Leading Iraqi opposition spokesman Dr Hamid Al-Bayati talks to Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Saddam Hussein's regime was "very frightened and fragile", a leading Iraqi dissident claimed in Dublin yesterday. Although war was probably inevitable, he said, it would not be a protracted conflict, because support for Saddam was so weak.
Dr Hamid Al-Bayati (50) was on a brief visit to the Republic to meet members of the local Iraqi community, which is about 400-strong. He is a London-based representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and has been prominent in negotiations to put together a united opposition front.
I put it to him that many in Ireland would be happy to see the Iraqi regime fall but less enthusiastic about an Islamic Shi'ite revolutionary group, currently based in Tehran, becoming part of the new government.
He said that the Islamic movement had emerged in response to repression of Shi'ite Muslims by Saddam's regime, which was mainly Sunni Muslim. "If the Saddam regime falls, the supreme council will end, and then we will have a constitutional, parliamentary, democratic regime in Iraq."
The council works with secular organisations from the Kurdish element of the population and from Iraq's Shi'ite and Sunni communities. A conference of these opposition groups in London last December selected a "co-ordinating and follow-up committee" of 65 members, which will in turn elect a leadership for the combined opposition. The committee is due to hold its next meeting in the autonomous Kurdish area of northern Iraq later this month.
After the fall of Saddam, a broad-based provisional or transitional government would run Iraq for "two years or so" while a census was carried out and a referendum held to decide a permanent constitution for Iraq, said Dr Al-Bayati.
He is not attracted by the counter-proposal, originating in the US, that a top American commander should run the country on an interim basis. "We told them that we would reject any military commander, whether it is an American or an Iraqi."
There are also hopes in some quarters that Saddam's own military people might turn against him. "We think a military coup will be very unlikely: Saddam is coup-proof now, because he took all the measures to prevent any coup in the last 12 years."
There have been objections by human rights activists to the inclusion of a former head of Iraqi intelligence in the co-ordinating committee.
"The problem is you have to include people who left the regime, who defected - otherwise you can't send the right message to people inside Iraq, around Saddam," he said.
Once the current regime went, he envisaged the possibility of a general amnesty with a "handful" of specified individuals prosecuted on war-crimes charges. "Saddam, his two sons, members of the Revolutionary Command Council . . . altogether we are talking about 49 people."
Commenting on speculation that Saddam might take refuge in, say, Belarus, he said: "There are many places which he could defect to."
His reading of the mood among the ruling elite in Baghdad was as follows: "They are very frightened, the regime is very fragile. We already received reports that members of Saddam's family have been in contact with the opposition abroad to have a safe haven outside Iraq. Some people around Saddam are trying to guarantee a safe haven for their families because if they send their families abroad it would be much easier for them to flee the country as individuals."
A military attack was practically inevitable, he said. "I think we are heading to a war, unless something dramatic happens, but all the indications show that Saddam will have a crisis with the UN team and all the evidence is that he is not going to declare his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction." For the present, Saddam was trying to "appease" the inspectors.
I suggested that, for all the military might mustered by the US and Britain, the overthrow of Saddam would not be as easy as the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
"I know Saddam's forces are larger, but the support among the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army is much lower than the support for the Taliban.
"The Taliban were believers in their fundamental ideas, but Saddam's people don't believe in him after all these atrocities, wars and crises," he said.