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By Martin Walker
UPI
April 2, 2003

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KUWAIT CITY, April 2 (UPI) --

This is how Berlin must have been in the worst days of the Cold War. Spies in the shadows, intrigues in the hotel lobbies, discreet meetings in cafes, as the would-be successors to Saddam Hussein jockey and maneuver for position.

It is the same in Tehran, in Amman, in Ankara and in Damascus, as all Iraq's neighbors try desperately to work out who will run the place when the dust finally settles.

Throughout this region, politicians and generals and media assume that the Americans will pick Iraq's next ruler. This is the Middle East, where nobody believes the American protestations that the Iraqis themselves will choose who will rule them. Even the Americans, they smile knowingly, could not be so naïve.

As coalition troops close in on the Iraqi capital, the question is becoming urgent.

The lights are back on in Umm Qasr. And the water is flowing again. A hospital in An Nasiriyah will re-open this week, under Iraqi management. In An Najaf, U.S. officers are talking with local tribal leaders about setting up a council of Iraqis to run the city. The war still rages, so these are very early days to be thinking about post-war governance, but facts are being created on the ground.

Serious tensions have erupted between the Bush administration and the Iraqi exiles who assumed they would slide in power on the heels of the U.S. troops. A gathering of several Iraqi exiles recently met in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. There are four main groups. There are the leaders of the two Kurdish zones, each with its own prime minister and armed force. There is the London-based and U.S.-financed Iraqi National Congress, led by the urbane ex-banker Ahmed Chalabi. And there is the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite Muslim opposition group, and long backed by Iran.

In the name of their "Council of the Leadership of the Iraqi Opposition," they announced that they would (in agreement with local leaders inside Iraq) establish an independent, provisional government and set a time line for the withdrawal of the U.S. troops who put them in power. The U.S. State Department said, "No."

"We do not support the creation of a provisional government by the outside Iraqi opposition at this time," said official spokesman Richard Boucher. "We believe that creating a new government for the Iraqi people, prior to the liberation of the country, before those Iraqis inside Iraq can make their views known, would disenfranchise the vast majority of Iraqis who continue to live under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."

That statement undermined the efforts of the exile leaders to form a common front. The Kurds say their troops are now under U.S. command. SCIRI has said it will remain neutral in the war. And the INC, long regarded by suspicion in the State Department and CIA, has turned to its supporters in the Pentagon. Half the intriguers in Kuwait, unfamiliar with the bureaucratic wars of the Potomac, are trying to work out what devilish double game the cunning Americans are playing.

All this puts former U.S. Gen. Jay Garner, named to run Iraq's interim administration, in a tricky position. Already facing an Iraq far more devastated and more hostile than once envisaged, he no longer talks of "working ourselves out of a job within 90 days."

Four questions now arise:

First -- Did the exiles ever have much influence inside Iraq? The conference of exile leaders called on the Iraqi people to "prepare to launch an uprising and liberate cities and villages" -- to notably little effect.

Second -- What kind of potential leadership can possibly emerge from a country run by Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party for three decades? There may be a military man -- since any new regime will need a loyal army. There may be a figure with religious credentials, most likely from the Shiites, but possibly vulnerable to the looming presence of the Iranian Shiite neighbor. There may be a "reformed" Baathist, like those reformed Communists who now run so much of former Soviet empire.

Third -- Can the Americans persuade their British allies (and the United Nations) to go along with their plan for General Garner's civilian administration, with three or four Iraqi advisers advising the U.S. "commissioners" who will run the country's 23 ministries? (The Pentagon is already bad-mouthing this plan as "too bureaucratic.")

Fourth -- Assuming a siege of Baghdad, should the interim administration get started anyway in the regions of the country outside the capital -- or would that provoke a break-up of Iraq as a unified state?

The military battle of Baghdad has yet to open. The political battle of Baghdad is already under way, and in the capitals of Iraq's neighbors, they talk and scheme of little else.