PM Allawi

There's all kinds of information contained within Seymore Hersh's Plan B in the New Yorker, and I wholeheartedly reccomend y'all read it in its entirety. The last few paragraphs were particularly striking, to me, and laid out elements of Iyad Allawi's biography in a crystallization that's helpful in seeing what's happening on June 30. Other than what's hinted at in this AP gem, that is:

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor said that by the end of the week, all Iraqi government ministries would be under full Iraqi control.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has promised to crush the terrorist threat and said Sunday his administration was considering martial law in some areas to restore law and order.

``They are trying to destroy our country, and we are not going to allow this,'' Allawi said Sunday.

Anyway, here's the relevant info on Allawi from Hersh's piece (which, by the way, spells out a very hostile future for the region, hinting at an Israeli fueled Kurdish uprising in all of what was historic Kurdistan, including parts of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran):

The White House has yet to deal with Allawi’s past. His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—Saddam became President in 1979—is much less well known. “Allawi helped Saddam get to power,” an American intelligence officer told me. “He was a very effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.”...

Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.

“If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. “He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.” A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi’s personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat “hit team” that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.

There had already been speculation that Allawi's known history with the CIA as an anti-Saddam agent would decrease his legitimacy with the Iraqi population. What is probably worse, however, is his history with Saddam and what that means for post-June 30 Iraq. Martial law with a thug in power. Like Saddam, only with the power of the US military behind him. Nice.