Our S.O.B.

There is a story about President Franklin D. Roosevelt in which somebody complained to him about one of the more unsavory dictators the United States was sponsoring in Central America. "He may be an S.O.B.," FDR is said to have responded, "but by God, he's our S.O.B."

Iyad Allawi, the handpicked Prime Minister of Iraq, is rapidly turning out to be our S.O.B. in Baghdad. Formerly the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, Allawi spent the 1990s running a bombing campaign under CIA direction, among the targets of which were movie theaters and school buses. Now, after taking nominal power in the June 28 "handover of sovereignty," Allawi and his new administration have made their mark in a number of ways:

1. Allawi is said to have personally executed six blindfolded and handcuffed prisoners by shooting them in the head in front of U.S. military and Iraqi police witnesses at the Al-Amariyah Security Center in Baghdad on June 17. These reports have barely been mentioned in the American press.
2. In a separate incident, Allawi personally cut off a prisoner's hand to force him to confess to allegedly terrorist activities.
3. Al-Jazeera's Baghdad office was ordered closed for 30 days on the grounds that the TV network had been causing unspecified "problems." Allawi said Al-Jazeera's staffers were given "a chance to readjust their policy against Iraq."
4. A "Higher Media Commission" was established to censor all press reports in Iraq. Among the news articles destined for redlining is any "unwarranted criticism" of Allawi.
5. More than a few former torturers have been recruited to serve in Iraq's new secret police.
6. Allawi has suggested more than once that promised elections may be delayed or even cancelled if he does not like the "security situation." Which means that if he's likely to lose, the election is history.
7. U.S. military personnel who witnessed the brutal beating and torture of prisoners by Iraqi plainclothesmen at the Interior Ministry were ordered not to intervene. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad made a pro forma attempt to raise the issue with the Ministry, then let it drop.

This is not a good sign. Aided and abetted by his patrons in Washington, Allawi is on his way to becoming Saddam Lite. He may not have the mass graves or chemical attacks that Hussein did, but by muzzling critical expression and personally shooting blindfolded men, he's certainly got the potential. The difference between Hussein and Allawi, of course, is that Allawi knows how to follow orders (for the moment) and he is not as brutal as Hussein (also for the moment).

Pre-invasion propaganda said we had to invade Iraq to overthrow a tyrant and turn the country into a democracy. Now the word out of Washington is that Iraq needs a tyrant who can impose martial law, ban protest, and use secret police to deal with opposition while putting democracy on the back burner.

And we wonder why our national credibility is in the toilet.

Perhaps we might take a few baby steps towards repairing our shattered world image if we paid more than lip service to the idea of Iraqi democracy instead of merely exchanging one thug for a more palatable thug. How about setting up immediate elections and let the Iraqi people decide who should be their leader?

Nah, that would be too easy.