by the way, Paul McGeogh had to flee Iraq after publishing that story. Here is an update from him on Alawi:

Next year's elections will not stop Iraq's insurgents when ordinary Iraqis are too scared to vote. The absurdity seemed to be lost on the US Congress - only three months into his job as Iraq's unelected Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi stood before them, revealing himself to be as artful with the truth as the American administration that went to war to put him in office. He had a throwaway line about the possible "imperfection" of the proposed January elections; hours later; the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was before a Senate committee, waving aside concerns that the Sunni Triangle might have to be excluded from the poll - which is to say that they were both dismissive of United Nations concerns that a lack of security might mean no vote at all.

And was it the independent and sovereign state of Iraq that was addressing the security issue? Ah, no ... "This is something the ambassador is working on," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee as Allawi did the rounds of the US capital, introducing himself as "Prime Minister" as though his appointment had been dignified with a popular mandate. And if the country was in the grip of a security crisis, who was going to run the election or be ready to vote in only four months' time?

Allawi was certain that all would be in place, but his confidence was punctured when a member of his own electoral commission took time on the same day to tell reporters that it had only just begun to recruit the 70,000 staff it needed - without mentioning that they would become prime targets for the insurgency - and it had yet to send out, let alone get back, the forms necessary for collating data on individual voters in every household in the land. But even if there were an election, would people vote? "How can we go to vote [when] I'm afraid of just going to the police station?" a Baghdad electronics merchant asked a visitor.

"I want honest elections, but I'll not vote and I'll not allow my adult children to vote either - we are too afraid of explosions," a civil servant said. On his way to Washington, Allawi stopped in at the UN in New York where he pulled the same false promise that US officials were using last year to explain away what they assured us, back then, would be a short-lived insurgency. Telling reporters that the rise in the number and ferocity of the attacks by a "small" resistance force was proof of the weakness of the insurgency, Allawi claimed: "We think they are on the defensive ..."

Who are "they"? Washington has argued repeatedly that the insurgency is dominated by foreign Arabs - al-Qaeda jihadists and the like - and the remnants of the former regime. Allawi came in on cue: 30 per cent foreign; 60 per cent former regime; 10 per cent criminals, he said. Amazing that - not a single Iraqi nationalist among them.
But the latest estimates by US officers in Iraq are that as many as 20,000 fighters have the active support of about 100,000 Iraqis. Against that, the Iraqi Justice Ministry says that there are only 29 foreigners among several thousand suspected insurgents in its detention centres and US officials have told reporters that there are only 90 foreign Arabs among the 6000-plus detainees in its custody.

And who are "we", given that the commander of the Baghdad police district, Colonel Safaa Ali, has lamented the security challenge with American reporters: "We are taking on forces beyond our strength ... we cannot win." In a sense, the Allawi cameo appearance in the Bush re-election campaign was a closing of the Iraq circle - an unelected puppet was brought halfway around the world to prop up the official that we often refer to as "the leader of the free world" who also had put him in office.

The Americans and Allawi like to present the insurgency as a rump operation in remote centres like Falluja, but a graph in the Brookings Institution's latest Iraq Index shows that, far and away, the greatest number of US military fatalities between May and September this year were in Baghdad.

In New York and Washington, Allawi patted himself on the back for restoring order in 15 of 18 electoral districts, including Najaf, seeming to forget that his emissaries had twice failed to broker a ceasefire in the Shiite heartland. That was achieved by the ailing Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the world leader of all Shiite Muslims, who has twice succeeded in derailing American plans for the future of Iraq and who now appears to be positioning himself to do it again.

Security blanket; September 25, 2004, Sydney Morning Herald