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.

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.

Hey, did you know the Iraqis are about to hold a National Con­fer­ence of 1,000 del­e­gates to choose the 100 mem­bers of the interim Iraqi par­lia­ment? Not many in the west­ern press seemed to notice, either. (Note the same AP story from Jamie Tarabay shows up five out of 10 sto­ries, so dupes don’t count.) Robin Wright of the _Washington Post_ has a good story, too.
[UPDATE 28-July: Now they’re tak­ing notice.]
But that matches my expe­ri­ence on the ground. While the media buzz about Afghanistan’s loya jirga seemed quite lively, I’ve not heard much inter­est among reporters here about the con­fer­ence, which will, in essence, select the leg­isla­tive branch of the Iraqi Interim Gov­ern­ment. As Jamie says:

The con­fer­ence was stip­u­lated by a law enacted by the depart­ing U.S. civil admin­is­tra­tion last month. Made up of del­e­gates from Iraq’s 18 provinces as well as tribal, reli­gious and polit­i­cal lead­ers, the gath­er­ing will choose 80 of its del­e­gates to join a 100-member national assem­bly. The remain­ing mem­bers will come from the now-dissolved Iraqi Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil.
The assem­bly will have the power to approve the national bud­get, veto exec­u­tive orders with a two-thirds major­ity and appoint replace­ments to the Cab­i­net in the event a min­is­ter dies or resigns.

And there are a lot of prob­lems already, thanks in part to the fact that 19 or 20 (I’ve heard two num­bers) of the seats are already appor­tioned to the for­mer mem­bers of the old Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil. Yes, that means Ahmed Cha­l­abi might be a par­lia­men­tar­ian, as well as the PUK’s Jalal Tal­a­bani and the KDP’s Mas­soud Barzani. If the heads of the par­ties decided to take the seats reserved for them, that should make for some inter­est­ing floor debates!
Inter­est­ingly, I was talk­ing with my friend Sayyid Ayad Jumalud­din last night, and he said the Cha­l­abi had not par­tic­i­pated in any meet­ings lead­ing up to the con­fer­ence — which will be this week, but for secu­rity rea­sons the spe­cific time and place have not been announced. Nor had any­one from the Iraqi National Con­gress sent any del­e­gates to the National High Com­mit­tee, a body that has been lay­ing the ground­work for the con­fer­ence. As Wright says:

Cha­l­abi has been mobi­liz­ing a new Shi­ite bloc that includes sup­port­ers of rebel cleric Moq­tada Sadr. Chalabi’s goal is to win a seat and ulti­mately become leader of the coun­cil to be formed at the con­fer­ence, accord­ing to Iraqi and U.S. officials.

We’ll see. But right now, I think this puts Cha­l­abi in the same rejec­tion­ist cat­e­gory as Sheikh Dr. Harith al-Dhari, the head of the Islamic Cleric’s Asso­ci­a­tion and imam of the Mother of All Vil­lages mosque. (For­merly Mother of All Bat­tles mosque.)
I’ve spo­ken with al-Dhari and he rejected the whole idea of the interim gov­ern­ment, as estab­lished by the TAL, as ille­git­i­mate. And Jamie quotes him as say­ing, “We decided not to take part in any polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion as long as the occu­pa­tion exists in Iraq.” If, by occu­pa­tion, he means the pres­ence of any U.S. troops in Iraq, he’s going to be in the polit­i­cal wilder­ness for a long time. Just as well, as sto­ries swirl about him darkly that he’s some­how con­nected with the hostage tak­ing. A lot of for­eign dig­ni­taries come to him as their go-to guy on get­ting their nation­als released although he claims no con­nec­tion with kid­nap­pers. Need­less to say, his protests of inno­cence are met with skep­ti­cism.
On the other end of the reli­gious spec­trum, Moq­tada al-Sadr’s orga­ni­za­tion has point­edly not been invited, Jumalud­din said, because of the arrest war­rant hang­ing over his head. But sub­groups of Sadr sup­port­ers have been invited and may even­tu­ally take part. The conference’s orga­niz­ers, of which Jumalud­din is one, are wait­ing to hear from them.
But this con­fer­ence should be fun to cover. It will be like an old-fashioned pres­i­den­tial con­ven­tion, com­plete with smoke-filled back-rooms and arm-twisting. Expect a fair amount of polit­i­cal skull­dug­gery and coali­tion build­ing. Groups such as the Islamic Dawa Party (Hizb’dawa), SCIRI and the Iraqi Islamic Party can be expected to make a reli­gious coali­tion while the KDP, PUK and INC will be a sec­u­lar bloc. Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters is interim Prime Min­is­ter Iyad Allawi’s party, the Iraqi National Accord, which has a long rivalry with the INC. Look for some fire­works between those groups as Chalabi’s min­ions — assum­ing they show up — try to under­mine the INA and weaken Allawi before the par­lia­ment ever con­venes. Any­thing to make Allawi look inef­fec­tual strength­ens poten­tial chal­lengers’ hands for the elec­tions in Jan­u­ary — and you know who (*cough* Cha­l­abi *cough, cough*) will def­i­nitely be look­ing to fill Allawi’s chair next year.
But more grandly, the secular/liberal and the religious/conservative blocs will be the cen­ters of power in Iraqi pol­i­tics for some time to come, so watch the coali­tion build­ing start now.
Jaime lists a lot of prob­lems this week’s con­fer­ence, includ­ing secu­rity, squab­bling over how del­e­ga­tions from the provinces are picked and just gen­eral inex­pe­ri­ence with democ­racy. Jumalud­din cau­tioned that the estab­lished par­ties, such as SCIRI, the INC and oth­ers with long expe­ri­ence oppos­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein with have a real advan­tage over the newly formed local par­ties and inde­pen­dent can­di­dates. They know how to cut deals, pol­i­tick — and they’re well financed. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that they rep­re­sent, in total, only about 20 per­cent of Iraqis (Not count­ing the Kur­dish par­ties.) That means the major­ity of non-Kurd Iraqis are up for grabs — for par­ties that have no idea how to cam­paign or oper­ate in a leg­isla­tive body. I can barely imag­ine the out­rage that will occur when some fledg­ling party gets its lunch handed to it by, say, Hizb’dawa, after the smaller party trades its votes on some key issue only to get screwed because its rep­re­sen­ta­tives didn’t under­stand the details of the bar­gain.
Jumalud­din also warned of stealth can­di­dates. As in the United States, where a can­di­date — for exam­ple — runs as a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can but when elected turns out to be deeply con­ser­v­a­tive, some mem­bers of this week’s con­fer­ence will attempt to push for­ward “inde­pen­dent” can­di­dates in the inter­est of “rep­re­sen­ta­tion.” These osten­si­bly inde­pen­dent can­di­dates will be any­thing but. They will be cats’ paws for the major par­ties and can be expected to vote reli­ably with their patrons.
“Iraqis don’t know what democ­racy is,” said Jumalud­din as he chewed on a truly mag­nif­i­cent Cohiba. Then he told me a joke: An old woman asks her son, “What is this democ­racy I hear so much about? What does it mean?” Her son tells her that every four years there will be a new pres­i­dent. “Isn’t that won­der­ful, umma?” The old woman thinks about that for a moment, and then asks, “Does that mean every four years there will be loot­ing and fight­ing?“
The Iraqis have an odd sense of humor.
UPDATE: Unreg­is­tered com­ments are back and seem to be working.

BAGHDAD — By now, many of you know about the raid today on Ahmed Chalabi’s house and two offices of the INC in Bagh­dad at about 9:30 a.m. local time. Some evi­dence and weapons were con­fis­cated, senior Coali­tion offi­cials said, and “sev­eral” peo­ple were arrested. There was no resis­tance, offi­cials said, but footage after the raid showed that the place had been trashed.
The offi­cial line is that this was an Iraqi police pro­ce­dure, with search and arrest war­rants handed down by an Iraqi judge after CPA head Paul Bre­mer referred an alle­ga­tion 10 months ago to the Cen­tral Crim­i­nal Court of Iraq. The charges include fraud, kid­nap­ping and “asso­ci­ated mat­ters.” (No expan­sion on that.)
[UPDATE 12:12 AM, LOCAL BAGHDAD TIME: Now we have some expan­sion. Accord­ing to the inves­ti­gat­ing judge, Hus­sain Al-Moathin, who is on the Iraqi Cen­tral Crim­i­nal Court, said:

There have been some crimes and inci­dents that have been acted by Iraqi per­son­nel, and those inci­dents took place against Iraqis. A small group of peo­ple were detained by these crim­i­nals and tor­tured. And also, there have been a num­ber of inci­dents of kid­nap­ping and also killing some­one because — for per­sonal pur­poses. And in addi­tion to that, they have also cap­tured — or they have just took over some of the gov­ern­ment facil­i­ties. And those peo­ple have been — there was a war­rant of cap­tur­ing and seiz­ing those peo­ple, but unfor­tu­nately, it was not pos­si­ble to cap­ture them. They are now — away from the law — they are outlaws.

[Then he names people:

• Abdul­lah Araji
• Azid Samir Aziz
• Amar Mohammed Raib
• Vafir Mohammed Raib
• Aras Habib — pos­si­bly Aras Habib Karim, a colonel in the FIF and close asso­ci­ated of Cha­l­abi. He may have been the man in charge of the INC’s quest to hunt down for­mer high-level Ba’athists in Iraq
• Dezi Mavi
• Has­san Mahad
• Dr. Hamam

Senior Coali­tion offi­cials men­tioned that sev­eral peo­ple listed in the arrest war­rants involv­ing the INC offices were not arrested because they were not there; the above list is appar­ently those peo­ple. Judge Al-Moathin took no ques­tions.]
Peo­ple on the scene of the raid report U.S. tanks being used to back up the Iraqi cops. Senior Coali­tion offi­cials, in a back­ground brief­ing, said they had no knowl­edge of this and referred all ques­tions to the inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cers of the Iraqi Police force. At today’s 6 p.m. brief­ing chief CPA spokesman Dan Senor res­olutely refused to address any details about the raid, also refer­ring reporters to the Iraqi police force and the inves­tiga­tive judge.
Cha­l­abi, pre­dictably, was pretty pissed off. “When Amer­ica treats its friends this way then they are in big trou­ble,” Cha­l­abi said on CNN. “My rela­tion­ship with the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity now is non-existent.”
“Let my peo­ple go,” he — incred­i­bly, and taste­lessly — said at his press con­fer­ence. “Let my peo­ple be free.“
Cha­l­abi sure hasn’t lost his tal­ent for mak­ing offen­sive com­ments.
It’s unclear exactly what’s going on and dur­ing today’s brief­ings, a lot of spec­u­la­tion cen­tered around the oil-for-food inves­ti­ga­tion. Senor, how­ever, said there was no con­nec­tion between that inves­ti­ga­tion and the raid on Chalabi’s house. This idea seems to come from a state­ment from Cha­l­abi at his press con­fer­ence ear­lier today, where he also said a for­mer Ba’athist offi­cial car­ried out the “unwar­ranted” raid. (Tech­ni­cally not true, there were numer­ous war­rants.)
So if there was ever any doubt that Cha­l­abi was now per­sona non grata with the Amer­i­cans, today should dis­pel any con­fu­sion. First there was the bogus WMD infor­ma­tion he ped­dled to the United States. Then it was his dis­as­trous idea to Bre­mer to dis­band the Iraqi Army. Next, it was his seizure of tens of thou­sands of records from Saddam’s era. He’s involved in dozens of dirty lit­tle con­tracts and a cor­rupt oil-for-food inves­ti­ga­tion — Cha­l­abi hand-picked the auditors! — may finally have caused the United States to cut the strings of its puppet/puppet-master.
So this is the end of a beau­ti­ful friend­ship, but is it the end of Cha­l­abi? He’s a sur­vivor, that’s for sure. What this means for the June 30 han­dover is, unfor­tu­nately, also unclear.
This is all very frus­trat­ing, because S. is mother-henning me prac­ti­cally to death, and I’m not able to talk to any Iraqis. Every­thing is “too dan­ger­ous,” he says. I couldn’t even go gro­cery shop­ping today. He’s prob­a­bly right, but I’m chaf­ing under the restric­tions. I know I’ve only been here a day, total, but I’m anx­ious to get out there and talk to peo­ple. As it is, all I can tell you is that S. and his nephew A. are both happy about the raid on Chalabi’s offices and home.
“He’s a big crook,” A. said tonight over a din­ner of rice, bread and meat. S. nod­ded in agree­ment. “A thief!” he added. A. is pretty apo­lit­i­cal, but he’s an excel­lent dri­ver and he likes to play R&B and hip-hop from artists such as Blue and 50-Cent as he screams down the Bagh­dad back alleys at night in a 1991 BMW.
This is not sur­pris­ing — A.‘s opin­ion of Cha­l­abi, not his musi­cal tastes — and I’d guess it is the opin­ion of a major­ity of Iraqis. Cha­l­abi pulls maybe 2% approval rat­ing in the coun­try, and he must know he would be badly beaten in any elec­tion. Of course, if, like Sad­dam Hus­sein, he sur­rounds him­self with “yes” men (na’am men here) he might be blind to his real unpop­u­lar­ity. Both S. and A. men­tioned his fraud con­vic­tion in Jor­dan and nei­ther seemed sur­prised by this recent turn of events. Leop­ards, spots, etc.
In other news, Brig. Gen. Mark Kim­mitt stuck to the story that the attack in the desert yes­ter­day, about 25 km from the Syr­ian bor­der, was no wed­ding party, con­tra­dict­ing what many news orga­ni­za­tions have reported and many Iraqis have claimed. When pressed to explain the num­ber of women and chil­dren among the casu­al­ties — as shown on APTV, hardly an Al Jazeera clone — he said the images on the tele­vi­sion and what Amer­i­can troops found on the ground were “incon­sis­tent.“
Specif­i­cally, Kim­mitt says the attack was in the mid­dle of the desert took place along a known “rat-line” that serves as a route for for­eign fight­ers and smug­glers com­ing into Iraq. U.S. troops recov­ered shot­guns, pis­tols, AK-47, sniper rifles, RPG launch­ers and other weaponry along with about $1,000 in mixed Iraqi dinars, he said. When it was pointed out that the sum of money and cache of guns didn’t seem that unusual — for Iraq — Kim­mitt basi­cally shrugged.
“This oper­a­tion was not some­thing that fell out of the sky,” he said. “We had sig­nif­i­cant intel­li­gence which caused us to con­duct a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion in the mid­dle of the desert. … We are sat­is­fied at this point that the intel­li­gence that led us there was val­i­dated by what we found on the ground. There was not a wed­ding party going on.“
Most reporters in the room seemed to have sources dif­fer­ent from Kimmitt’s. A Reuters reporter said a wed­ding singer and his brother were at this gath­er­ing and died in the blasts The singer’s cousin was the source. Kim­mitt stuck to his “We don’t know, we’re inves­ti­gat­ing,” line and promised … an inves­ti­ga­tion.
Finally, after a brisk 37 min­utes, Senor cut off the ques­tion­ing and called it a day.