- WASHINGTON - CIA officers
in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current
and former U.S. officials said yesterday, starkly contradicting the upbeat
assessment President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.
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- The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered orally
to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity because of the classified information involved.
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- The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority,
which until now has accepted the U.S. occupation grudgingly, could turn
to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.
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- Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing for autonomy
and shares of oil revenue.
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- "Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's
their time," one intelligence officer said. "They think that
if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both
of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."
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- These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this
week by Bush, his top national-security aides and the chief U.S. administrator
in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official who requested
anonymity.
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- Another senior official said the concerns over a possible
civil war are "broadly held within the government," including
by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.
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- Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy
after concluding Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Husseini al-Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for
an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by July 1.
Bremer then would hand over power to the interim government.
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- The CIA hasn't put its officers' warnings about a potential
Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior official said he expected a
formal report "momentarily."
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- "In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days,
several very bad possibilities have been outlined," he said.
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- Bush, in his State of the Union address Tuesday, insisted
an insurgency against the U.S. occupation, conducted primarily by minority
Sunni Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein, "will fail,
and the Iraqi people will live in freedom."
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- "Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility
for their own security and their own future," the president said.
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- Bush didn't address the Shiites' political demands directly.
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- Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south
to Kuwait and Iran, make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people.
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- Several U.S. officials acknowledged al-Sistani is unlikely
to be "rolled," as one put it. As a result, Bremer's plan for
restoring Iraqi sovereignty and ending the U.S. occupation by on schedule
is in peril.
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- The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed Iraqi
Governing Council, calls for caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces to choose
the interim national assembly, which in turn would select Iraq's first
post-Saddam government. The first direct elections wouldn't be held until
the end of 2005.
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- In an interview with Knight Ridder yesterday, a top cleric
in the Shiite holy city of Najaf appeared to confirm the fears of potential
civil war. "Everything has its own time, but we are saying that we
don't accept the occupiers getting involved with the Iraqis' affairs,"
said Sheikh Ali Najafi, whose father, Grand Ayatollah Bashir al Najafi,
is, along with al-Sistani, one of the four most senior clerics. "I
don't trust the Americans, not even for one blink."
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- If the United States went ahead with the caucus plan
and ended the military occupation, the interim government wouldn't last,
he said.
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- "The Iraqi people would know how to deal with those
people," he said, smiling. "They would kick them out."
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- U.S. and British officials hinted yesterday that they
might bow to the demand for some kind of elections, after saying for weeks
that holding free and fair elections in time for the handover of sovereignty
would be impossible.
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- "We've always favored elections," Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said after he and other top Bush aides briefed senators.
"The only question is ÷ the tension was, if your goal is to
get sovereignty passed to the Iraqis so that they feel they have a stake
in their future, can you do it faster with caucuses or can you do it faster
with elections?"
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- Rumsfeld was responding to comments by British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw, who opened the door yesterday to elections in Iraq
earlier than planned.
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- "The discussion, which has been stimulated by Ayatollah
Sistani, is whether there could be an element of elections injected into
the earlier part of the process," Straw said at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "We have to work with great respect for
him and similar leaders. We want elections as soon as it is feasible to
hold them."
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- State Department officials said no changes to the Bremer
plan are being considered formally. They said much depends on the findings
of a U.N. assessment team that the Bush administration has asked U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan to send to examine the feasibility of elections.
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- One option being discussed informally is to delay the
transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations
time to organize some sort of elections, one official said. But that is
almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the
occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by summer to bolster Bush's re-election
chances, the official said. "It's all politics right now," he
said.
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- Other options are to go ahead with the June 30 turnover
as planned, whatever the fallout, or to accelerate it by handing over power
to the Iraqi Governing Council in March or April, he said.
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- Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Tom Lasseter
in Najaf, Iraq, and Joseph L. Galloway and John Walcott in Washington contributed
to this report.
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- http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001841528_cia22.html
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