Unveiled: the thugs Bush wants in place of Saddam

If Saddam Hussein is America's frying-pan, these men are the fire into which President Bush may be jumping. Foreign Editor David Pratt runs the rule over some of the highly assorted and far from loveable would-be beneficiaries of Iraqi 'regime change'



CORRUPT, feckless and downright dangerous. Some say they make the Butcher of Baghdad himself look good. Who are they? The contenders for Saddam Hussein's throne.
Ever since the September 11 attacks 'regime change' has been the catchphrase coming out of Washington. But if George Bush is as intent on invading Iraq as he seems to be, overthrowing the Iraqi regime and deposing Saddam may well turn out to be the easy bit.

If Afghanistan's nightmarish internal politics proved problematic after the toppling of the Taliban, Bush should be under no illusion that Iraq's would be any less so. The Northern Alliance might not have seemed a very palatable alternative to the Taliban, but it has a certain rough credibility. There is no equivalent in Iraq.

Following any ousting of Saddam, the task will be to prevent anarchy from returning to the streets of Baghdad and the oil facilities throughout the country. To that end the US needs its own strongman to put in Saddam's place.

Saddam, of course, has never had a problem with making enemies. Indeed, the breadth of the Iraqi opposition -- from Islamic fundamentalists and communists to monarchists and free-marketeers -- demonstrates his ability in this respect. Seemingly every week a new group springs up and issues an identikit statement to the international media. Recently one organisation, which nobody seems to have heard of except its own members, even took over the Iraqi embassy in Germany to prove that it existed.

There are, however, some basic patterns to the cacophony of proclamations from new movements, councils and parties that purport to represent the voice of the authentic Iraqi individual.

First, there are the national bodies that were created inside Iraq before 1990, when the bond that had formed between Iraq and the US was shattered by the invasion of Kuwait. These are groups like the Iraqi Communist Party, the largest group in Iraq from the 1950s through to the 1970s, and al-Daawa al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Call), which engineered the biggest demonstrations against the Iraqi regime in the 1970s and had close ties with Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolutionaries in neighbouring Iran.