Note To My Successor

By Brian Bennett/Baghdad

Most of the chairs at the Prime Minister's table are empty now, and the long cloth is littered with the remains of a large early-evening repast: half-eaten bowls of lamb and okra, traces of hummus, a dented mound of rice. As he stirs three small, white tablets of artificial sweetener into a tear-shaped glass of tea, Ibrahim al-Jaafari describes the scolding he gave the Minister of the Interior that morning. A U.S. raid the day before had found evidence that Iraqi police were torturing detainees at a secret prison in Baghdad. Soon after he was told about it, al-Jaafari announced he was launching a full investigation. But even he has no illusions about how much control he actually has over his Cabinet. He didn't really make the appointments, he notes. Instead, the political parties "divided the government in shares," like warlords divvying up fiefdoms. "When [the Prime Minister] is responsible for forming the ministries," he told TIME wistfully, revealing the weakness of his position, "his ability to control them will be better." He wasn't really referring to himself in the third person. He is unlikely to be the Prime Minister for much longer.

Al-Jaafari has been Prime Minister for just about eight months, and a new government is expected to be elected on Dec. 15. But his experience is both a harbinger of and a template for the travails of Iraq, as well as a once and future job description for how to deal with fractiousness and tumult. The elections are unlikely to provide any party with a governing majority, forcing contending groups to compromise once more and produce the kind of jigsaw Cabinet that has proved not to work so far. The new Prime Minister is likely to discover that he must act as al-Jaafari has: as a mediator and patchwork maker. Some analysts, attempting political clairvoyance, have said that the lack of a strong leader may then tempt one faction or another to stage a coup d'etat.

What is certain is that the next head of government will inherit rampant corruption, stagnant oil exports, a crumbling infrastructure, deadly insurgencies (on Friday and Saturday alone, five suicide bombings killed more than 120 people), an Iraqi army riddled with factional militiamen and a police force suspected of conniving in sectarian violence. A case in point is last week's discovery by U.S. forces of 173 prisoners at an Interior Ministry bunker. The majority of them were believed to be Sunni and several reportedly showed signs of torture or starvation. It has only increased the public perception that the Interior Ministry, which runs the police, is under the sway of a powerful Shi'ite faction. The head of the Interior Ministry is Bayan Jabr, a man reportedly with ties to the pro-Iranian Badr Corps, the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Although al-Jaafari berated him after the discovery was made public, Jabr was apportioned his ministry by political agreement, and al-Jaafari, who is also Shi'ite but of another party, can do nothing to get rid of him. Jabr has denied allegations that militiamen have been using the Iraqi police to launch a campaign of terrorism against Sunnis. "I swear on the name of God," Abu Rasul al-Shebani, spokesman for the Badr Corps, told TIME, "nobody in the Badr Corps is in the Ministry of the Interior."

A second cloud over the ministry has formed from various accounts that police vehicles were used in the killings of lawyers defending Saddam Hussein's lieutenants in the current trial. Two eyewitnesses who told friends they saw Ministry of Interior vehicles take lawyer Saadoun al-Janabi from his office on Oct. 20 before he was discovered dead have themselves been killed. (One witness was shot just last week while taking his pregnant wife to a Baghdad hospital; TIME had been trying to reach him to have him relate what he saw.) "All fingers point to the Ministry of Interior," insists Saddam's personal lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi, "its militias and Iranian intelligence." While al-Jaafari conceded that a corrupt Interior official could have been bribed to carry out the killings, he says the likely culprits are ex-Baathists and "those who want to disrupt the political process." An ex-Baathist field commander says his group wouldn't target Saddam's attorneys. "These people are doing their duty defending any accused," says the leader of the insurgent al-Tamimi brigade of Jaish Mohammed.

The Iraqi Bar Association is convinced that the police are not doing enough to investigate the crimes and has ordered the Saddam defense team to cut off contact with the court until the killers of the lawyers are found, a decision that could further delay the tribunal when it reconvenes on Nov. 28. Procedures would require the court to appoint new counsel, causing another 40-day stay for the difficult discovery process (see following story).

During the course of his nine-month term, al-Jaafari, by his own admission, has acted less like a strong-arming leader and more a playground monitor. Still, he is proud of negotiating to get more representatives of the large Sunni minority, which dominated Iraqi politics under Saddam, into the Cabinet. Al-Jaafari also pushed to bring in Sunnis to help write the constitution. While al-Jaafari stops short of welcoming Baathists back into the government, his actions, say Western diplomats, have brought Sunni politicians into the fold and may reap benefits including broader participation in the Dec. 15 elections. But each step, al-Jaafari says, is a huge exercise.

He is almost plaintive as he pleads for patience with Iraq's fledgling democracy. Last week he showed off a gift he received from President George W. Bush, a gold-foil-covered box containing a worn, leather-bound 19th century copy of the Federalist papers. Al-Jaafari has read the book in translation and cites the extensive debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution as a reason that the Iraqi democracy should not be rushed. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited on Nov. 11, he told her he didn't want to have to "start at the beginning, but we can't start at the end."

For most of his life, al-Jaafari thought less about how to run a government and more about how to topple one. In the 1970s, al-Jaafari, a physician, was a rising star in the Islamic Dawa Party and fled with the leadership to Iran and then Britain in the 1980s when Saddam outlawed the movement. He speaks English well but not with the facility of a native speaker and prefers to conduct interviews through an interpreter. Since becoming Prime Minister, al-Jaafari has lived within the Green Zone in what had been one of Saddam's favorite palaces. But al-Jaafari knew not to make himself too comfortable. Boxes are backed up in the corner of his office, never unpacked. Framed pictures lean against the wall, unlikely to be hung. He often recalls a discussion he had as a young student in the holy city of Karbala, when he told a friend of his ambition to launch an opposition movement. The friend stopped him and warned that managing Iraq would be much harder than getting to power. "He was right about this," al-Jaafari says. A lesson the next Prime Minister should note.