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ANALYSIS
Meet the new
boss
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
While final touches are being put on war plans that
could involve as many as 250,000 US troops, officials
here are still fighting among themselves over the shape
of a post-war Iraq.
Neo-conservative forces
hoping for a complete removal of the governing Ba'ath
regime from 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 government.
"It is very difficult for me to conceive of
democratic institutions being established in Iraq with
the Ba'athist power structure mostly intact," said Randy
Scheunemann, executive director of the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a group created last November
that includes, among other influential foreign-policy
players, Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard
Perle and former Secretary of State George Shultz.
"It's like taking out Hitler and Himmler 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.
Khalilzad, who met INC and other
opposition leaders in Sulaymaniyah in US- and
British-protected northern Iraq last weekend, informed
them of plans to install a US military governor in
Baghdad for up to a year to oversee the transition with
the aid 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'athist 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 Bush himself at the White House, told the Post.
Makiya and other INC sources said Khalilzad
appeared to be favoring the interests of neighboring
states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which have
expressed strong concerns about the implications of a
major purge of the existing governmental and military
apparatus on the stability of Iraq and 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
newspaper after the meeting.
A similar concern
about the regional implications of Saddam's removal
prompted severe warnings by Khalilzad to Kurdish
opposition groups on the weekend against resisting
Turkish intervention into northern Kurdistan once US
troops invade.
Ankara, which is believed to
already have 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 reportedly has given
the Turks a green light to send their own forces into
northern Kurdistan in exchange for their agreement to
let the US military use their territory as the jumping
off point for a northern invasion of as many as 35,000
troops, as well as up to US$16 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, 2001 attacks that launched
Washington's war on terrorism.
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. They have also
ridiculed the neo-conservatives' notion that
democratizing Iraq would have a "domino effect" on the
rest of the region.
Cheney himself has
reportedly come to share their skepticism, particularly
of the INC's leader, Ahmed Chalabi, who 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.
It was the INC that nominated as
many as 3,000 volunteers now being trained at a military
base in Hungary to act as military police, interpreters,
spotters and guides for invading US forces.
"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 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.
INC 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, 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 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 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."
(Inter Press Service)
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