U.S. to Convene Iraq Meeting in Nassiriya Tuesday

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Friday it would convene a meeting of Iraqis in the southern city of Nassiriya on Tuesday to discuss the future of Iraq (news - web sites) and an eventual interim authority to govern the country.

The meeting, which a U.S. official said was to be chaired by U.S. presidential envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, was expected to be the first in a series Washington aims to organize leading to a Baghdad conference to choose an Iraqi governing authority.

It was expected to include Iraqis from inside and outside the country, including opposition figures and Iraqi émigrés who have worked with the United States for months on how to run Iraq after the fall of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).

While U.S. military operations continue to defeat remaining Iraqi forces, U.S. officials are turning to creating an Iraqi-led interim authority that they hope will have sufficient legitimacy to win acceptance from the Iraqi people.

The end of Saddam's government has left a vacuum in the country, with looting and lawlessness plaguing both Baghdad and Iraq's third largest city, Mosul.

The initial civil administration will be run by a U.S. team led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner but will gradually give way first to the interim authority and then a government chosen by the Iraqis. U.S. officials cannot predict an exact timeline.

"We expect this to be the first in a series of regional meetings that will provide a forum for Iraqis to discuss their vision of the future and their ideas regarding the Iraqi interim authority," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher of the Nassiriya gathering. "We hope these meetings will culminate in a nationwide conference that can be held in Baghdad in order to form the Iraqi interim authority."

Boucher said participants, invited by Gen. Tommy Franks -- the U.S. officer in charge of the war on Iraq -- would include "Iraqis from newly freed areas" of the country, members of the Iraqi opposition and Iraqis who took part in a long-running State Department project on the postwar future of Iraq.

The United States is seeking to bring together a wide variety of Iraqis to decide who will initially govern a country splintered among the majority Shi'ites, the minority Sunnis who have long ruled and the separatist Kurds in the north.

Asked if it was not a huge challenge to win consensus, a U.S. official replied: "It is, and we recognize that, and that is why we see this as the first of what are expected to be several meetings."

Asked when an interim authority might emerge, he said: "We are hopeful that it will be a matter of weeks."

Khalilzad, the White House official overseeing the meeting, performed a similar function in Afghanistan (news - web sites) after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban regime in the autumn of 2001.

That effort led to a December 2001 international conference in Bonn that agreed on an interim government led by Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's president.

In a sign of the difficulties that Khalilzad may face in bringing Iraqis together, a lawyer who works closely with the opposition Iraqi National Congress said he had been invited to Nassiriya and was considering whether to accept.

Asked why he had not accepted immediately, the lawyer said he would not be keen to attend if there was what he called an excessive emphasis by the organizers on the involvement of tribal leaders.

The British army appointed a tribal leader last week as the head of a fledgling civilian administration in and around Basra, Iraq's second city, prompting dismay among INC officials who complained he was too close to Saddam's Baathist party.

The main Iraqi Shi'ite exile group, the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has said it will boycott the Nassiriya meeting because it disapproves of the U.S. military occupation.

The convocation of regional committees to serve as a nucleus for the new Iraqi government is a canny move, despite the fact that it is "a huge challenge to win consensus". By filling the political vacuum with Iraqis at the earliest possible moment, the United States will make it difficult, or even impossible, for outside parties to insinuate their own structures. The organization of regional committees is aimed at Syria, Iran and France as much as it is directed against the concrete problems of anarchy and reconstruction.

Once these Iraqi governmental bodies are functioning, even to a minimal degree, it will become very difficult for a United Nations representative to demand subordination to him. Nor will Iraqis, in control of their own destiny, be sympathetic to Kofi Annan's strange claim that "only the UN can confer legitimacy". That will already have been obtained by the consent of the governed.

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