WASHINGTON: As the White House campaigns to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, it is manoeuvring to dilute Iranian influence in a committee of Iraqi exiles that would help form a post-Saddam government.

Some in the fractious exile community accuse the United States of heavy-handed interference for seeking to enlarge the panel from 65 members, agreed to at a conference in London last month, to 100. The US government played a major role in selecting the six exile organizations that formed the committee.

There also were signs of splits over what role the committee should have in forming a provisional government. The exile groups are bent on quickly forming a government they would control, according to influential exiles and administration sources. But the State Department opposes such a rush, saying a provisional government should include Iraqis inside the country, according to a spokesman who insisted he not be quoted by name. “We believe that creating a government for the Iraqi people now is tantamount to disenfranchising the vast majority of Iraqis,” he said.

After Saddam is forced out, “significant individuals, groups of individuals or institutions ... are going to emerge that are going to represent a very, very important source of stability and legitimacy for a future government,” the spokesman said.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who is the White House’s point man for a post-Saddam government and is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, reportedly has different ideas. A source close to Khalilzad said the “policy-makers” of any provisional government “would be drawn from the leaders of the opposition,” while the “technocrats” would be chosen from current Iraqi officials, academicians or leaders with no lingering loyalty to Saddam Hussein.

With Muslims of the Shia sect forming about 60 per cent of Iraq’s people, the exile steering committee has numerous Shias, and they have ties to Shia-ruled Iran. They include 15 members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is based in Tehran.

Cheney and Khalilzad are seeking to dilute the Shias’ influence by enlarging the panel from 65 to 100, the source close to Khalilzad said. Iran is unhappy, seeing this “as an effort to diminish their influence,” he said. Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the largest dissident group, the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, and a leading Iraqi opposition intellectual, Kanan Makiya, a professor at Brandeis University, are in Iran to reassure officials that Iran’s interests will be preserved.

An aide to Chalabi confirmed last week he was in Tehran meeting with officials there, but said it was merely a transit stop on Chalabi’s route to northern Iraq, where the committee is planning to meet next month. A spokesman at Brandeis would not provide a phone number for Makiya, saying he could be reached only by e-mail.

The State Department spokesman said he was unaware of any plan to alter the panel, whose role he said should be limited to serving as a link between the administration and the “formalized Iraqi opposition groups.” At the same time, he said, “It probably wouldn’t come as a surprise to you to know that there have been disagreements across several” US government agencies.

Members of the Iraqi exile community said the administration also wants to dilute influence of ethnic Kurds on the opposition committee. An INC source said that at a Jan. 10 meeting with Iraqis, a State Department representative complained that the panel “looks like a Kurdish-Shia conspiracy.”

Laith Kubba, who helped create the Iraqi National Congress in 1992 but has left the group, said the exiles intend on their own to enlarge the panel “to be more inclusive.” Still, “it is not up to the United States to decide the numbers,” he said. “It just doesn’t look right.”

One group the White House wants to include in the panel, the source close to Khalilzad said, was Dawa, a secretive organization of Shias in southern Iraq, who would get five seats. Other new members would be “liberals closer to the administration’s point of view,” he said.

Besides the Tehran-based Shias and the Iraqi National Congress, groups now on the committee are the Kurdish Democratic Party and its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; the National Accord, composed of former military and intelligence officers; and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, which wants to restore the Hashemite monarchy buttressed by the British from 1921 until 1958.

Kubba, who many in the administration wanted to see appointed to the panel but was not chosen, is not sanguine that the last- minute manoeuvring can prevent a post-Saddam collapse of Iraq.

“What kept the US away (from ousting Saddam) for all this time was the concern that the country (Iraq) might be dismembered,” he said. “Now it has become more problematic than ever. Now the concern is real.”—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service (c) Newsday.