Expanding its cooperation with Iraqi dissident groups that it has sometimes held at arm’s length, the Bush administration announced Thursday that it would support a broad-based conference of Iraqi exiles and emigres seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
The conference, expected to be held outside the United States, would include political and military figures from a variety of ethnic groups in Iraq, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. He provided few other details.
“The purpose of getting together the Iraqi opposition is to help marshal the support, look at ideas, demonstrate that there are Iraqis who want a different future for their country,” Boucher told reporters.
The meeting of opposition groups would complement a separate gathering of former Iraqi military officers that is being organized later this month in Washington by the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella opposition group that has had a prickly relationship with the State Department for months.
State Department officials have questioned the capabilities of the INC and cut off funding after an audit last year found accounting irregularities. But the funding was restored a day after President Bush’s State of the Union Message in which he labeled Iraq part of an “axis of evil.”
“There is a new environment to work something out and go forward,” said Entifadh Qanbar, director of the INC office in Washington. “The president’s speech made all the difference in the world.”
Qanbar said his group was seeking a $35 million grant from the Bush administration for expert training to “start to prepare ourselves to run the territories that are liberated” from Hussein’s control.
The warming ties come as the White House is weighing how to accomplish its declared goal of a “regime change” in Iraq.
The administration continues to press Hussein to allow United Nations inspectors into Iraq to look for evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development. But U.S. officials have not ruled out military action to drive Hussein from power.
American officials are increasing contacts with two Kurdish groups that control areas of northern Iraq to determine whether they could form the vanguard of a U.S.-led military operation, similar to the role the Northern Alliance played in ousting the Taliban regime from Afghanistan.
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The Kurds, who at U.S. urging rose up against Hussein after the 1991 Persian Gulf war only to be brutally suppressed, have been wary of cooperating with another American effort, fearing halfhearted support again.
Also Thursday, Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, told the House International Relations Committee that two aides were gathering data on atrocities blamed on Hussein, with an eye toward eventually prosecuting the Iraqi dictator and his top lieutenants before an international tribunal.