of U.S. strategy, U.S. officials say. Yet each day, the political situation in Iraq gets more complicated.

U.S. officials are concerned about alienating either the powerful Sunni Muslim or Kurdish minorities in their effort to satisfy Sistani, Iraq's most popular Shiite cleric.

Already, the preeminent body of Sunnis, the Association of Muslim Clergy, has come out against elections. Sunni clerics have used their Friday prayer sermons to make clear they will not give in to a plan that ends up with Shiite domination -- and that all methods of resistance will be allowed to prevent it.

But the Shiites do not speak with one voice either. Cleric Muqtada Sadr, who heads his own faction, supports Sistani's call for elections but insisted at Friday prayers last week that the United Nations should not be involved.

The 25 U.S.-picked members of the Governing Council are also not united -- nor happy with the plan they signed 10 weeks ago. Reflecting the views of several members, one Iraqi official said the Nov. 15 agreement was "hasty and hurried. There was a lot of pressure [from the United States] to sign it."

To accommodate the communities, the United States has developed options in four broad categories.

One category involves expanding the 18 provincial caucuses to bring in a "critical mass" of participants so that they would seem more open than elite-dominated. The variations are being referred to as "partial elections" or "cascading caucuses," U.S. officials say.

Under the original plan, 15 Iraqis on coordinating committees -- five from the Governing Council, five from provincial councils and one each from the five largest cities in each province -- would vote on caucus members. Each winner would have to get at least 11 votes, giving the council an effective veto. That prospect has triggered fears of manipulation to favor pro-council candidates. The 18 caucuses would then select representatives for a new national assembly.

Another proposal calls for scrapping the coordinating committees and opening up the caucus process to anyone who wants to participate, with limits only on age and clean criminal records, U.S. officials say.

Although L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, favors modifying the process, there is a growing sense among Iraqis and even key U.S. officials that these ideas no longer go far enough to defuse the crisis, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

A second category centers on local elections or referendums, U.S. officials say. Local elections could possibly be conducted in a town hall format to come up with a list of candidates for the national assembly -- perhaps four, five or six times larger than the allocated seats -- from which representatives would then be picked by a provincial caucus.

A variation calls for local elections in one province at a time because conducting polls in all 18 provinces at the same time would pose manpower and security problems.

The problem with this category, U.S. officials say, is that each option involves larger operations than currently envisioned, with far more manpower, electoral expertise and, potentially, time that the U.S.-led coalition authority may not have.

A third category is elections, which U.S. officials now say is unlikely -- although the United States has consulted experts at the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the International Foundation for Election Systems and the National Democratic Institute think tanks.

The administration has rejected elections as not feasible by June 30, although they remain on the back burner until the United Nations provides its assessment, expected next month. The administration repeatedly notes that elections will be held for a permanent government next year. But some U.S. officials involved in the planning fear that the momentum behind holding elections this year may force their hand.

And those pressures have produced the fourth category of options. If the United States and the United Nations find that elections have to be held as part of the immediate transition, the leading option is to turn over power to the Governing Council or an expanded version until elections can be held -- and so the United States can still end the occupation on June 30.

This proposal -- favored by many on the council, who are reluctant to step aside -- was floated last summer but shelved after the United Nations pulled out last fall.

The United Nations has also begun to develop its ideas on how to select an Iraqi government, U.S. and U.N. officials say. At the top of a tentative list is reviving a national meeting -- the equivalent of Afghanistan's loya jirga assembly -- of representatives of political parties, tribal communities, ethnic factions and professional groups to pick a provisional government.

The United States tried this option after the war ended, but it was aborted because of the difficulty of doing background checks and identifying a credible cross-section of representatives, U.S. officials say.

Sistani, meanwhile, is looking at options, too, Iraqi and Arab officials said, in preparation for the verdict from the United Nations on elections. If the world body, which is expected to announce early this week that it will dispatch a team to Iraq, does determine that elections are not feasible, he has been talking among his advisers about what alternative he would support, the sources added.

Shadid reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Mike Allen in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this report.