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-practised pitch that emphasizes the need for US troops to withdraw.
"The problem in Iraq is the American Army," al-Daini told a group of attentive US legislators gathered last week in the office of Republican Jim McDermott, an anti-war Democrat from Seattle. "What brought terrorism, what brought al-Qaeda and what brought Iranian influence is the Americans."
Al-Daini, soft-spoken and generally unsmiling, has been ushered from meeting to meeting by a public relations firm paid by a US 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 al-Daini shares.
But a closer look at al-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.
Last year, after al-Daini helped expose a secret torture jail run by the Interior Ministry, his Shiite opponents accused him of having ties to Sunni insurgents. He has publicly praised the Sunni insurgency for taking on US troops, and a reporter for a Shiite newspaper has accused him of complicity in the killing of the reporter's brother.
A central part of al-Daini's pitch is the perfidy of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and he has brought to Washington a stack of documents that he contends prove the government of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki is tied to death squads and takes orders from Iran. One is a letter purporting to bear al-Maliki's signature pledging to Iran's Revolutionary Guard to destroy 13 opponents in parliament "by any means," including "physical elimination."
Another supposedly shows al-Maliki advising the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to hide his top militia commanders in Iran or send them to the south during the new Baghdad security push.
Al-Maliki's allies, however, say the documents are forgeries. The government now plans to ask parliament to vote to lift al-Daini's immunity from criminal prosecution, a privilege of all legislators, so that he can be charged with forgery.
"The documents that he has can be found on the terrorists' Web sites," Hassan al-Sineid, a senior Shiite legislator from al-Maliki's party, said on Saturday. "The Iraqi government knows all about what he's doing in Washington."
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