U.S.-Backed Iraqi Exiles Return to Reinvent Nation
By DOUGLAS JEHL

This article was reported by Danny Hakim, Douglas Jehl and Michael Moss and 
written by Mr. Jehl.

ARLINGTON, Va., May 3 — Munther al-Fadhal believes that there is no place for 
religion in a new constitution for Iraq. He favors the establishment of 
relations between Iraq and Israel. He even thinks Iraq should outlaw the 
death penalty. 

Such an agenda might not seem surprising in Washington or in Sweden, Dr. 
Fadhal's temporary home. But in Iraq, even after Saddam Hussein, and in much 
of the Arab world, it is very radical indeed, challenging deeply felt views 
about Islam, Israel and Arab autonomy. 

And yet, this very weekend, aboard an American military plane, Dr. Fadhal is 
beginning a trip home to Iraq to try to put his ideas in place. As the 
designated senior adviser to the Iraqi Justice Ministry, he will be one of 
the leaders of a 150-strong team of exiles plucked by the Pentagon from posts 
in America and Europe to help shape the new Iraq. 

A look at the team, assembled in a mere two months by Deputy Defense 
Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, shows how boldly the United States is trying to 
import secular, democratic notions to an Iraq whose political future remains 
the subject of profound division and flux. It also underscores some of the 
considerable risks involved. 

"Maybe in five or six years they'll understand that this guy is a good guy," 
Dr. Fadhal said the other day over lunch near the Pentagon, referring to 
himself. More immediately, though, he said he expected that Iraqis who stayed 
behind through Mr. Hussein's rule would view him with hostility, not just as 
an import but "as an agent or a spy." As a precaution, he said, he has 
arranged for six Kurdish bodyguards to meet him in Baghdad, to supplement his 
American military guards. 

Pentagon officials have described the team of advisers, which works from 
United States-financed offices in Virginia and is called the Iraqi 
Reconstruction and Redevelopment Council, as primarily administrators whose 
job will be to smooth a transition to an Iraqi-led authority by resuscitating 
moribund ministries and restarting basic services.

"It's an enormously valuable asset to have people who share our values, 
understand what we're about as a country, and are in most cases citizens of 
this country, but who also speak the language, share the culture and know 
their way around Iraq," Mr. Wolfowitz said in a telephone interview. He said 
the Iraqi advisers would not play political roles. "They are going to give us 
technical advice," he said.

But some Iraqi exile leaders say the creation of the team was too narrow and 
overly influenced by the views of Mr. Wolfowitz and fellow conservatives, who 
have espoused a vision of bold change in Iraq. 

"This is insulting," said Imam Husham al-Husainy, an Iraqi Shiite leader who 
runs the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Detroit, which is aligned with 
the Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a group that is based in 
Iran and has kept at arm's length from the American government-building 
effort. 

"We don't follow others," Imam Husainy said in dismissing as "yes men" the 
members of the Pentagon-assembled team. "Where is the democracy if you're 
just dictating our ideas? That's not democracy."

Certainly most of the advisers espouse liberal, secular ideals that are at 
odds even with those of many other Iraqi exiles as well as powerful forces 
inside Iraq. The leader of the group is Emad Dhia, a 51-year-old engineer and 
pharmaceutical executive on leave from Pfizer in Ann Arbor, Mich. Among the 
other important advisers are Dr. Fadhal, a legal scholar and author of a 
draft Iraqi constitution, and Khidhir Hamza, a nuclear scientist who, with 
help from the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990's, became one of Iraq's 
most prominent defectors. 

The seeds for the exiles' team were planted at a reception that Mr. Wolfowitz 
attended in Washington last fall, Pentagon officials and the exiles say. 
There, Joanne Dickow, an Iraqi-American from Michigan who was an 
administration appointee at the Energy Department, discussed Iraqi-American 
and Arab-American views about the war with Mr. Wolfowitz. He asked if it 
would be useful to reach out to Iraqi-Americans.

After a flurry of meetings in the Detroit area between Iraqi exiles and 
Defense Department officials, the plans for the group were devised at a 
February meeting at the Pentagon and cemented after a rally in Dearborn, 
Mich., on Feb. 23 at which Mr. Wolfowitz was the leading attraction. The team 
was assembled over the next two months, in a round-the-world burst of 
telephone negotiations and voice-mail messages left by Mr. Dhia.
U.S.-Backed Iraqi Exiles Return to Reinvent Nation

(Page 2 of 3)By the middle of this coming week, at least two dozen exiles 
will be installed in key temporary posts advising Jay Garner, the retired 
lieutenant general who has been the country's day-to-day administrator, and 
L. Paul Bremer, the retired State Department official who is expected to be 
appointed Iraq's senior American overseer. Some American officials openly 
hope that some of the Iraqis will stay on even longer to serve under the 
transitional government that Iraqi political leaders themselves are trying to 
assemble, under American and British supervision, with a target date now set 
for late this month or early June.The roots of the exiles' team led back to 
the Iraqi Forum for Democracy, which Mr. Dhia co-founded in 1998. Composed 
mostly of secular professionals from across the spectrum of Iraq's Shiite, 
Sunni, Kurdish and Christian populations, the group's declared mission has 
been "to promote democracy and democratic values for Iraq by peaceful 
means."Some Iraqi-American critics said they were troubled by the speed of 
the process. "Many of us are really upset that we didn't know about this," 
said Raz Rasool, who fled Iraq in 1998 and is a member of the advocacy group 
Women for a Free Iraq. "They started this two months ago, and we read about 
it just this week."In the interview, Mr. Wolfowitz took issue with the idea 
that the selection process had been improper. "What we're saying is they 
share our values, so we shouldn't be dealing with them?" he said.Dr. 
Wolfowitz announced plans to form the exile team at the Feb. 23 rally. Still, 
the Pentagon has been guarded in answering inquiries about the team, although 
officials say their motivation is to provide security. During their time in 
the Washington area, Mr. Dhia, who returned to Baghdad late last month, and 
other team members have lived and worked in apartments and offices paid for 
by the United States government, and received salaries and pocket money paid 
by American taxpayers.Before heading to Baghdad, each team member has been 
required by the Pentagon to undergo several days of training at American 
military bases, to learn how to protect themselves against possible attack. 
In Baghdad, Dr. Fadhal said, the team will live and work in compounds guarded 
by American soldiers. But technically, they are working for SAIC, a defense 
contractor, and their heavily guarded offices outside Washington have been 
equipped with telephone numbers and e-mail addresses that betray no hint of a 
Pentagon link. Most members of the team have post-graduate degrees, according 
to Pentagon officials and the exiles themselves. A substantial number are 
naturalized citizens of the United States or European countries. While some 
are well known, many others are not.Among the latter group, Mohammad Ali 
Zainy, an American citizen designated as senior Iraqi adviser to the Ministry 
of Oil, held only a mid-ranking position in that ministry before he fled Iraq 
in 1982. Now 64, he worked in Colorado as an oil company executive and energy 
consultant before joining the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, 
where he has been analyst for several years.Dr. Hamza, also 64, on the other 
hand, is a nuclear physicist who became well known in the West after he fled 
Iraq in 1994, first to Libya and then to the United States. His six months of 
experience in 1987 as director of Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons 
made him valuable to the C.I.A., which, after rebuffing his initial attempts, 
ultimately helped Dr. Hamza and his family resettle in the Washington 
area.David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is 
president of the Institute for Science and International Security, an advo
cate of the inspections, worked closely with Dr. Hamza in the late 1990's, 
but describes him as becoming sharply critical of the process. He said Dr. 
Hamza believed that the inspections threatened to undermine his overarching 
goal of ousting Mr. Hussein. "If the inspections work, then the regime change 
can't happen,' " Mr. Albright says Dr. Hamza told him.  
    Dr. Fadhal, 52, who left Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was a law 
professor in Baghdad who had drawn attention to himself by criticizing Iraq's 
occupation of Kuwait. He fled first to Jordan and then to Sweden, where he 
and his family now live.Along with others who are now part of the Pentagon 
team, he was among 32 Iraqi exiles who helped to prepare a State Department 
report last year on the future of Iraq. In that role, he prepared a draft of 
an Iraqi constitution, a task that he said he hoped to complete on behalf of 
a future Iraqi transitional government, among other tasks. 
"I will take care of the Ministry of Justice in Iraq, and abolish all of 
Saddam's legal system," he said, "to create the new legal system toward 
democracy that will accept human rights, that will fight corruption in Iraq, 
and create new laws to build democracy."A Shiite Muslim whose family is from 
the holy city of Najaf, Dr. Fadhal now describes himself as a secularist who 
believes that Islam should play no role in Iraq's constitution. That would 
set a future Iraq apart even from pro-Western Arab countries like Egypt, 
where the Constitution describes Islam as the principal source of the 
country's laws.In that regard, Dr. Fadhal's views are more secular than those 
of most Iraqi opposition groups, and go beyond even the most recent stance 
taken by the Bush administration. The White House said last month that it 
would not allow Iraq to become a theocratic state like Iran, but could 
endorse what it called an "Islamic democracy" for the country. Ultimately, 
Dr. Fadhal said, he would prefer for family reasons to work abroad for a new 
Iraqi government — perhaps as its ambassador to Sweden or to a United Nations 
organization in Geneva. He would not rule out serving as a future Minister of 
Justice, but said he recognized that he and other exiles would face high 
hurdles."I have a dream," he said, "to build in Iraq a civil society, a 
democracy, like Switzerland or Sweden. But now there is chaos and risk — from 
Islamic fanatic groups, and from the Baath Party and from the Arab terrorists 
who supported the Hussein government. "The Iraqi people have been 
brainwashed," he said, "and it is our responsibility to build a new brain."     

    




    
    

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