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Washington's axis of
incoherence
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - As the administration of United
States President George W Bush searches increasingly
desperately for a viable "exit strategy" from an Iraqi
quagmire, its policy there is appearing ever more
incoherent.
The latest example - and an
especially spectacular one - took place on Wednesday
when, at the same moment that Bush himself was
personally asking key European and other leaders to
forgive tens of billions of dollars in Iraq's crushing
debt, the Pentagon announced on its website that
companies from the same countries will not be permitted
to bid on US$18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts
there.
Needless to say, the Pentagon's directive
and its timing were unlikely to put the leaders of
Russia, France and Germany - the most important of the
excluded countries - in the mood to forgive a lot of
Iraq's debt. Even the deputy prime minister of Canada,
another blacklisted country, suggested that Ottawa may
have to reconsider its plans to add to the $190 million
it has already contributed to reconstruction.
The New York Times reported that White House
officials were "fuming" over the Pentagon's
announcement. Foremost among them, no doubt, was former
secretary of state James Baker, who was spending his
first day on the job as Bush's special envoy for, of all
things, reducing Iraq's debt. Indeed, Bush was asking
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, French President
Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir Putin, among
others, to welcome Baker when he comes calling.
But Wednesday's embarrassing and potentially
costly snafu is symptomatic of a larger problem faced by
an administration that seems increasingly at sea over
what to do about Iraq and whose constituent parts are
trying desperately to protect their own interests.
This has become especially clear over the past
month in Iraq itself, where the US military has adopted
much more aggressive counter-insurgency tactics in order
to reduce insurgent attacks against its own forces, even
at the expense of the larger struggle waged by the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to win the "hearts
and minds" of Iraqis, including the residents of the
so-called Sunni triangle.
On the one hand, the
CPA's job is to convince Iraqis that US troops are there
to help them to rebuild and make a transition to
democratic Iraq. On the other hand, the military, which
lost a record number of troops to hostile fire last
month, is now embarked on a military campaign in the
region that increasingly apes Israeli tactics.
Razor-wire fences, checkpoints, night-time raids and
roundups, bombing and the demolition of houses and other
buildings have never persuaded Palestinians that Israeli
soldiers are in the West Bank to help them.
The
CPA and the military now have "opposing goals", noted
retired Rear Admiral David Oliver, who just returned
from a high-level CPA job. While General Ricardo
Sanchez's forces are focused on "tactical and immediate"
goals of hunting down suspected guerrillas and
maintaining order, CPA chief L Paul Bremer is trying to
win the confidence of the Iraqi people. "The military's
goal has nothing to do with the [coalition's] success,"
Oliver said.
This incoherence - or rather the
exasperating difficulty of reconciling military tactics
to strategic goals - was best expressed this week by
Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan Sussaman, the commander of a
battalion that has surrounded the town of Abu Hishma
with a razor wire fence. "With a heavy dose of fear and
violence, and a lot of money for projects," he told the
New York Times, "I think we can convince these people
that we are here to help them."
Incoherence of a
third kind is reflected in the continuing bureaucratic
infighting over power within Iraq that pits the
neo-conservative hawks around Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney against the
"realists" and regional specialists in the State
Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
While the neo-cons continue to try to bolster
their favorites on the Iraqi Governing Council,
primarily Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), the "realists" are more inclined to work with
others on the council, notably Ayad Alawi, leader of the
Iraqi National Accord (INA), long a CIA favorite.
During the 1990s, the two groups, both of which
boasted high-ranking secret contacts within the Iraqi
army and intelligence services, competed for influence
in Washington, but, with the empowerment of the
neo-conservatives after September 11 and Bush's decision
to give the Pentagon the lead in the war on terrorism,
the INC became clearly dominant.
The two groups
fundamentally distrust and detest each other. The INC
has always contended that the INA was heavily
infiltrated by Iraq's intelligence services and that, in
any case, many of its operatives were Ba'athists whose
democratic credentials were questionable at best. The
INA, on the other hand, claims that the INC was
essentially a vehicle for Chalabi's personal ambitions
as opposed to a movement that could mobilize significant
sectors of the population.
Their major
differences at the moment are over the CPA's
"Iraqification" plans. Chalabi, who helped persuade the
Pentagon neo-cons to summarily disband the army after
the war, has long called for a thorough
de-Ba'athification of Iraq, particularly in the military
and police. The INA, on the other hand, has long argued
that purges should be kept to a minimum in order to
ensure the cooperation and loyalty of competent
officials and military officers in post-war Iraq.
In the run-up to next June's scheduled transfer
of sovereignty from the CPA to a provisional government,
both parties are now pursuing their separate but largely
contradictory agendas. While the Pentagon leadership
continues to support Chalabi's efforts to launch a
wide-ranging de-Ba'athification by, for example,
blacklisting companies close to Saddam Hussein for new
contracts or sponsoring laws that would enable tribunals
to prosecute even mid-ranking Ba'athist officials,
Alawi's INA is working with the CIA and US military
authorities in Baghdad to recruit former Ba'athist
intelligence officials into a new service that is being
deployed against the insurgents. The INA has also
lobbied hard for accelerating "Iraqification" of the
army and security forces.
All of these
incoherencies reflect the lack of an underlying strategy
behind which the key factional interests back in
Washington could unite, a unity that has long eluded the
Bush administration. And while Bush has clearly been
tilting away from the hawks in favor of the "realists"
over the past two months, incoherence is likely to
persist so long as both forces retain the ability to
undermine each other.
That Baker was the latest
victim of this incoherence on his first day of work is
particularly juicy. Of all Bush's advisers, Baker - a
dyed-in-the-wool realist who, as former president Ronald
Reagan's chief of staff and secretary of state during
the first Gulf War in 1991 showed little patience for
bureaucratic or ideological intrigue, least of all by
neo-conservatives - may be very well-placed to correct
the problem.
(Inter Press Service)
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