U.S. Plan to Transfer Power In Iraq May Shift Drastically
    By Colum Lynch and Robin Wright
    Washington Post 
    Friday 06 February 2004 

     UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 5 -- The U.S. plan to hand over power in Iraq is increasingly likely to undergo major changes rather than merely "refinements," because of increasing skepticism about the June 30 deadline for creating a provisional government and erosion of support for the proposal to use caucuses to select it, according to senior U.S. and U.N. officials. 

     The Bush administration still publicly clings to its transition plan, but a U.N. team scheduled to arrive in Iraq as early as Friday has been given a free hand to present its own blueprint for the country's political transition if it determines elections cannot be held by June in Iraq, U.S. and U.N. officials say. 

     In a sign of their growing anxiety, U.S. officials have also crafted some dramatically new ideas, in the hope of bringing a smooth conclusion to the struggling occupation. The list has been shared with the United Nations, the officials add. 

     One option is extending the June 30 deadline for installing an Iraqi government to allow enough time for the direct elections demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading cleric. There is already talk about a hypothetical extension to Jan. 1, 2005. 

     This could mean that the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority would stay longer, which could carry political costs for President Bush in an election year and anger Iraqis who want an end to foreign occupation, U.S. officials conceded. 

     In a reflection of the full range of options on the table, another alternative is to end the occupation as planned on June 30 but to delay the selection of a provisional government until direct elections can be held. In that scenario, the authority would turn over power to an interim body, possibly by expanding the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council to make it large enough to serve as a national assembly, or by calling a national conference of Iraqi leaders -- similar to the loya jirga in Afghanistan -- to select a sovereign body to rule until elections, U.S. officials said. 

     The original plan agreed to on Nov. 15 calls for 18 regional caucuses to select a national assembly that would then pick a leadership and cabinet. But the plan was quickly challenged by Sistani, leading the administration to offer to consider "refinements." Now, however, the proposal is so widely questioned and already so delayed that U.S. officials concede much more will have to be done to salvage it. 

     "We are now open to enough refinements that the transition plan is not necessarily going to look like a caucus or act like a caucus when it eventually happens," an administration official said. "But we have to have a handoff, and working out that part is tricky. And there's no consensus yet on an alternative." 

     A well-placed U.S. official said the issue is so sensitive that it has become a "radioactive topic." 

     Bush told Annan at a meeting this week in Washington that he is committed to the current deadline. But a senior State Department official said that United States is now willing to let the United Nations determine what will work. 

     "We [have] enough respect for the U.N. that we know it may present options that are not June 30," the official said. "We're still thinking about making June 30 -- and not not making June 30. And we've conveyed that to the U.N. . . . But we can't rule out that they may come back with something different about what we can do by June 30 or by another date." 

     The United States is "open" to almost any option leading to a political transition that has broad Iraqi support, said one U.N. official who tracks the issue. "We are looking at the whole plan, the whole transition right now," the official said. "There are no restrictions. What they have didn't work, so we have to try something else. The caucuses cannot be fixed." 

     The Bush administration's decision to grant the United Nations the authority to negotiate the terms of Iraq's political transition marks the third time in a year that it has been forced to redraw the map for Iraq's political future. 

     The United States appointed the Iraqi Governing Council last summer to lead the country's transition to self-rule. Facing criticism from within Iraq that the group was not sufficiently representative to form a credible government, U.S. authorities shifted gears, reaching an agreement with council members on Nov. 15 to hold caucuses to select a provisional government. 

     That plan has come under attack by Sistani, who said it would exclude too many Iraqis from the political process. L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, reversed course again, asking U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan at a Jan. 19 meeting in New York to send a team to Iraq to broker a deal pledging to abide by it. 

     Annan said Wednesday that the new team will reconsider the prospects for elections or see whether "we can refine the caucus system or come up with any other option that will be acceptable to the Iraqis." 

     Senior U.N. officials said that the team will remain in Iraq for up to 10 days and try to arrange a meeting with Sistani and other ethnic, religious and tribal leaders. It will return to New York to present Annan with the findings. 

     One senior U.N. official noted that the United Nations is not seeking to sell to the Iraqis a specific plan for a political transition. 

     The U.N. team "will genuinely be going in with an open mind," the official said, adding that there are no "predetermined outcomes" on how the country's political transition would proceed. "We will want to take a hard look at elections and a hard look at alternatives and would want to know what Iraqis think." 

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