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The hawks fall out
By
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Faced with the rising
costs and complications of occupying Iraq, the hardline
coalition around US President George W Bush that led the
drive to war with Iraq appears to be suffering serious
internal strains.
On the one hand,
neo-conservatives, who were the most optimistic about
postwar Iraq before the US-led invasion, are insisting
that Washington cannot afford either to pull out or to
surrender the slightest control over the occupation to
the United Nations or anyone else.
To a rising
chorus of calls by Democrats for Washington to invite
the world body to take over at least political control
of the transition to Iraqi rule in exchange for a
commitment of money and peacekeepers, the neo-cons are
urging the administration to send more US troops
instead.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, on the
other hand, is dead-set against deploying yet more
troops to join the 180,000 now in Iraq and Kuwait. And
while he, like the neo-cons, opposes conceding any
substantial political role for the UN or anyone else,
his preferred option is to transfer power directly to
the Iraqis as quickly as possible, even at the risk that
reconstituted security forces would be insufficiently
cleansed of elements of the former regime's Ba'ath
Party.
"It's clear now that Rumsfeld is not
interested in 'remaking Iraq'," said Charles Kupchan, a
foreign-policy analyst at the Washington, DC, office of
the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. "He
wants to get the hell out of there."
The growing
divide between the two groups emerged publicly over the
past month as Secretary of State Colin Powell, backed by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared to persuade Bush and
his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that the
financial costs of the occupation and the strain it was
putting on US military forces were simply too much for
Washington to bear on its own or with the support of the
United Kingdom and the other members of the current
"coalition of the willing".
Key Republican
lawmakers brought back much the same message from the
August recess. They reported that their constituents
were increasingly concerned about how badly things
appeared to be going in Iraq. As a result, Bush gave
Powell the authority to negotiate a new UN Security
Council resolution that would lighten the load on
Washington, even if that meant giving up substantial
control over the occupation. The only caveat was that
the US military retain complete control over security.
Bush's decision marked a signal victory for
Powell, who until then had lost virtually every major
internal administration battle regarding the "war on
terrorism" to an unbeatable coalition of unilateralist
hawks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York
and the Pentagon.
That coalition has comprised
the neo-conservatives in the Pentagon and Vice President
Dick Cheney's office, traditional Republican
machtpolitikers such as Rumsfeld and Cheney, and
the Christian Right, whose views have often been pushed
by Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.
While their common unilateralism still unites
them in opposition to the UN taking any control from the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, the hawks
appear now to have fallen out over whether Washington
should increase US military forces and financial
investment in order to keep the world body out and
commit itself to a serious effort at "nation-building".
The divide burst into the open recently when
neo-cons outside the administration, seconded by
Republican Senator John McCain, launched a concerted
attack, centered in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly
Standard and other sympathetic media, on Rumsfeld's
opposition to increasing US troops in Iraq.
"The
choices are stark," wrote Standard editor William
Kristol (a former top McCain adviser) and his frequent
collaborator, Robert Kagan. "Either the United States
does what it takes to succeed in Iraq, or we lose in
Iraq."
The article, "America's responsibility",
argued that it was illusory to believe that foreign
troops from India, Pakistan or Turkey, which would
presumably be made available under a new UN resolution,
were capable of doing what was required in Iraq. Recent
CPA initiatives to bring former Iraqi intelligence and
police officers back into service risked "catastrophe",
it added.
"If we
lose [in Iraq], we will leave behind us not blue helmets
but radicalism and chaos, a haven for terrorists, and a
perception of 
American
weakness and lack of resolve in the Middle East and
reckless blundering around the world," they warned.
While they did not attack Rumsfeld by name,
another article in the same issue did. Tom Donnelly, a
defense analyst based at the hub of the neo-con network,
the American Enterprise Institute, assailed the defense
secretary's "mulish opposition to increasing the number
of American soldiers in Iraq". He also derided the
notion that "an Iraqi army or police force" would be
able to secure the country's borders or "even control
traffic in Baghdad" without a much larger US force for
protection.
Titled "Secretary of stubbornness",
the article argued that Rumsfeld's position "is a prime
reason the Bush administration has had to go begging to
the United Nations".
But Rumsfeld is sticking to
his guns, asserting that he also has few illusions about
both the usefulness of foreign troops and even the
willingness of other countries to provide them. He
stresses instead that a new UN resolution would at least
provide much more money for reconstruction, while
Washington speeds up the training and deployment of
Iraqi security forces and begins to devolve power from
the CPA to Iraqis themselves. "Our hope is that we can
begin to transfer the political responsibility quite
rapidly," he said.
The open clash between
Rumsfeld and the neo-cons over the US commitment to
"nation-building" has long been simmering below the
surface. Indeed, even as US troops were driving toward
Baghdad last March, neo-conservatives such as Kristol
and Kagan were expressing concern that Rumsfeld and
Cheney were more interested in crushing perceived US
enemies than in trying to "remake" them.
But
Washington's difficulties in stabilizing Iraq have
forced the difference into the open, especially since
many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are seeking
scapegoats for the administration's failure to
anticipate the postwar challenges.
Bush's
request that Congress approve a jaw-dropping US$87
billion to fund US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in
the coming year has spurred the hunt for a scapegoat,
which is currently centered on Rumsfeld and his neo-con
deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
In
such an atmosphere, the divide between the two forces
will be difficult to bridge.
(Inter Press
Service)
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