Despite a unified public stance, offices within the Bush administration are at odds over whether democratization would most effectively stabilize a potential regime change in Iraq, according to the director of Harvard’s Iraq Research and Documentation Project (IRDP).

As the U.S. government considers policy options toward Iraq, members of the Bush administration as high as Vice President Dick Cheney have consulted IRDP’s director to guide the diplomatic and democratization effort.

Kanan M. Makiya, an associate of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, started and currently heads the project, which collects and analyzes Iraqi government records that document human rights violations, mass murder and chemical weapon usage.

On Friday, Cheney met with Makiya, an Iraqi expatriate who was born in Baghdad and currently serves as an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern politics at Brandeis University.

Makiya said that while the White House and Department of Defense under Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are in favor of democratizing Iraq, other officials within the Bush administration prefer an unspecified alternative policy.

“I have met with all kinds of senior government officials,” Makiya said.

Based on his conversations, he said, it seems the administration’s direction has gotten “fuzzier” on this issue.

Makiya explained that opponents of democratization believe that the process would destabilize the entire Persian Gulf region and that the U.S. would need to rely excessively on rebel groups in Iraq.

In the past few months, the Bush administration has stated interest in democratizing Iraq. Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have each publicly addressed democratization.

“Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and protected,” Cheney said in an Aug. 26 address to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.

A few weeks ago, Rice told London’s Financial Times that the U.S. is “completely devoted” to nation-building and reconstruction in Iraq.

Makiya and his colleagues have prepared a proposal he calls a “road map” for democratization for the state department’s Democratic Principles Workshop and its “Future of Iraq Initiative.”

Makiya has been in contact with the department’s key Iraq policy advisor, Ryan Crocker, who has served as a U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Qatar.

Neither Crocker nor Cheney’s office returned phone calls from The Crimson yesterday.

Makiya’s proposal, which was presented in rough draft form to Cheney last Friday, will be formally submitted at the end of November to the Conference of Iraqi Opposition—an organization of expatriate Iraqis who are opposed to Saddam Hussein’s government.