Samir Sumaida’ie, Iraq’s Ambassador to the United States, is a revolutionary.
A decade ago, Sumaida’ie was an integral part of the diverse cadre of Iraqi dissidents who, from their perches in London, Washington, and Iraqi Kurdistan, provided impetus for the coup-by-proxy that would become one of the largest foreign policy blunders in modern American history.
But since he acquired his coveted post in Washington, the 65-year old ambassador has confronted a new lobbying offensive: a group of Iraqi political factions hoping to, by vying for the attention and confidence of American leaders, propel themselves into the upper echelons of power in Iraq.
“There are other political representatives here in Washington from Iraq…who represent the interests of other parties,” Sumaida’ie says. “And they plead their case. That’s fine, as long as it’s understood that on a state-to-state basis, the port of call [for the Iraqi government] is the ambassador.” According to disclosure records filed with the Justice Department, these “other parties” include:
- The Iranian-backed Islamic Supreme Council for Iraq (ISCI), one of Iraq’s largest and most powerful Shiite political parties. ISCI opened a small Washington liaison office last fall to promote “activities to educate and raise awareness about the needs, hopes and desires of the Iraqi people” and help Americans “become familiar with the Iraqi Islamic culture”;
- Ayad Allawi, a former U.S. and British intelligence asset who served as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister until 2005. Another exiled opposition leader, Allawi provided spurious information about Iraq’s weapons programs to MI6 during the pre-war propaganda frenzy. In 2007, he hired the boutique lobbying outfit BGR Group—whose executives include Bush I aide Ed Rogers and Bush II adviser Bob Blackwill—as part of a $300,000 contract that ended in late 2008;
- Tariq al-Hashimi, one of Iraq’s vice presidents and leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s largest Sunni bloc. Al-Hashimi hired a U.S.-based Iraqi “peace advocate,” Muthannna Al-Hanooti, to lobby Congress for several months back in 2007. Al-Hanooti was arrested last year and accused of spying for Saddam Hussein;
- Nehro Kasnazani, a wealthy Sufi businessman and ex-CIA agent campaigning for the Iraqi presidency. Kasnazani has dispatched a former U.S. military translator to Washington to serve as his personal lobbyist and facilitate a handful of business deals, including the purchasing of an American oil refinery;
- The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The KRG is represented inside the Beltway by Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, and has spared no expense on U.S.-based representation. Besides operating its own office in downtown D.C., the Kurds retain BGR Group (at $58,000 per month), the law firm of Greenburg Traurig American ($40,000), and the Business Development Group ($10,000) for “strategic counsel and representation.” Moreover, to help “shape U.S. perceptions of Kurdish interests ” the Talabanis paid the Republican-linked PR firm of Russo, Marsh & Rogers $200,000 to produce television advertisements “educating the public that Kurdistan is safe, has an open society, and is receptive and equipped for investment.”
The Kurds’ mounting influence has rivaled that of the Iraqi embassy, challenging—and perhaps in some cases, diminishing—Sumaida’ie’s political leverage. “[Qubad Talabani] has more clout than any other Iraqi in Washington because of his ability to call his father directly and because he represents the collective view of an influential minority,” the Washington Post reported in 2007. “By contrast, Baghdad’s ambassador to Washington is a secular Sunni Arab who has limited sway with his Shiite-dominated government.”
While Kurdistan maintains no official diplomatic status, a State Department spokeswoman admits that its employees meet with KRG representatives like Talabani “from time to time,” and assist in “official” visits from Kurdish leaders to the United States. The Kurds’ influence-buying campaign has not only produced tangible political results—as illustrated in the creation of a Kurdish-American Congressional Caucus, led by Representatives Lincoln Davis (D-TN) and Joe Wilson (R-SC)—it has also generated significant interest in Kurdistan’s investment opportunities. Last May, for example, organizers of an Iraq oil conference in Houston invited Talabani, not Ambassador Sumaida’ie, to give the event’s keynote address. “[Talabani] is keen to put across specific views of the KRG to people here,” Sumaida’ie says. “For the time being, I am not a party to that.”
Adding to this political dichotomy are the growing tensions between the KRG and Baghdad. Iraq’s two major legislative stalemates— brokering an effective hydrocarbon law and resolving territorial disputes—are split along Kurdish-Arab lines. The oil law is needed to quell the controversy over who retains the right to develop the country’s energy reserves, particularly in the Kurdish north, where the KRG has been auctioning off its exports. Territorially, disagreements remain over the boundary between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq—and which side will include Kirkuk, the historic, oil-rich city that the Kurds call their “Jerusalem.” Meanwhile, Kurdish and Iraqi leaders are at odds over ending the U.S. presence in Iraq. As Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki celebrated the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq’s cities last month, the Kurds responded by calling for an increased U.S. commitment. “The Kurds fear what they see as a ‘tug of war’ in Washington between those who want to move on from Iraq and those who want a continued focus,” reported the Associated Press.
But as concerns over the potential for a renewed sectarian war ricochet from Baghdad to Washington, Sumaida’ie is downplaying the rift. “The messages [from the KRG and the Iraqi government] may cross and conflict in certain detail,” he says. “But we believe that the central messages are the same, which is a unified Iraq, a federal Iraq, a democratic Iraq.”
From the fray, however, the outlook is less rosy. “The big battle over Iraq stability and security has yet to be won fundamentally because of the politics of Shia, Sunni, Kurd,” Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, told the New York Times last week. “These are fundamental issues of power, resources and territory.”
The vigilance that makes Sumaida’ie a shrewd diplomat—he wields a cautious handshake and a demeanor that is cordial, but careful—helped him become an able leader in the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in the early 1990s. As an exile living in Britain, Sumaida’ie joined ranks with the INC, an alliance of nineteen Iraqi opposition groups ranging “from the Islamists to the Communists,” according to the ambassador. They shared a common purpose: getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Buoyed by clandestine U.S. support and an Iraqi diaspora that claimed significant financial resources, the INC developed military strategies, crafted political talking points and generated faux intelligence as part of an orchestrated campaign to transform the Iraqi dictator from a regional pariah into an international menace.
The Iraqi National Congress was a product of the Central Intelligence Agency, which President George H.W. Bush authorized to “create the conditions” for regime change in Iraq following the first Gulf War. The CIA hired the Rendon Group, a powerful public relations firm led by spy-for-hire James Rendon, to foment anti-Saddam propaganda. Rendon would serve as the INC’s advisor and organize the June 1992 conference in Vienna, Austria, that initially brought the coalition together. Several years later, the INC started to receive covert funding from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Aside from Sumaida’ie, the group’s more notable leadership included Masud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan; Ayatollah Mohammad Bahr al-Ulloum, a prominent Shiite leader and politician; and Ahmed Chalabi, the Bush Administration’s hand-picked successor to Saddam who was eventually discredited for falsifying intelligence on Iraq’s mythical nuclear program. In 1996, Chalabi began working closely with a Republican-dominated Congress to draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which enumerated U.S. support for “democratic reforms” in Iraq, and was signed into law by President Clinton in 1998.
Despite these symbolic gains, the copious amount of time Sumaida’ie and the INC spent lobbying went largely unheeded until 2001, when they found a willing partner in a small group of American neoconservatives. As American policy migrated from containment to intervention, the Bush Administration ramped up U.S. funding for the Iraqi opposition. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the INC received $33 million from March 2000 to May 2003 alone. “In politics, individuals do matter,” the ambassador explains. “I think the fact that the president was George W. Bush was an important factor [in the Iraq invasion], as was the composition of his administration.” Emboldened, the INC intensified its efforts to, in Sumaida’ie’s euphemism, “prepare the environment” for military engagement. This included using the media as a megaphone: in a June 2002 memo, INC officials claimed that between October 2001 and May 2002, their dubious allegations against Saddam were cited in 108 news stories around the world. “They [the INC] make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda,” Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official, told the American Prospect in 2002.
After Saddam’s ouster, Sumaida’ie was rewarded, like many of his comrades, with a seat in Iraq’s provisional government. He served as Interior Minister before being appointed as the country’s representative to the United Nations. In 2006, he became Baghdad’s man in Washington, where he found himself among a new Iraq lobby that—unlike its predecessors in the INC—championed diverging political aims, mirroring the sectarian divisions that had taken root back home.
The presence of these factions, Sumaida’ie claims, is a “transient situation” that will dissipate as Iraqis “move towards a more unified voice.” Unity, however, appears to be far off on the horizon. Iraq’s impotent political institutions threaten to turn the country into a crony state (only Somalia and Burma were more corrupt than Iraq in 2008, according to Transparency International) while reports from the ground accuse Prime Minister Maliki of using repressive tactics to maintain his authority. “Maliki has begun to consolidate his power and mastery over Iraq’s security forces, asserting his will on the provinces,” writes Ned Parker, the Los Angeles Times’ Baghdad correspondent, in an aptly titled article, “Machiavelli in Mesopotamia.” “To anger him is to risk endless harassment, exile, or imprisonment.”
But according to the ambassador, Iraq is simply “in a state of transition.” “Look, taking control of a country is a gradual process,” he says. “The important thing is to ensure that we don’t jeopardize the gains that we have sacrificed so much for. So far it seems that we [Iraqis] will be able to manage this on our own.”
“But if not, then we will call on our friends.”
