A Chat with Iyad Allawi

Here’s some­thing you might find inter­est­ing. I had a one-on-one inter­view with Iraqi Interim Prime Min­is­ter Iyad Allawi on Wednes­day when the fight­ing was rag­ing in Sadr City. It was for TIME Mag­a­zine, but — so far — the Q&A is not avail­able online. [UPDATE: The other ques­tions are now avail­able online.] Any­way, my edi­tor said I could post the ques­tions that didn’t make it into the print ver­sion for rea­sons of space. This tran­script is pretty raw. The print ver­sion has con­densed and cleaned up the lan­guage a bit. (Eng­lish is not Allawi’s first lan­guage.) Before peo­ple start yelling cen­sor­ship or some­thing, know this: I approved every edit in the printed ver­sion so that it was true to the man’s words. Any changes were purely for space rea­sons and any errors are my fault, not the magazine’s.

[UPDATE Aug 17: Per­haps it wasn’t clear that the ques­tions on this site are the out­takes of the inter­view. The pub­lished ques­tions are avail­able on the TIME site. I pub­lished these out­takes to because I believe in trans­parency in jour­nal­ism — which means mak­ing notes avail­able when you can. In this case I was able to show some addi­tional ques­tions, that were mainly designed to put him at ease. I would urge you to read all the ques­tions on both sites.]

Any­way, here’s the intro­duc­tion and the ques­tions not included in the print version.

These are try­ing days for Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi Interim Prime Min­is­ter, who has two sep­a­rate threats to his power: the Sunni insur­gency in the west and the al-Sadr rebel­lion in the south. He sat down last week for an inter­view with TIME reporter Christo­pher Allbrit­ton in Allawi’s spar­tan office in his Bagh­dad villa. A cou­ple of Iraqi police offi­cers stood in an antecham­ber, but signs of U.S. patron­age were every­where. Even the air con­di­tioner units bore the label, “Prop­erty of the U.S. Gov­ern­ment.” Dressed in a natty, brown-plaid suit, Allawi was alter­na­tively avun­cu­lar and aggressive.

Does Moq­tada al-Sadr have a future inside Iraq’s future polit­i­cal sys­tem? Well, if he wishes to do so, he would have. He can. As far as we’re con­cerned we have no prob­lem with that. I think he should be party of the polit­i­cal sys­tem, and he should allow the peo­ple to give their opin­ions of whether they will pick him as the pres­i­dent or not. It is bet­ter for him to be inside the polit­i­cal process rather than out­side the polit­i­cal process and try­ing to force his way on Iraqis and the Iraqi peo­ple by using arms and guns.

Regard­ing the arrest war­rant against Ahmed Cha­l­abi. He says this is all polit­i­cally dri­ven because of his rivalry with you. Is this true? Absolutely not true. The judi­cial sys­tem is inde­pen­dent here and we have no power over the judi­cial sys­tem. I have spo­ken with Cha­l­abi myself two days ago. He called me and I assured him that this was def­i­nitely a gov­ern­ment spon­sored — and he knows this by the way, he declared this, by the way, on an inter­view yes­ter­day. We have noth­ing to do with this at all. On the con­trary, we are now try­ing to find ways of try­ing to put this into the proper con­text and get him back into the polit­i­cal process and get him back into the country.

Do you expect him to come back and stand trial? I hope so. I hope he should come back and I hope he will def­i­nitely defend from the alle­ga­tions… But as far as the gov­ern­ment is con­cerned it has to be very clear that the gov­ern­ment has no power on the judi­cial sys­tem at all.

About he future of Iraq and the recent past, here’s an easy one: What’s improved and what’s dete­ri­o­rated since you’ve taken office? Well, I have to tell you, you know, there is what we call the process of improv­ing the secu­rity of Iraq. Now this gov­ern­ment, in this process, we have really done a lot so far given the very short period we have been a gov­ern­ment. We have dis­man­tled the ICDC, cre­ated the National Guard instead, expanded with the National Guard to cre­ate at least one divi­sion so far with the Iraqi Army. We have beefed up the police, cre­ated the intel­li­gence. So this is on the secu­rity. And we hope that this will continue.

On the process of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and national unity and reha­bil­i­tat­ing Iraq back into the region, we have done a lot. We have done the law of amnesty, we have the ongo­ing con­fer­ence, which will take place in two or three days time, we have been out­reach­ing, even to the periph­er­als of the so-called resis­tance. We have been hold­ing face-to-face meet­ings, ask­ing them to get back, to be part of the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion process. We have been vis­it­ing the region. We have devel­oped very good ties again, which would enable us to rein­te­grate again in a pos­i­tive and a healthy way.

On the polit­i­cal process itself, we have even moved far­ther than that, and as I said, we are now going to have our first national con­fer­ence. We hope the United Nations will put more effort so we can do it together, expe­dite and speed up the process of the, the polit­i­cal process.

On the issue of the econ­omy, we have laid down very impor­tant min­is­te­r­ial com­mit­tees, to take care of the econ­omy. We have estab­lished the Supreme Coun­cil for Oil Pol­icy, the Supreme Eco­nom­i­cal Com­mit­tee, which I chair myself. We have estab­lished the Recon­struc­tion Com­mit­tee, which my deputy chairs. The Recon­struc­tion Com­mit­tee has gone into imme­di­ate dia­log with the donor coun­tries and we hope the money will be com­ing in by the end of this month. We have ear­marked a lot of projects for the under­de­vel­oped areas in Iraq.

So these are all processes that have been achieved so far in spite of the very short period and prob­lems we are facing.

In what ways do you dis­agree with cur­rent U.S. pol­icy and in what ways would you like to see more from the U.S.? Frankly, the rela­tion­ship with the United States is very friendly, very pos­i­tive. We appre­ci­ate what the United States has done to Iraq, start­ing from lib­er­a­tion, post-liberation. Now, the United States is help­ing in the recon­struc­tion of Iraq. As you know, the United States is the major donor to Iraq in the donors’ con­fer­ence in Madrid. What we want to see is the imple­men­ta­tion of the pro­gram that we want to do and the recon­struc­tion and expe­dit­ing the chan­nel­ing of funds into Iraq as soon as pos­si­ble. There are indeed, as in any Arab coun­try, there are areas of agree­ment and there are areas of dis­agree­ment, but the most impor­tant thing is that we have a very healthy dia­logue with the United States. This dia­logue will con­tinue. We are very appre­cia­tive of the role the Amer­i­can ambas­sador Negro­ponte is doing here. He’s a very pos­i­tive per­son and engag­ing in a pos­i­tive way with the Iraqi gov­ern­ment and we hope the rela­tion­ship will con­tinue to be healthy and positive.

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