World

Support Ebbs For U.S. Iraq Plan

February 14, 2004 / 7:00 AM EST / CBS/AP

A consensus is building among Iraqi leaders to scrap a U.S. formula for choosing a new government and instead to hold elections later this year, several Iraqi officials and Governing Council members said Friday after meeting a U.N. envoy.

A U.N. spokesman, meanwhile, said Friday it was unlikely elections could be held before the U.S.-led occupation authority transfers power to an Iraqi government by July, as demanded by the country's powerful Shiite Muslim clergy.

Some members of the U.S.-picked Governing Council were pushing a plan to hand power to an expanded council, which would rule Iraq after June 30. The council would then arrange elections before the end of the year.

Support for this plan appeared strongest among the 13 Shiite council members.

Meanwhile, U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned Iraqis to be aware of the risks of civil war.

"I am a little bit disturbed and a little bit uneasy because there are very serious dangers," Brahimi said. Civil wars erupt, he said, "because people are reckless, people are selfish, because people think more of themselves than they do of their country."

In other developments:

An explosion killed an American soldier and wounded two others in a Baghdad suburb. At least 538 Americans have died in Iraq.

The U.S.-led coalition is trying to determine whether a security breach may have led to a grenade attack Thursday on a military convoy that was carrying Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of all American forces in the Middle East, and another top U.S. general.

President Bush named the final two members of the commission that will investigate prewar intelligence on Iraq: Charles Vest, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and former Pentagon official Henry Rowen. The panel has until March 2005 to issue its report — well after the November presidential election.

Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay is advising Mr. Bush to acknowledge he was wrong about hidden storehouses of weapons in Iraq and move ahead with overhauling the intelligence process. Despite the lack of weapons of mass destruction, Kay said, Iraq had an aggressive program to develop missiles assisted by foreign technology and scientists.

A Senate committee will expand its investigation of pre-war Iraq intelligence to investigate whether some administration officials exaggerated the available information to build their case for a pre-emptive war.

Britain's inquiry examining the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons will meet in private, its members have announced.

Mexico has sent a letter to Britain and the United States asking them to explain recent accusations that they spied on countries before the Iraq war. The statement came a day after Chile said the telephones at its U.N. mission were tapped in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Britain's Guardian newspaper reports Tony Blair's government is engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to get some Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to British firms. Failure could deepen Blair's political problems.

South Korea's parliament approved the government's plan to send 3,000 troops to Iraq, responding to a call from the United States, its key ally, for military help.

The Bush administration is eager to end the formal occupation of Iraq and hand over security to Iraqis well before the November U.S. presidential elections.

Under the American blueprint, 18 regional caucuses would pick a new legislature, which in turn would choose a provisional government to take power June 30 and serve until elections in 2005.

The U.S. plan lost ground when the Shiite Muslim clergy, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, demanded legislative elections before June 30.

Doubts about the complex U.S. caucus plan, announced Nov. 15, were expressed Friday to Brahimi during a meeting with the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council.

The U.N. team arrived Sunday to find ways to break the impasse. Opposition to the U.S. plan among the members of the Governing Council is significant because it was a signatory of the Nov. 15 agreement, along with the U.S.-led occupation authority.

A spokesman for Brahimi said Friday that Sistani's demand for nationwide balloting would probably be too difficult to pull off in strife-ridden Iraq.

"The time between now and June is very short and that makes it unlikely that you can put mechanisms in place," U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told The Associated Press. "The elections don't have to happen before then (June 30)."

Following Friday's meeting with Brahimi, several council members from different factions, as well as others familiar with the discussions, said opposition among Iraqi leaders was likely to quash the caucus formula. Many of them understood the difficulty of holding an election by June 30.

Many top Iraqis also opposed the U.S. caucus plan because it gave the United States too much influence over the process, an official close to the discussions said.

The proposal to hand power to an expanded council and set early elections had not been finalized and was not discussed in detail with Brahimi during Friday's meeting, said Samir Shaker Mahmoud, a prominent Sunni Muslim author and council member.

"The questions that remain are when and how elections will be held," Mahmoud said.

U.S. postwar plans have been twice disrupted by al-Sistani, who commands enormous prestige among the majority Shiite population.

A blueprint outlined last year called for Iraqis to draft a new constitution and elect a new government before the return of power.

However, al-Sistani insisted that the constitution be drafted by elected representatives — a process that Washington believed would take too long.

That formula was then scrapped in favor of a plan to hand power to a provisional government by June 30. But al-Sistani called the caucus system "illegitimate" and pressed for early elections.

Shiites, believed to make up 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, expect to dominate an elected government. Sunni Muslim leaders say they are unprepared for an early election and fear rule by Shiites, who have been long suppressed by Sunni-dominated governments.