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Post-war poser divides Bush
administration
By Jim Lobe
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
In the aftermath of millions on the streets
worldwide opposing a rush to war by the Bush
administration, United States officials remain at war
among themselves over the shape of a post-war Iraq.
While finishing touches are being put on war plans that
could involve as many as 250,000 US troops,
neoconservatives and realists within the administration
are battling over the future of a post-invasion Iraq.
Neoconservative forces hoping for a
thoroughgoing "de-Ba'athization" of Baghdad and the
creation of a new democratic state along the lines of a
post-World War II West Germany or Japan are increasingly
worried that the administration will settle for the
removal of only the top layer of President Saddam
Hussein's regime.
"It is very difficult for me
to conceive of democratic institutions being established
in Iraq with the Ba'ath power structure mostly intact,"
said Randy Scheunemann, executive director of the
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group created
last November that includes, among other influential
foreign policy players, Defense Policy Board chairman
Richard Perle and former secretary of state George
Shultz. "It's like taking out Hitler and [Gestapo
commander Heinrich] Himmler [in Nazi Germany] and
leaving almost everyone else in place," he added.
The same forces are also angry about the latest
consultations of Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi
opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, who, they say, appears
inclined to exclude the exiled Iraqi National Congress
(INC) from a leading role in a transitional
administration. It was the INC that nominated as many as
3,000 volunteers who are now being trained to act as
military police, interpreters, spotters and guides for
US forces at a military base in Hungary.
INC
leader Ahmed Chalabi went to northern Kurdistan late
last month, reportedly in hopes of preparing a
provisional administration that could assume power in
territory taken by US forces as they made their way to
Baghdad. Khalilzad met with INC and other opposition
leaders in Sulaymaniyah in US and British-protected
northern Iraq in early February and informed them of
plans to install a US military governor in Baghdad for
up to a year to oversee the transition with the help of
an appointed "consultative council" and a judicial
committee that would draft a new constitution.
INC sources briefed by Khalilzad also told the
Washington Post that the US planned to remove only the
top one or two Ba'ath officials in each government
ministry, rather than attempt a much more sweeping purge
of the structure that has ruled Iraq for more than a
quarter century.
"Power is being handed
essentially on a platter to the second echelon of the
Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi officer corps," Kanan Makiya,
an influential INC associate who met with Khalilzad and
recently took part in a meeting with Bush himself at the
White House, told the Washington Post.
Makiya
and other INC sources said that Khalilzad appeared to be
favoring the interests of neighboring states,
particularly Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent,
Kuwait, that have expressed strong concerns about the
implications of a major purge of the existing
governmental and military apparatus on Iraq's stability,
as well as that of the entire region.
"They have
come to the arrogant conclusion, 'Why piss around with
the opposition? Why not do this in a way the Arab
regimes will be much happier with?'" Makiya told
Canada's Globe and Mail after the meeting.
Saudi
Arabia is particularly concerned about the rise of a
Shi'ite-dominated government (INC leader Chalabi is
Shi'ite). This is not only because it could enhance
Iran's influence in the Gulf, but also because Shi'ites
in Saudi Arabia have suffered a history of
discrimination and repression and may well be emboldened
by a sympathetic government in Baghdad.
A
similar concern about the regional implications of
Saddam's removal prompted severe warnings by Khalilzad
to Kurdish opposition groups over the weekend against
any resistance to Turkish intervention in northern
Kurdistan once US troops invade. Ankara, which is
believed to have already about 2,000 troops in the
region, is worried that the Kurds will be tempted by the
US invasion to quickly seize Kirkuk or Mosul, which
could then form the basis of an independent Kurdish
state - which could, in turn, revive the Kurdish
insurgency in Turkey itself.
Washington is
negotiating with the Turks for them to be given a green
light to send their own forces into northern Kurdistan
in exchange for an agreement to let the US use Turkey's
territory as the jumping off point for a northern
invasion by as many as 35,000 US troops, in addition to
as much as US$20 billion in various forms of aid.
Khalilzad's advice to both the INC and the Kurds
appeared to reflect the long-standing views of so-called
"realists" in the State Department and the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) who have been battling the
pro-INC hawks centered in the offices of Vice President
Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld over
Washington's Iraq and Mideast policies since even before
the September 11 attacks that launched Washington's war
on terrorism.
Huge undertakings
The
continuing struggles between administration factions
were illustrated on February 11 in testimony by
Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and his
counterpart at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith. While
Grossman ventured that a US military commander would run
the country for a period of two years, Feith
ostentatiously disassociated himself from his
colleague's prediction, stressing that Washington wanted
to hand over power as soon as possible to a new Iraqi
government but that it faced a "huge undertaking ... we
cannot now even venture a sensible guess as to the
amount of time", he said. Feith is known as a major INC
supporter within the administration.
The failure
of both witnesses to give clearer answers about costs,
strategy and other aspects of a post-invasion Iraq
clearly exasperated many senators, who complained that
they had been getting many of the same questions from US
allies who have been disappointed by the lack of US
follow-up in Afghanistan.
Senator Joseph Biden
remarked to Grossman that, "Every European leader I've
met with the last year is worried you don't have any
plan, because they've heard all this rhetoric about no
nation-building, heard all this rhetoric about we're
warriors, we're going to fight the war, and we're going
to leave. They've heard all this rhetoric. And guess
what? They believe our rhetoric."
"To state the
obvious, Iraq is a heck of a lot more complicated, a
heck of a lot more sophisticated, and they live in a
neighborhood that is very, very, very complex," said
Biden, who also expressed concerns that even groups
allied with the INC had conflicting agendas.
"I
predict to you that Kirkuk is going to make [Kosovo's]
Mitrovica look like a picnic," Biden told the two
witnesses, recounting a conversation he had in northern
Iraq with leaders of the top Kurdish groups there. "They
went out of their way ... to tell us that the Barzani
and Talabani clans were together, and they were united
and resolved. But then they'd say, as we were leaving,
'by the way, we've been ethnically expelled from Kirkuk
for the past 20 years, methodically replacing
Indo-European Kurds with Arab Sunni. We're going home.
The oil is a national asset,' they quickly added, 'but
Kirkuk is ours. You're going to guarantee that for us,
aren't you?'"
Cheney shares
skepticism
In addition to their sensitivity to
the interests of Iraq's neighbors, both the State
Department and the CIA, as well as the uniformed
military with experience in the Gulf, have been openly
skeptical about the INC, whose cause has been championed
by the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and Cheney's
office. They have also ridiculed the neocons' notion
that democratizing Iraq would have a "domino effect" on
the rest of the region.
Cheney himself, however,
has reportedly come to share their skepticism,
particularly of the INC head Chalabi. "When Cheney took
a look at the edifice the US was creating [with the
INC], he apparently decided it couldn't bear the weight
of international scrutiny," an anonymous official told
the Los Angeles Times last week. The official said that
Cheney's distancing from the group has had a "chilling
effect" on its Pentagon supporters who, according to
another official, have not yet given up the fight.
The INC's supporters were deeply disturbed by
another meeting last week between Khalilzad and exiled
former Iraqi foreign minister Adnan Pachachi, who,
according to the New York Times, was being sounded out
for a senior position in a transitional government. As a
well-respected Sunni Muslim - the minority group that
has dominated Baghdad under Saddam - some US officials
have argued that he would make a reassuring figure of
continuity in a new government.
But the INC and
its Pentagon allies protested the meeting vigorously,
pointing out that Pachachi, among other views, had
advocated Kuwait's absorption by Iraq from 1961 until
1999, and questioned Israel's right to exist. "The
outreach to Mr Pachachi ... suggests that the United
States is mainly interested in perpetuating the status
quo in a post-Saddam Iraq, and not in promoting
democracy," one official told the Times.
But the
pro-INC forces in and outside the administration remain
optimistic that ultimately Bush will support their side.
"The fact that one White House envoy is off having a
rather strange meeting in the UAE [United Arab Emirates]
is no indication that this president is going to give up
on freedom for the Iraqi people," said Scheunemann.
Paraphrasing a recent statement by Cheney himself, he
added, "We are not going to risk American lives to
replace one dictator with another."
Jim
Lobe is a political analyst for
Foreign Policy In Focus. He also writes regularly for
Inter Press Service.
(Posted with permission
from Foreign Policy in
Focus)
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