State Department to
Give $6 Million To the Main Iraqi Opposition Group.
Wall Street Journal, 6/14/01
WASHINGTON - The State Department has told Congress it plans to give $6 million over the next three months to the main Iraqi opposition group, a move that could jeopardize the administration's delicate diplomacy to revamp sanctions on Iraq.
The disbursement comes after months of hot debate between officials at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon over how to tackle the challenge of Iraq and its troublesome leader, Saddam Hussein.
While hardly a victory for those who want to see the White House back an armed insurgency against Iraq, the money will be the first open support from the new administration to the Iraqi National Congress and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi. A reluctant President Clinton gave the INC $4.2 million last year to help it open offices in Syria and Iran and to begin limited activities around Iraq's borders. Republicans skewered the Gore campaign last year for the administration's timid approach toward the INC, promising to back an insurgency if they won the White House.
But the administration remains deeply divided between INC backers (largely at the Pentagon and within the office of Vice President Dick Cheney) and those skeptical about the group's aims and abilities (largely at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency).
The State Department has resisted giving significant new money to the INC until the U.S. resolves its campaign at the United Nations to revise the 11-year-old sanctions on Iraq. France, Russia and China, all with veto powers on the U.N. Security Council, say the U.S. has no business trying to topple the Iraqi government by force.
The Security Council hopes to vote on a new Iraq-sanctions resolution before July 4, around the same time the INC expects to receive its first $2 million disbursement.
The money is far from the $29 million that the INC has requested and that Congress explicitly set aside for its use last year. But it marks a significant increase on a $300,000-a-month offer that a State Department official made to INC representatives in London last week.
The State Department declined to comment on the disbursements, other than to confirm it had notified Congress of the plan late yesterday.
Details of how the money will be spent must still be worked out. But Francis Brooke, an advisor to the INC in Washington, said the two sides have reached a tentative agreement to fulfill a longstanding pledge to begin television and radio broadcasts into Iraq. The INC and Lockheed Martin Corp. plan to sign a contract to beam satellite- TV programming into Iraq and nearly all of the Arab world at a cost of more than $3 million a year, according to a Lockheed spokesman. The station, run out of a studio in London, is expected to go on the air by August.
The rest of the money will go to pay for continuing activities, including humanitarian relief work and limited intelligence gathering that the INC is doing outside of Iraq. Mr. Brooke said that the one firm prohibition is that no money can be spent for activities on the ground in Iraq.