[iwar] [fc:Rumors.Of.War]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-06 20:51:01
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 20:51:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Rumors.Of.War]
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Newsweek
August 12, 2002
Rumors Of War
The way some civilian leaders talk, a showdown with Iraq is all but
inevitable. That has the brass worried. The road to Baghdad begins with a
battle in Washington
By John Barry and Roy Gutman
The "Future Of Iraq Project" is holding its second two-day working session
this week at the State Department. Participants will enthusiastically sketch
out their plans for running Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone. At the first
session, in July, a group of 10 Iraqi exiles and a few Western observers
debated issues of "transitional justice": reforming the courts, ending
police abuses and looking at amnesty for some rights violators. This week's
theme is "public finance," things like eradicating corruption, restoring
Iraq's international credit rating and finding and taking back the billions
allegedly stolen by Saddam and his sons. Everyone involved agrees the talks
are a splendid idea. "We should have done this years ago," says a European
diplomat. 
There's just one problem. Saddam isn't cooperating. Despite the Bush
administration's repeated vows to remove the Iraqi dictator, and despite the
"battle plans" slathered across the pages of The New York Times in recent
weeks, no one in Washington knows how to get him out. Bush keeps demanding
that U.S. military planners give him more options, but they have delivered
nothing but staff college exercises-and "second rate" stuff at that, says a
military source who has seen it. The brass are understandably reluctant to
send insufficient troops into a battlefield as challenging as Iraq. But more
than that, they can't possibly plan an invasion until the political leaders
tell them a few basic things like where the soldiers can be based and which
countries will permit overflights. And those questions are easy next to the
real monster: what happens after Saddam is out? 
There's no clear answer. Even if by some miracle a strong democratic leader
were to emerge, the country's basic institutions are hopelessly
compromised-and no such miracle seems to be in the works. This week the
exiled leaders of six dissident groups will try formulating a political
platform. The most prominent of them, Ahmed Chalabi, has the backing of
congressional conservatives and civilian hawks at the Pentagon, but he has
few friends elsewhere. The CIA refuses to work with him. The State
Department, which was providing support to his Iraqi National Council under
a 1998 mandate, has finally run out of patience with his fast-and-loose
accounting practices. Now the Pentagon is taking his intelligence operation
under its wing, but no one expects him to stay out of mischief.
So far the big battles are in Washington, not Baghdad. Secretary of State
Colin Powell, the only combat veteran among Bush's senior aides, is said to
be determined that if U.S. troops are committed, they go in with
overwhelming force. Vice President Dick Cheney (who had student and parent
deferments during Vietnam) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (a Navy
pilot in the years between Korea and Vietnam) are eager to finish the job
Bush's father started when he was president. And they seem to think they can
do it with far fewer troops than U.S. military leaders would like. By
Rumsfeld's orders, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been shut out of the
planning process-a decision that has only added to the generals'
unhappiness. The recent spills to the press are a measure of how serious it
is. Leaked war plans can get people killed. No one knows that better than
the military.
Someone talked despite the risk. As the Times reported, the first invasion
scenario involved roughly 225,000 troops sweeping into Iraq from the north,
south and west. The whole scheme depended on the cooperation of Iraq's Arab
neighbors, and they don't seem at all interested-especially not Jordan,
whose supposed participation was blazoned all over the front page. Since
then the military's Central Command planners have worked up a total of six
broad concepts ranging from "Desert Storm Lite" (the in-house nickname for
the original idea) to a bare-bones Special Forces operation to spark an
uprising against Saddam. None of the plans looks very convincing, sources
say, when the action reaches Baghdad. The city is a 1,600-square-mile sprawl
with countless hiding places and some 4 million potential human shields. No
one in Washington doubts that the U.S. military is capable of taking Saddam
out. Still, the cost in human lives, both American and Iraqi, could be
horrendous.
Even so, the Bush administration is quietly getting ready for a fight. U.S.
munitions plants have put on extra shifts to rebuild arsenals depleted
during the Afghan war. A few hundred uniformed personnel are working as
advance teams in Jordan and elsewhere, assessing the need for new airstrips,
wider roads and the like. And even before Saddam became a priority target,
the U.S. Department of Energy was working to get America's strategic
petroleum reserve up to its full capacity of 700 million barrels-enough to
meet U.S. energy needs for more than 80 days in a crunch.
The question is whether America can go it alone. Last week Jordan's King
Abdullah, who has publicly denounced the administration's war threats as
"ludicrous" and "a tremendous mistake," visited Bush in Washington. The king
says that even Bush's closest ally in the war on terror, Tony Blair, shares
his concerns. Britain's prime minister is still being as tactful as possible
about his reservations, but he's expressing them more and more forcefully.
The Brits are "asking us, 'How do you propose to keep law and order the day
after?' " says a senior Bush aide. "And when there's no concrete answer, the
question comes back: 'OK, how long are we going to be occupying Iraq?' No
one has any answer to that question."
Last week Baghdad tried to avert a showdown. The Iraqi government offered to
talk about letting U.N. arms inspectors back into the country-on certain
conditions. Saddam loves to play that game. This time the hawks want the
Security Council to say no, even if Saddam drops his conditions. What if the
inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction? International sanctions
would have to be lifted. Saddam would be free to stay in power as if nothing
had ever happened. Intolerable.
With Christopher Dickey in Amman, Tamara Lipper in Washington and Sam
Seibert

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