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Iraq: Who
takes the blame?
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has
become distinctly testy, while Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz seems almost to have disappeared from
public view, and Vice President Dick Cheney hasn't been
heard from in weeks.
Outgoing White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer has been reduced to barnyard
epithets when asked about how a reference to forged
documents about alleged Iraqi purchases of African
uranium made it into President George W Bush's State of
the Union address in January, while the headline in the
USA Today on Monday says "CIA director [George Tenet]
nudged toward the plank".
Bush's standing in the
polls is declining rapidly. Indeed, a Washington Post
poll published on the weekend says his overall
job-approval rating, while still a majority, dropped
nine points in the previous 18 days - as did public
support for the Iraq deployment. The same poll found
that 52 percent believe US casualties have reached an
"unacceptable" level.
Meanwhile, yet another US
soldier was killed and six others wounded in a multiple
rocket-propelled-grenade attack on their patrol in
Baghdad on Monday, and two more on Wednesday, bringing
to 34 the total number of US soldiers killed in combat
since Bush declared the war over on May 1 after his
celebrated flight to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham
Lincoln, from where he made the announcement.
Retired army generals are grumbling ever more
loudly that the 148,000 US and 12,000 foreign troops in
Iraq now are not enough to ensure stability, and even
Rumsfeld was forced to admit publicly two days after
predicting that the US occupation of Iraq will cost
almost US$4 billion a month - twice as much as predicted
before the war - that more troops may be required.
The realization that the US did not prepare even
remotely adequately for its occupation of Iraq and now
appears to be drifting toward serious trouble has
definitely dawned in Washington. Even Democratic
presidential candidates smell blood and are baring their
teeth.
"It's important that we not lose sight of
the bigger picture, which is the enormous failure that
is looming in Iraq today," Senator John Edwards of North
Carolina, among the mildest of Democratic aspirants and
a supporter of Bush's war, told the New York Times after
tearing into Bush for the loss of credibility he has
suffered over the uranium report and the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is
clearly a critical moment in the imperial trajectory on
which the Bush administration's hawks, centered
primarily in the Pentagon and Cheney's office, set US
foreign policy after September 11, 2001.
Their
dreams of global supremacy based on the unilateral use
of US military power are clearly foundering in Iraq as
they come up against the very real limits of US manpower
and their contempt for the interests of other nations.
Increasingly, analysts in Washington agree that
the only way the administration can get out its present
situation with its power, treasury and credibility
intact is if it hands over control of Iraq to a
multilateral institution - the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), if not the United Nations - capable
of enlisting sufficient support from the international
community, in the form of peacekeepers, aid and
investment, to stabilize Iraq and launch it on the path
to reconstruction.
"The administration faces a
classic tradeoff between keeping control and getting
outside participation," James Dobbins, a former top US
diplomat who helped run reconstruction and peacekeeping
operations in Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan and elsewhere,
told the Times. "This administration does not want to
lose control, but they'll have to take another look at
that position."
Even Republican lawmakers are
beginning to see the necessity of such an approach. On
Friday, just one day after Rumsfeld admitted that
occupation costs were twice what the Pentagon had
predicted, the Senate approved a non-binding resolution
urging the administration to reach out to NATO and the
UN for assistance.
"I don't want every kid that
is blown up at a checkpoint being an American soldier,"
said Senator Joseph Biden, a co-author of the resolution
and ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
Committee. "This is the world's problem, not just ours.
I want to give the French ... the honor and the
opportunity to do the same thing as our young men do,"
he said.
But such a course of action is anathema
to unilateralist hawks such as Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and
Cheney, who had confidently predicted before the war
that only between 50,000 and 75,000 US troops would be
necessary to police Iraq after the war, and now find
themselves agreeing that at least 150,000 will be
necessary for the foreseeable future.
Rumsfeld
said last week that Washington had approached "70, 80,
90" countries for police or troops to help out, but
lawmakers mocked the seriousness of some of those
requests and warned that very few countries would be
inclined to respond given the Washington's insistence on
overall control.
That point was underlined on
Monday when India, which the Pentagon had been counting
to provide as many as 20,000 peacekeepers for Iraq,
announced that it would not provide any in the absence
of an "explicit UN mandate". The State Department
expressed "regret" over the announcement, although
Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately long
warned that Washington was unlikely to get even aspiring
strategic allies like India behind it without giving up
more control.
The announcement was seen as a
major blow to the Pentagon, which has been telling
Congress that Indian troops would constitute at least
half of the foreign recruits. "This is chickens coming
home to roost," one administration official told Inter
Press Service. "One would hope the hawks would
understand by now that their arrogance and unilateralism
have serious costs, but that's probably too optimistic."
He pointed to reports that NATO, if asked, may
itself not have many troops to spare, given its current
commitments in Afghanistan and the Balkans. France and
Germany have indicated that their participation would
require a UN mandate in any event.
Indeed, there
appears to be a growing consensus among military experts
that the United States will itself have to send more of
its own troops sooner or later. Dobbins, echoing
predictions (mocked by Wolfowitz as "wildly off the
mark") by the former army chief of staff, General Eric
Shinseki, before the war, told the Times that he thinks
the 160,000 troops there now will eventually have to be
doubled.
Most military experts believe that the
deployment of even 100,000 US troops - let alone as many
as 300,000 - will put such a burden on the army that
Congress will face pressure to increase its size, adding
billions of dollars to a defense budget that this year
will exceed $400 billion, roughly equal to the
anticipated federal budget deficit.
Such
assessments help explain a growing sense that, while
Tenet's job may be on the line most immediately, top
Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz,
may soon find themselves facing calls to resign for so
badly misjudging postwar requirements. Indeed, H D S
Greenway, a mainstream columnist in the Boston Globe,
called Saturday for both to be "given the boot" for
their "fatal combination of hubris and incompetence".
"The damage done is incalculable and not just in
material terms," he wrote. "The political damage has
been far worse and will be far more lasting in its
consequences."
(Inter Press
Service)
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