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ANALYSIS
A liberated Iraq, free to
choose
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- While United States military strategists are refining
their plans for invading Iraq early next year, the
configuration of a post-invasion Iraq remains a matter
of hot debate within the administration of President
George W Bush.
The dispute breaks along lines
that have become very familiar to those who have
followed the administration's foreign policy since Bush
first took office. On one side are the neo-conservative
and unilateralist hawks in and around the offices of
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who also have key allies strategically placed
in the National Security Council and the State
Department.
On the other side are the more
internationalist realpolitikers led by Secretary of
State Colin Powell and senior career officers in the
foreign service, the Central Intelligence Agency and the
military itself. They are aided by former top officials
in the administration (1989-1993) of past president
George H W Bush.
On Wednesday, the realists
unveiled their vision of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, one
that differs completely with the neo-con plan. The two
groups have tangled repeatedly - from the Kyoto Protocol
and North Korea to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and,
of course, Iraq - over the past two years. They fought
hard over whether to go to the UN Security Council
before launching an invasion, and even over how to
attack Iraq.
The hawks, who opposed the UN
route, initially favored an invasion plan that called
for US Special Forces, working with local militias in
Kurdistan and other parts of Iraq not under Saddam's
control, to direct US air power against strategic
targets. That would, they argued, cause the collapse of
the Saddam government in much the same way that the
Taliban was defeated in Afghanistan. As insurance, the
plan called for some 70,000 US troops to stand by, ready
to intervene if the going got tough.
This
strategy was scorned by the realists, and especially by
the military brass, who found it not only hopelessly
optimistic, but potentially disastrous.
Retired
General Anthony Zinni, Powell's Mideast adviser who
served in the late 1990s as the commander of US Central
Command, which includes the Gulf region, even refers to
it as the "Bay of Goats". Consistent with the so-called
Powell Doctrine, the dissenters called for mustering
hundreds of thousands of US troops and major weapons
systems for a full-scale invasion that would completely
overwhelm defending forces.
By the end of last
summer, a compromise was struck in which the realists
got the better of the bargain, just as they did in
September when Bush went to the United Nations.
While air power and Special Forces will still be
given major roles in an attack, Washington will deploy
only about 1,000 US-trained Iraqis, who will mainly act
as guides, translators and military police. Added to
these forces will be between 200,000 and 250,000 US
troops in Kuwait and possibly Turkey, most of who will
be part of the invasion force. While the Army and Marine
Corps are still arguing for more reinforcements, the
general battle plan has been agreed.
Not so the
configuration of a post-invasion Iraq, over which the
factions remain at war.
The neo-conservatives in
Rumsfeld's and Cheney's office see the invasion of Iraq
as the first step in a profound transformation of the
Arab world. They have argued for establishing a US
military occupation similar to that which followed World
War II in Germany and Japan.
Indeed, a seminar
held just this week by the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), which has increasingly taken on the role of
policy think tank for the Pentagon hawks, was devoted to
how to carry out a "de-Baathification" of Iraq, just as
the US carried out a "de-Nazification" of Germany almost
60 years ago. The Baath Party heads Iraq's government.
The hawks see as their main partner in this
enterprise one particular opposition leader, the head of
the exiled Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, a
long-standing friend of both Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the chairman of the
Defense Policy Board, who is based at the AEI. They have
also favored establishing a provisional government
headed by Chalabi once the invasion gets under way. And
they reject a major role for the United Nations in
administering Iraq.
Finally, the same group has
pushed for the US to take control of Iraqi oil fields
and installations after the war, both to protect and
rehabilitate them, but also to pay for the invasion and
occupation and gain control of an important share of the
world market in order to undermine the Arab-led
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The realpolitikers, on the other hand, think
that these plans are as dangerous as the hawks' initial
ideas about a military campaign. Their rebuttal was laid
out in the new study by a 25-member task force released
in Washington on Wednesday by the influential Council on
Foreign Relations and the James Baker III Institute for
Public Policy, named for Bush Sr's secretary of state.
Headed by Edward Djerejian and Frank Wisner, two
retired foreign service officers who held top diplomatic
positions under Bush Sr, the task force rejected
virtually every key position pushed by the hawks.
Offering what it called "guiding principles" for a
post-conflict Iraq, the study called for the creation of
a "short-term, international and UN-supervised Iraqi
administration ... with an eye toward the earliest
possible reintroduction of full indigenous Iraqi rule"
in full control of its oil sector.
"The
continued public discussion of a US military government
along the lines of post-war Japan or Germany is
unhelpful," the 28-page report said, stressing that "it
will be important to resist the temptation, advanced in
various quarters, to establish a provisional government
in advance of hostilities or to impose a post-conflict
government, especially one dominated by exiled Iraqi
opposition leaders.
"There has been a great deal
of wishful thinking about Iraqi oil, including a
widespread belief that oil revenues will help defray war
costs and the expense of rebuilding the Iraqi state and
economy," the report continued, concluding that those
views are not realistic given the current state of
Iraq's oil sector.
"A heavy American hand will
only convince [Iraqis] and the rest of the world that
the operation was undertaken for imperialist, rather
than disarmament reasons," it said. "It is in America's
interest to discourage such misperceptions."
In
order to stabilize the region after the invasion,
Washington should immediately "re-engage actively and
directly" with the other members of "the Quartet" -
Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - in
support of the roadmap leading to a viable and
independent Palestinian state by 2005, it added. Failing
such steps, "the United States may lose the peace, even
if it wins the war", warned the report.
(Inter
Press Service)
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