[A-List] US imperialism: Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

A liberated Iraq, free to choose
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, December 20 2002

WASHINGTON - While United States military strategists are refining their
plans for invading Iraq early next year, the configuration of a
post-invasion Iraq remains a matter of hot debate within the administration
of President George W Bush.

The dispute breaks along lines that have become very familiar to those who
have followed the administration's foreign policy since Bush first took
office. On one side are the neo-conservative and unilateralist hawks in and
around the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, who also have key allies strategically placed in the
National Security Council and the State Department.

On the other side are the more internationalist realpolitikers led by
Secretary of State Colin Powell and senior career officers in the foreign
service, the Central Intelligence Agency and the military itself. They are
aided by former top officials in the administration (1989-1993) of past
president George H W Bush.

On Wednesday, the realists unveiled their vision of a post-Saddam Hussein
Iraq, one that differs completely with the neo-con plan. The two groups have
tangled repeatedly - from the Kyoto Protocol and North Korea to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, of course, Iraq - over the past two years.
They fought hard over whether to go to the UN Security Council before
launching an invasion, and even over how to attack Iraq.

The hawks, who opposed the UN route, initially favored an invasion plan that
called for US Special Forces, working with local militias in Kurdistan and
other parts of Iraq not under Saddam's control, to direct US air power
against strategic targets. That would, they argued, cause the collapse of
the Saddam government in much the same way that the Taliban was defeated in
Afghanistan. As insurance, the plan called for some 70,000 US troops to
stand by, ready to intervene if the going got tough.

This strategy was scorned by the realists, and especially by the military
brass, who found it not only hopelessly optimistic, but potentially
disastrous.

Retired General Anthony Zinni, Powell's Mideast adviser who served in the
late 1990s as the commander of US Central Command, which includes the Gulf
region, even refers to it as the "Bay of Goats". Consistent with the
so-called Powell Doctrine, the dissenters called for mustering hundreds of
thousands of US troops and major weapons systems for a full-scale invasion
that would completely overwhelm defending forces.

By the end of last summer, a compromise was struck in which the realists got
the better of the bargain, just as they did in September when Bush went to
the United Nations.

While air power and Special Forces will still be given major roles in an
attack, Washington will deploy only about 1,000 US-trained Iraqis, who will
mainly act as guides, translators and military police. Added to these forces
will be between 200,000 and 250,000 US troops in Kuwait and possibly Turkey,
most of who will be part of the invasion force. While the Army and Marine
Corps are still arguing for more reinforcements, the general battle plan has
been agreed.

Not so the configuration of a post-invasion Iraq, over which the factions
remain at war.

The neo-conservatives in Rumsfeld's and Cheney's office see the invasion of
Iraq as the first step in a profound transformation of the Arab world. They
have argued for establishing a US military occupation similar to that which
followed World War II in Germany and Japan.

Indeed, a seminar held just this week by the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), which has increasingly taken on the role of policy think tank for the
Pentagon hawks, was devoted to how to carry out a "de-Baathification" of
Iraq, just as the US carried out a "de-Nazification" of Germany almost 60
years ago. The Baath Party heads Iraq's government.

The hawks see as their main partner in this enterprise one particular
opposition leader, the head of the exiled Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed
Chalabi, a long-standing friend of both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who
is based at the AEI. They have also favored establishing a provisional
government headed by Chalabi once the invasion gets under way. And they
reject a major role for the United Nations in administering Iraq.

Finally, the same group has pushed for the US to take control of Iraqi oil
fields and installations after the war, both to protect and rehabilitate
them, but also to pay for the invasion and occupation and gain control of an
important share of the world market in order to undermine the Arab-led
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The realpolitikers, on the other hand, think that these plans are as
dangerous as the hawks' initial ideas about a military campaign. Their
rebuttal was laid out in the new study by a 25-member task force released in
Washington on Wednesday by the influential Council on Foreign Relations and
the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy, named for Bush Sr's
secretary of state.

Headed by Edward Djerejian and Frank Wisner, two retired foreign service
officers who held top diplomatic positions under Bush Sr, the task force
rejected virtually every key position pushed by the hawks. Offering what it
called "guiding principles" for a post-conflict Iraq, the study called for
the creation of a "short-term, international and UN-supervised Iraqi
administration ... with an eye toward the earliest possible reintroduction
of full indigenous Iraqi rule" in full control of its oil sector.

"The continued public discussion of a US military government along the lines
of post-war Japan or Germany is unhelpful," the 28-page report said,
stressing that "it will be important to resist the temptation, advanced in
various quarters, to establish a provisional government in advance of
hostilities or to impose a post-conflict government, especially one
dominated by exiled Iraqi opposition leaders.

"There has been a great deal of wishful thinking about Iraqi oil, including
a widespread belief that oil revenues will help defray war costs and the
expense of rebuilding the Iraqi state and economy," the report continued,
concluding that those views are not realistic given the current state of
Iraq's oil sector.

"A heavy American hand will only convince [Iraqis] and the rest of the world
that the operation was undertaken for imperialist, rather than disarmament
reasons," it said. "It is in America's interest to discourage such
misperceptions."

In order to stabilize the region after the invasion, Washington should
immediately "re-engage actively and directly" with the other members of "the
Quartet" - Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - in support of
the roadmap leading to a viable and independent Palestinian state by 2005,
it added. Failing such steps, "the United States may lose the peace, even if
it wins the war", warned the report.