Iraqis want Control...

and they want to go to Congress with their gripes. However, any group with Chalabi as leader is suspect in my book. One wonders if they are serious or just want a bigger slice of the pie. Should be an interesting few days in DC.
______________
Iraqi Leaders to Press Congress for Control Over Rebuilding
By PATRICK E. TYLER--NYTimes


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 21 — In a 6,000-mile end run around American and British occupation authorities, leaders from the Iraqi Governing Council say they will go to Congress this week to argue that American taxpayers could save billions of dollars on Iraq's reconstruction by granting sovereignty more rapidly to the council, the 25-member interim government here.

In interviews, the Iraqi leaders said they planned to tell Congress about how the staff of L. Paul Bremer III, the American occupation administrator, sends its laundry to Kuwait, how it costs $20,000 a day to feed the Americans at Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, how American contractors charge large premiums for working in Iraq and how, across the board, the overhead from supporting and protecting the large American and British presence here is less efficient than granting direct aid to Iraqi ministries that operate at a fraction of the cost.

"The Americans are spending money here to secure themselves at a rate that is two to three times what they are spending to secure the Iraqi people," said Ahmad al-Barak, a human rights lawyer and a member of the council. "It would be better for us if we would be in charge of how to spend this money and, of course, they could monitor how it is spent."

He estimated that in some cases the savings could be a factor of 10. "Where they spend $1 billion, we would spend $100 million," he said.

In the spirit of demonstrating such savings, the Governing Council this month canceled the $5,000-a-day contract that Mr. Bremer had arranged to feed the 25-member body and its staff and found a cheaper supplier. Mr. Barak said he did not know the cost of the new contract.

President Bush has asked Congress for $87 billion to finance military and reconstruction operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. Of that amount $20.3 billion is dedicated to Iraq's reconstruction.

The council's maneuver to bypass Mr. Bremer, who has flown back to Washington for meetings this week, seemed bound to irritate and embarrass him. Council members said Mr. Bremer was not told in advance of the council's plans to send representatives to Washington.

Mr. Bremer has said the council is not yet ready to take on more governing responsibilities. He was unavailable for comment tonight, but his spokesman here, Nabeel Khoury, said Mr. Bremer would be answering questions in Washington "about what we have been doing with the money we have" and would be explaining how the occupation authority would spend the $20.3 billion the White House has requested.

The council's end run reflects a political struggle between occupiers and the occupied that Iraqi officials say is inevitable and, so far, has not undermined the otherwise close working relationship that the council maintains with Mr. Bremer and his staff. But the good will is wearing thin as the interim Iraqi leaders, most of them from the opposition groups that helped persuade the Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein, become increasingly frustrated with the deteriorating security in the country and the impatient expectations of Iraqis to see some fruits of what the United States calls their liberation.

"To proceed, we need a new political consensus among the United States, the coalition and the Governing Council itself," said Iyad Alawi, a council member who will take over the rotating presidency of the governing body next month.

For that reason, he said, the delegation is being sent to Washington to seek support in Congress for a more rapid transfer of sovereignty, budget resources and security responsibilities to Iraqis.

Mr. Alawi was one of the five former opposition leaders who met privately in northern Iraq last week to formulate a proposal that would call for American troops to return gradually to their bases in Iraq and turn over the day-to-day policing of the country to a national Iraqi security force under the Ministry of Interior. The force would be drawn from the militia forces, but also from local tribes and police forces tailored to the security requirements of each part of the country, according to officials who attended the meeting.

One member of the delegation headed to Washington, Ahmad Chalabi, this month's president of the council, said the group would press Congress to support a proposed United Nations mandate that would grant sovereignty to the current interim government before a new Iraqi constitution is written and before national elections are held.

"We don't want to antagonize the United States in any way, shape or form," Mr. Chalabi said before he departed this weekend. But at the same time, he said, the daily attacks on American troops, accidental shootings of Iraqis and an overall sense of instability threatens to undermine American support for a long-term commitment to the emergence of a democratic state in Iraq.

"If we get sovereignty, the first thing we will do is ask the Americans to stay," he said.

Also headed to Washington was Adnan Pachachi, who had unsuccessfully sought to persuade Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during a meeting in Geneva this month to endorse the council's bid for a new United Nations resolution ending the occupation and turning over sovereignty in the next few months.

Mr. Pachachi then took his draft elsewhere in Europe, where he found greater support among the French and Germans, who opposed the American invasion of Iraq. Though Bush administration officials were said by Iraqi leaders to resent their lobbying efforts, the Iraqis point out that President Jacques Chirac of France has modified his earlier proposal to turn over power in a matter of weeks — something Mr. Powell dismissed as unworkable — to a matter of months.

Missing from the delegation to Washington will be Akila al-Hashemi, who is recovering from a gunshot wound suffered in an assassination attempt on Saturday.