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

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-06 20:52:47
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 20:52:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Theater.Of.War]
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Time
August 12, 2002
Theater Of War
The Administration is engaged in an unsettling war game with itself. Bush
may be eager to go after Saddam, but he's stalled while his own team
quarrels about the best way to do it: should there be more diplomacy or
all-out war?
By Michael Duffy, Washington
How do you take a country to war? If you're Saddam Hussein, you just call
out the Republican Guard, invade your neighbor and let the consequences be
damned, the way you did 12 years ago this month. But if you're the President
of the United States, you have to run the high hurdles. You have to talk to
Congress. You have to listen to your generals. You had better measure the
ability of your economy-especially if it's feeling weak-to go the distance.
Above all, you have to get approval from your people, who might think you
have enough on your plate already.
One man runs an iron dictatorship; the other has to wrestle with a real
democracy. Which is as good an explanation as you'll find to explain why,
even as the noise level on Iraq rose last week, the signals from the Bush
White House quietly flickered from green to yellow. A senior Administration
official informed a key lawmaker that Congress should not expect U.S. action
before the November elections. Another pushed the timetable into 2003. "No
decisions are going to be made on Iraq for the foreseeable future," this
official told Time. "It slips until next year." And intimates of the Bush
team concede that the Republican party's mood on Iraq has been shifting
under Bush's feet.
The President, whose near obsession with extinguishing Saddam remains
strong, was giving nothing away. Yet even he sounded slightly more
circumspect than usual last week. Asked about Iraq in an Oval Office meeting
with Jordan's King Abdullah II, Bush paused for a long time and then said,
"Saddam Hussein is a man who poisons his own people, who threatens his
neighbors, who develops weapons of mass destruction. And I'll assure His
Majesty, like I have in the past, we're looking at all options, the use of
all tools. I'm a patient man. But I haven't changed my opinion since the
last time he was in the Oval Office." Translation: "I've changed my timing
but not my goals." King Abdullah jumped in with his own interpretation: "All
I'd like to say is that what I've found from Day One with the President is
this: he understands the bigger picture."
Those were remarkably diplomatic words from a key foreign ally who recently
called invading Iraq "a terrible idea." And Jordan's worried King is hardly
the only voice of caution. While just about everyone at home and abroad
agrees the world would be better off without Saddam, a lot of folks want to
make sure the hard questions are answered up front about when and how the
U.S. could successfully attack and what will happen when the shooting stops.
That bigger picture has become impossible to ignore. Bush's timetable is
being revised for him by an economy that keeps sputtering, fresh violence in
the other troubled quarter of the Middle East, where Palestinian bombers
claimed five Americans along with Israeli lives, and new questions about his
strategy from Capitol Hill. The pause also came as the Administration's
bitterly divided camps on Iraq-one pragmatic, the other jihadist-squared off
in another round of the battle they have been waging for weeks via the front
pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Internal catfights are not the way this Administration prefers to make
decisions on national security affairs. The Bush team is capable of working
the levers behind the scenes, maneuvering in close secrecy, then springing a
plan on the public. Tight lips, perfect timing and total unity are prized
above all. But none of those usual habits has controlled its handling of
Iraq.
The Administration has instead been engaged in a remarkable and unsettling
war game with itself. In one camp is Secretary of State Colin Powell and his
diplomats at the State Department, who believe a more aggressive containment
of Saddam must be tried before resorting to war. Derided as dewy-eyed
optimists by their rivals, this group believes that worldwide opinion of the
U.S. is so negative these days that Bush cannot attack Saddam without some
clear provocation. Pressing diplomacy to the edge might at least provide
that.
The Powell camp also worries that war with Iraq would destabilize the entire
Islamic crescent from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas and that a
post-Saddam Iraq might devolve into neighbor-rattling chaos. To make sure
the hotheads consider every complication and consequence, Powell has forged
an informal alliance with powerful old pals in uniform at the Pentagon, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are, like him, Vietnam-era generals who believe
that regardless of whether an invasion is a good idea (and most doubt that
it is), any military action must follow the old Powell doctrine:
overwhelming in size and strength.
On the other side stand the Pentagon civilians, guys in ties who came into
office ready to roll. They are convinced containment has not worked and that
America's allies will never come aboard even after new U.N. inspections of
Saddam's secret weapons caches-which Iraq said last week it was prepared to
consider-inevitably fail. Deemed impractical "theologians" by the Powell
camp, this faction is almost unconditionally pro-Israel and regards Saddam,
not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the more urgent regional and global
threat.
The Pentagon civilians also think Saddam can be taken down much more
quickly-and with fewer troops and fewer casualties-than the generals have
led Bush to believe. Because these advocates contend the U.S. faces such
danger from Saddam's swelling arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that it
will have to destroy Saddam sooner or later, they say it's better to get it
over with sooner. This camp is led in public by Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld and his fiercely gung ho deputy Paul Wolfowitz. But most longtime
Bush hands agree that its vital spiritual leader is the backroom Vice
President Dick Cheney, who gives this camp constant access to Bush's ear.
Most of the leaks in recent weeks-all those stories spelling out yet another
"secret" invasion plan-have been intended, depending on which camp was
involved, to slow or speed the march toward war, or humiliate the other camp
in the process. Yet even when a leak is meant to pump up public opposition,
the cumulative effect of the theatrics may be the opposite, conditioning the
nation to assume some kind of war is inevitable.
But the jockeying has had the virtue of airing a host of difficult-to-answer
questions. Over at the Pentagon, the various services each have problems
with a near term strike. The Air Force is not confident its flight wings can
mount several months of globe-spanning combat-especially if it can't count
on staging bases close to Iraq. The Navy fears it will need most of its
carriers to fight Iraq, leaving other oceans unpatrolled. (Rumsfeld shocked
the service by removing planes from carriers and using the ships as bases to
launch special forces into Afghanistan.) The Army is the most wary of all.
Its troops are already stretched across the globe in an assortment of
open-ended commitments and as many as two divisions might need to stay on
for years when the shooting stops to help the country rebuild.
Those kinds of objections explain why the war party is looking for a
silver-bullet strategy-a lucky first strike on Saddam, say, or a
manufactured coup by Iraqi dissidents-that would forestall an old-fashioned
deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks. But almost no one
in uniform thinks such dream schemes will work. One defense official puts it
this way: "There's nobody in the Joint Chiefs who doesn't want Saddam gone
yesterday. But no matter how much you want to do the silver bullet strike,
you need a Plan B. And all the Plan Bs are uninspired, conventional warfare
things. And that means more time, more money, more buildup and less
surprise."
And, added this official: "The longer it takes, the more you rankle the
people in the region and the more you put the security of other states at
risk. This is less about how swiftly we can isolate Baghdad and more about
how we will reap what we sow."
Surprisingly, neither Bush nor Condoleezza Rice, his National Security
Adviser, seems capable of closing down the public war gaming. That may be
because the leaks are the work of low- and mid-level officials who, as one
Bush aide puts it, "feel left out of the action." More likely, the White
House has underestimated the depth of opposition to its single-minded focus
on Iraq. If nothing else, Bush and Rice may feel that the flood of war plans
helps scare Saddam into lying low. "They may think," said an old diplomatic
hand, "that signaling is important."
That may be, but the signals are also scaring people at home and overseas
who don't share Bush's obsession with Baghdad. That partly explains why even
though the President insists he has made no decisions on Iraq, others are
plunging ahead with the debate. Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden held two days
of hearings last week in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in search of
answers about the urgency of the Iraqi threat and what kind of action is
needed. Biden is moderately hawkish on the issue and has signaled to Bush
that he will back him against Saddam if the conditions are right. The
Senator wants to make sure Bush consults with Congress and gets a formal
go-ahead before the jets scramble-just as Bush's father did for Gulf War I.
Democrats hope debate will at a minimum stretch out the timetable for war
and, if Congress does decide to send in the Marines, ensure the public is
with them. But Biden's hearings served a partisan political purpose as well:
they gave all sides a chance to gauge the position of the one Republican in
Washington who can still stop a foreign-policy freight train. Senator
Richard Lugar, the five-term Hoosier, is the pivotal g.o.p. voice in the
Senate on foreign affairs; where he goes, the balance of the Senate usually
follows. Lugar has long championed Saddam's downfall, but his questions last
week suggested he now fears, as Bush's father once did, that toppling Saddam
could lead to even greater instability in the region. "The thing I worry
about at the end of the day," said Lugar, "is not that Saddam would fall,
but ... that there aren't people in Iraq that may be prepared for democracy
as we know it. Suggestions are, in fact, (that) liberal democracy might even
lead to more terrorists being spawned out of the
Doubts from Lugar, even if they are later allayed, signaled that mainstream
Republicans are not yet ready to start singing Over There. "There has been a
change in the ambient temperature in the party," said a longtime Bush
foreign policy aide. "Bush may not sense it strategically, but he senses it
politically."
So, for now, the planning continues. Central Command boss Tommy Franks, who
has met with Bush more than 12 times this year, is expected in Washington
this week for more meetings. A top defense official told Time last week that
none of the many scenarios leaked to the newspapers will resemble the plan
eventually presented to Bush: "People don't want to accept this, but
everything about it is going to be different. It won't be like Afghanistan,
and it won't be like the Persian Gulf."
But Democratic Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, a West Point grad who spent
14 years in active duty, said the "palpable tension" between the two camps
is growing, not fading. "All along, there has been this division within the
Administration between those who see Iraq as something that has to be done
regardless of the costs and those who ask, 'What are the costs?' It's almost
schizophrenic, and Bush is caught in the middle."
But don't count Bush out on this one. He first called for "regime change" in
Iraq in the 2000 campaign. He did not visibly budge from that goal last
week: it's one of those vows that becomes harder to retract every time he
repeats it. Yet with so many stars in motion, Bush has little choice but to
slow down and start organizing the coalition against Saddam, inside his own
Administration first of all.

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