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12/03/2001: "WHY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WILL GO
AFTER IRAQ"
Within the Bush administration, a debate is raging
over where the war on terrorism goes after
Afghanistan. But contrary to press reports, the
argument isn't about whether to extend the war to
Iraq--that question has largely been settled. Last
week national security adviser Condoleezza Rice
declared Saddam "a threat to us because he is
determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
Echoing that appraisal, President Bush argued, "As for
Mr. Saddam Hussein, he needs to let inspectors back in
his country, to show us that he is not developing
weapons of mass destruction." Asked what would happen
if the Iraqi dictator declined to comply, the
president said, "He'll find out." Even Colin Powell,
not known for favoring punitive action against Saddam,
sounds as if he has modified his opinion. Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has recommended that
the United States strike Iraq as soon as "we find the
right way to do it." And, indeed, the United States
does plan to strike. Unfortunately, it still hasn't
found the right way to do it.
Broadly speaking, the Bush team consists of two camps:
The first wants to disarm Saddam; the second wants to
destroy him. The Pentagon's civilian leadership, led
by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
has been pressing for a broad and robust military
campaign, launched in conjunction with the Iraqi
opposition, and aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator.
So have some National Security Council staffers and
Dick Cheney aides. The State Department, meanwhile,
favors limiting any campaign to the destruction or
degradation of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
And if this latter faction has been losing the fight
over whether to take military action against Saddam,
it appears to be winning the fight over the scope of
the action. Which means good news for Saddam Hussein
and bad news for the rest of us.
Those counseling a minimalist approach today happen to
be the same people who counseled minimalism the last
time the United States confronted Saddam, during the
Gulf war. Atop the list is Colin Powell--who
discounted warnings of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait;
opposed a show of naval force to deter one; argued
against freeing Kuwait once it was occupied; and,
after it was finally liberated, insisted that the
United States not carry the fight to Baghdad and that
it turn a blind eye to the massacre of Iraqis we had
encouraged to revolt. The CIA--which exaggerated
Iraq's military prowess during the run-up to the Gulf
war, and then spent the 1990s botching coup attempts
in Baghdad and maligning the Iraqi opposition--has
also reprised its Gulf war role. Then there's the
State Department's new Middle East counselor, retired
Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni (who spent the
Clinton years crusading against the Iraqi opposition
and warning that they "have very little, if any,
viability to exact a change of regime") and the State
Department's policy planning director, Richard Haass
(who seconded Powell's abandonment of the Iraqi
opposition in 1991 and would prefer it stay
abandoned). To complete the reunion, none other than
Bush p re's national security adviser, Brent
Scowcroft, and the original George Bush himself have
been discouraging Bush fils from extending the war to
Iraq. Had he taken the war to Baghdad in 1991, Bush
pere explained in late October, "[W]e would have seen
something much worse than we have now."
But other veterans of the first Bush administration
learned a very different lesson from the Gulf war.
Wolfowitz has spent a decade anguishing over his
failure as undersecretary of defense to overcome
Powell's arguments against rescuing the Iraqi
insurgents. At the NSC, Iraq point man Zalmay
Khalilzad, a former Wolfowitz aide, has pushed
aggressively to right yesterday's wrong. So have Rice
and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. Another proponent of
robust action at the NSC is retired General Wayne
Downing, the administration's counterterrorism czar
and until recently a close adviser to the opposition
Iraqi National Congress (INC). Cheney's chief of staff
and national security adviser, I. Lewis Libby (another
former Wolfowitz aide), also favors regime change in
Iraq. And Rumsfeld, who in 1998 signed a letter
stating that "Iraq today is ripe for a broad-based
insurrection," has joined the call as well.
Until very recently, it seemed unlikely that the Bush
team would be having this debate at all. Having
pledged to deal forcefully with Baghdad, the
administration spent its first months in office doing
the reverse. Though Cheney met with the INC's Ahmed
Chalabi last year, and Bush's Pentagon team kept in
close touch with the Iraqi insurgents, nothing
happened. In fact, like the Clinton team before it,
the Bush team declined to authorize the release of
congressionally appropriated funds for use by the
opposition inside Iraq. Instead, the State Department
audited them. Foggy Bottom then launched a plan to
ease sanctions against Saddam (which it peddled as a
plan to tighten sanctions), and its officials lobbied
for scaling back the U.S.-patrolled no-flight zones
above Iraq.
Nor did September 11 immediately convince the
administration to reverse course. On the contrary,
bickering between the State and Defense Departments
over Iraqi culpability for the attacks ended up
undermining the case for decisive action. Powell
lectured Wolfowitz that an attack against Iraq would
"wreck the coalition" and complained that Hadley had
inserted a reference to "further action with respect
to other organizations and other states" in a letter
submitted to the United Nations. For its part, the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board recommended that the
United States target Iraq, and the Pentagon dispatched
former CIA Director R. James Woolsey to London
(without State Department knowledge) to hunt for
evidence of Iraqi complicity. By mid-September, the
debate appeared to have been settled in the State
Department's favor, when the president ordered that
further discussion concerning Iraq await the outcome
of the war in Afghanistan. Cheney subsequently
instructed Wolfowitz to quell the Iraq maneuvering,
and the State Department froze its contacts with the
INC and held up a plan to fund opposition television
broadcasts inside Iraq.
This came as a particular relief at the CIA, whose
timidity on Iraq rivals even Foggy Bottom's. The CIA's
reluctance to involve itself in anti-Saddam
operations--a reluctance that September 11 did nothing
to dispel--boasts a long and depressing history. With
the departure of Frank Anderson, the Agency's widely
admired chief of Near East operations and a vocal
proponent of the Iraqi opposition, responsibility for
operations against Saddam fell to a parade of
spectacularly incompetent officials. Those officials,
with the encouragement of George Tenet--who, as senior
director for intelligence programs at the NSC, and
later as deputy director of central intelligence,
became enthralled with the idea of ousting Saddam in a
military coup--gradually turned their backs on the
Iraqi opposition. By 1996 Langley had become so
indifferent that when the Iraqi army thrust into the
Kurdish North in August, CIA operatives fled the
country, leaving behind hundreds of opposition
fighters to be slaughtered by Saddam. The same year,
Chalabi and his American contacts warned Tenet
directly that Saddam's agents had penetrated the CIA's
coup operation. Tenet ignored the advice. And not long
after, Baghdad arrested and executed the coup
plotters. Chalabi then took to attacking the CIA
publicly, which culminated in the INC's virtual
banishment from the intelligence community's
deliberations. According to intelligence sources, the
CIA's animus toward the Iraqi opposition extends even
to Iraqi defectors to the INC, whose information the
CIA routinely discounts. Even today, the Agency
continues to pin its hopes on officials within the
Iraqi government and resists closer cooperation with
the opposition. Indeed, administration officials claim
Langley's current Iraq point man, Ben Miller, has
spent much of his time since September 11 disparaging
the INC and musing about how to create an alternative
opposition force.
ut if the State Department and CIA quickly reverted to
type after September 11, at the White House that day's
aftermath eventually changed some minds. Aides say
that two post-9/11 realities have convinced the
president of the wisdom of turning toward Baghdad. The
first and most important has been our military success
in Afghanistan, and the template--American airpower
combined with on-the-ground proxies--that achieved it.
The second derived from Bush's growing recognition of
how exposed the United States actually is. "This isn't
an abstract issue anymore," explains a Bush adviser.
"It's now clear we're vulnerable, and it's also clear
the best way to protect ourselves is to eliminate
those that threaten us." And Saddam Hussein,
universally assumed to have been developing weapons of
mass destruction during the three years since the UN
inspection regime collapsed, clearly fits the bill.
Vice President Cheney has also slowly come around to
his staff's view that Iraq should be targeted. "What
[Cheney] had a problem with was the timing, not the
issue of confronting [Saddam]," insists an official
close to the vice president. "He follows the
president's lead and had no desire to get out ahead on
this." Now he doesn't have to.
ut the question of how to strike Saddam remains
undecided. Though the administration continues to
debate several options, ranging from a brief air
campaign along the lines of President Clinton's 1998
fusillade against Baghdad to an Afghanistan-scale
effort, a split-thedifference alternative has emerged.
Some officials dub it the "21-day plan." As its name
suggests, the plan calls for an intensive air
campaign, possibly supplemented by the use of special
forces on the ground, lasting several weeks and aimed
primarily at eliminating weapons of mass destruction.
The idea, originally presented to the Clinton
administration during the run-up to its 1998 strike
against Iraq, has been gaining traction in recent
days. First, the administration would publicly demand
that Iraq permit UN weapons inspectors to return--a
demand the president made last week. Then, assuming
Saddam refuses to cooperate, the United States likely
would launch a bombing campaign against Iraqi
targets--although that phase, say Defense Department
officials, remains months away and likely wouldn't
commence before operations wind down in Afghanistan,
and possibly Somalia and elsewhere.
Yet these same Pentagon officials contend that efforts
to rid Iraq of Saddam's weapons, rather than Saddam's
rule, miss the point. "What's the endgame?" says one.
"We've been through this routine over and over again,
and he'll just rebuild his [weapons], and in a few
years we'll be back to square one." Saddam's weapons
aren't the problem, these officials maintain. Saddam
is.
And, in fact, the rationales for a narrowly tailored
bombing campaign are indistinguishable from the
rationales for no bombing campaign at all. The first
is that the opposition Iraqi National Congress can't
do the job. According to INC officials, despite the
renewed attention to Iraq, Washington hasn't stepped
up its contacts with them in recent weeks. The State
Department's Near East desk remains implacably hostile
to the INC and, on November 8, it informed the INC
that "the Department of State is not prepared to fund
INC activities inside Iraq at this time." Two weeks
ago Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage ordered
the Near East desk to release some INC funds. But that
hasn't stopped Armitage from trashing the INC as
incompetents in interagency meetings. And, according
to State Department officials, Zinni, Haass, Powell,
and Frank Ricciardone, the Clinton administration
liaison to the INC, have been strategizing about how
to minimize any future operations against Iraq.
But the INC isn't nearly so ragtag as its detractors
contend. It already controls a sizeable chunk of Iraqi
territory, boasts thousands of armed fighters, and in
its last major offensive in 1995, bested two
Republican Guard divisions. Compared to the Northern
Alliance, which the State Department also dismissed as
a ragtag band, the Iraqi opposition fields a
formidable army. The Iraqi military, by contrast,
still hasn't fully recovered from its Gulf war defeat,
when it lost roughly half of its forces, and today its
ground units and fixed assets would be far more
susceptible to American airpower than the
comparatively low-tech Taliban. In fact, the
Afghanistan template might well prove more effective
in Iraq than it was in Afghanistan itself.
The second argument for narrow action is Iraqi
"stability," a decade-long Foggy Bottom preoccupation.
Powell's dictum of ten years ago--"It would not
contribute to the stability we want in the Middle East
to have Iraq fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and
Kurd political entities"--remains the State
Department's lodestar. Specifically, officials at
Foggy Bottom argue that only an opposition force
broader than just the Kurds in Iraq's North and the
Shiites in the South can overthrow Saddam without
creating chaos in his wake. If the opposition
alienates Central Iraq's Sunnis by, say, overthrowing
Saddam Hussein, Iraq could be plunged into civil war.
(Sound familiar? If not, substitute the word "Pashtun"
for "Sunni.") But predictions of ethnic turmoil in
Iraq are even more overblown than they are in
Afghanistan. Unlike the Taliban, Saddam has little
support among any ethnic or religious group, Sunnis
included, and the Iraqi opposition is itself a
multiethnic force. In any case, the danger of
internecine strife pales alongside the danger of a
Saddam Hussein armed with biological, chemical, or
even nuclear weapons.
nother echo of Afghanistan holds that a robust
military effort would fracture our international
coalition. The Saudis, for example, believe that
Saddam's ouster would create more problems for them
than it would solve, not the least of which, according
to senior American officials, is that the Saudi
monarchy might find itself sharing a border with a
democracy. The Europeans, too, including British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, have played down the possibility
of targeting Iraq for fear of infuriating Arab
governments. But the obsession with maintaining our
international coalition confuses the means and ends of
American strategy. After all, a coalition so broad
that it deters the United States from prosecuting the
war on terror is hardly a coalition worth having.
Because different countries bring different
sensitivities and demands to the anti-terror
coalition, the broader the coalition becomes, the
narrower America's freedom to maneuver becomes. And
what are we sacrificing that freedom for? Riyadh
denies us the use of their airbases and denies our
requests to turn over information about Saudi links to
terrorism. As for other allies, including the
Europeans, their support would be nice. But it hardly
amounts to a precondition for a war fought to protect
American lives.
Which brings us to the imperative of locating
"conclusive" evidence of Iraqi involvement in
September 11, another "prerequisite" for American
action. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman announced on
November 9 that, in the months preceding the attacks
on New York and Washington, September 11 ringmaster
Mohammed Atta met twice in Prague with senior Iraqi
intelligence agent Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani.
That's not conclusive evidence, but what could
possibly be the benign explanation for such a meeting?
According to Zeman, the two men explicitly discussed
an attack on Radio Free Europe's headquarters in
Prague. And while that still doesn't point to Iraqi
involvement in September 11, President Bush has
declared a war against terrorism, not just against
those responsible for September 11. Besides, in
addition to planning the destruction of Radio Free
Europe, Saddam has hosted a terrorist training camp
for Islamic radicals (replete with the fuselage of a
Boeing 707 on which to train), tried to assassinate a
former president of the United States, and eagerly
seeks to acquire and develop weapons of mass
destruction. This is, after all, a man who, as former
UN weapons inspector Richard Butler recalls, "seemed
to think killing with germs has a lot to recommend
it."
hich is the fundamental problem: As long as Saddam
rules Iraq, there will always be tools for him to kill
with. The minimalists think they can eliminate those
germs (and whatever else Saddam intends to use)
without eliminating the man himself. "The idea would
be to get rid of the Iraqi [WMD arsenal], not the
government," explains a State Department official. But
Baghdad has dispersed and concealed its weapons
facilities--a process that has accelerated in recent
weeks, according to press reports--and senior military
officers say it's doubtful that even an air campaign
supplemented by special forces could find and destroy
them all.
But in the end, the most compelling argument for
ousting Saddam is a moral one. In 1991 Bush pere bet
that "Saddam would flee Iraq or be killed given the
magnitude of his defeat," as he told The New York
Times last week. But Bush bet wrong, and thousands of
Iraqis paid with their lives. Officials who encouraged
Bush's decision--including Powell, Haass, and
Scowcroft--to this day refuse to concede their
mistake. And the elder Bush defends them as well.
"That Colin did not want to use force is a grossly
unfair, insupportable lie," Bush Sr. insisted in his
recent Times interview. (Powell's advice, and Bush's
uncritical reception of it, are a matter of public
record. "We can't make a case for losing lives for
Kuwait," Powell complained in a widely reported remark
prior to the Gulf war.) Which brings us to an unspoken
but powerful argument for maintaining the status quo
in Iraq: Toppling Saddam, particularly with the aid of
the Iraqi opposition, would topple a few legacies in
Washington. And if there's one imperative more
important than keeping Iraq intact, it's keeping
intact the reputations of our statesmen. No matter how
wrong they happen to be.
WHY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WILL GO AFTER IRAQ.
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
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