Antiwar Iraqi in Washington Has a More Sectarian Agenda at Home

[maddezmom]

By SCOTT SHANE and EDWARD WONG
Published: May 14, 2007
WASHINGTON, May 13 — As Congress and the White House continue to spar over war plans, Iraqis representing all sides in the conflict are turning up in the halls of power here to press their views.

For two weeks, in meetings with a score of members of Congress, Muhammad al-Daini, a Sunni Arab member of the Iraqi Parliament who says he has survived eight assassination attempts, has offered a well-practiced pitch that emphasizes the need for American troops to withdraw.

“The problem in Iraq is the American Army,” Mr. Daini told a group of attentive American legislators gathered last week in the office of Representative Jim McDermott, an antiwar Democrat from Seattle. “What brought terrorism, what brought Al Qaeda and what brought Iranian influence is the Americans.”

Mr. Daini, soft-spoken and generally unsmiling, has been ushered from meeting to meeting by a public relations firm paid by an American businessman who calls the Iraqi politician “a true humanitarian.” The businessman, Dal LaMagna, says he is devoting the fortune he made selling his high-end grooming tools business, Tweezerman, to seeking an end to the violence in Iraq, a goal he says Mr. Daini shares.

But a closer look at Mr. Daini’s record in Iraq suggests a more complicated picture. The real lesson of his tour may be the difficulty of sorting out from Washington who is who in a distant, bitter sectarian conflagration, where hyperbole is rife and solid facts are hard to come by.

more:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/world/middleeast/14daini.html?ref=washington

[Erika]

1. And why are we there? n/t