The strongman of Baghdad

13 November 2004

Andrew Gilligan on the murky past of Iyad Allawi, who this week cleared the way for the attack on Fallujah

Following the unfortunate failure of this démarche — the exams eventually went ahead, after the authorities sent in tanks — Mr Allawi evidently decided that the time for liberal pussyfooting was over. With a friend, Adel Abdul Mahdi, he arranged to kidnap the dean of the university to publicise the Baath cause. ‘We took Iraq’s first hostages,’ recalls Mr Abdul Mahdi, now Iraq’s finance minister, nostalgically. The two men did time for the offence, until a Baathist coup got them back out again.

Now, as the US threatens to destroy Fallujah in order to save it, Mr Allawi is once again at the centre of an act of violence aimed at strengthening his position. He is both the supposed author of the American offensive and definitely its intended beneficiary. Actually, of course, the authorship lies elsewhere and Mr Allawi may not even be the beneficiary. Leaving aside the tricky question of whether democracy and freedom can be built on a pile of civilian corpses, a close examination of the past of this old Baathist intriguer makes clear that to represent him as a standard-bearer of liberty is a very hard sell indeed.

After his sterling efforts in Sixties Baghdad, and the final revolution that brought Saddam to power as vice-president, Mr Allawi was promoted to head the Iraqi Student Union in Europe, a key intelligence-related post that required him to cultivate the elite Arab students who headed for the universities of London. Some time in the 1970s, disillusioned with the regime, he started what was to be the major political relationship of his life — with British intelligence, MI6. (It nearly led to his murder in 1978, when Iraqi agents burst into his suburban London home and tried to axe him to death.)

Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, gave Mr Allawi the catalyst he needed. With another man, Salih Omar, whose democratic credentials included supervising public hangings for the regime, Allawi founded al-Wifaq, or the Iraqi National Accord, a small but influential collection of almost exclusively ex-Baathists who had held office but fallen out with Saddam. From the beginning, the INA was never meant to be any sort of mass movement. Its aim was never to bring democracy to Iraq, but to engineer a palace coup which would see, in Allawi’s estimate, the top 30 to 40 leaders replaced by ... well, people like himself.