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Clear Strategy in Iraq (G.W.)

Posted by Tony (Guest) - Saturday, May 8 2004, 6:34:40 (CEST)
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Financial Times - May 7, 2004

Bush runs out of options as chaos deepens
By Guy Dinmore

Iraq's deepening crisis has left the Bush administration with few
options, and although the US has entrusted the United Nations with
the task of finding a way towards political stability and elections,
officials and analysts close to the White House admit that hopes of
success are receding fast.

Insiders describe a lack of direction and a prevailing sense of gloom
and desperation in the administration. This gloom has only been
intensified by the exposure of torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi
prisoners.

Analysts point to an absence of clearcut strategy that has seen
repeated personnel changes and policy reversals resulting from
continuous battles between the State Department and the Pentagon. The
White House national security advisers are blamed for not resolving
the interagency battles.

This "dysfunctional" administration as described by Robert Kagan, a
prominent foreign policy thinker, is mirrored by an increasingly
public battle of recriminations among President George W. Bush's
conservative supporters.

While Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy, may be able
to put together a weak caretaker government with limited authority by
the June 30 target date set for the handover of sovereignty, many in
the administration fear violence will derail meaningful,
UN-supervised elections set for January 2005.

"They [the administration] are flying blind," comments one former
official just back from service in Baghdad. "They recognise it is a
mess. There is no consistency in vision and when they do agree, there
is no consistency in implementation.

"We are seeing a devolution of powers in an absence of clear
strategy. Local commanders are making local decisions that have
profound implications for the rest of the country."

Marina Ottaway, analyst with the Carnegie Endowment, says the Bush
administration has run out of options and is already lowering
expectations of what Mr Brahimi can achieve.

Anthony Cordesman, just back from Iraq for the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, says political tension has escalated and
security deteriorated to such an extent that the US no longer has a
viable military solution to fighting insurgents.

The US lacked effective options "other than to turn as much of the
political, aid, and security effort over to moderate Iraqis as soon
as possible, and pray that the United Nations can create some kind of
climate for political legitimacy," he wrote this week.

This sense of confusion was highlighted last week in the Sunni town
of Falluja, where Marines failed to dislodge insurgents and then
turned for help to local militia and former Saddam-era officers. The
Arab world and many Iraqis saw the outcome as a rebel victory.

"The insurgents want political recognition. They want to make Falluja
a Ba'athist mini-state," said Entifadh Qanbar, Iraqi National
Congress spokesman.

Among the Shia majority in Najaf and Karbala, there is a sense of
outrage that ex-Ba'athists are being allowed to return. For the Shia,
who were brutally suppressed under Saddam Hussein, the move reaffirms
suspicions that the US intends to repeat history and install a Sunni
strongman.

And the US failure to disband the many militias and private tribal
armies, or integrate them into a national army, reflects how Iraq is
splintering in the absence of a strong central government.

How it will end few care to predict. But there is increasing talk -
some close to the administration call it "plan B" although it does
not exist as such - of engineering Iraq's division into three
loosely-linked mini-states, perhaps a confederation.

At best it will be a controlled fragmentation, as advocated by former
US ambassador Peter Galbraith, into a system resembling the former
Yugoslav model of republics. The danger is a bloody Balkan-style
break-up as Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia fight for disputed territory
and resources.

Mr Galbraith, who has long been associated with the Kurdish cause and
also served in the Balkans, believes Iraq "is not salvageable as a
unitary state". Writing in the New York Review of Books, he also says
a break-up is not a realistic possibility "for the present" because
of hostility from neighbours wary of similar demands for self-rule by
their own Kurdish and Shia communities. Attempts to define the
specifics of a federal Iraq were abandoned during the writing of the
interim constitution.

For many conservatives in Washington - especially the ideologues who
envisaged Iraq as a shining example of America's power to bring about
change - talk of lowering expectations or allowing Iraq to fall apart
smacks of "cut and run".

"I find even the administration's strongest supporters, including
fervent advocates of the war a year ago and even some who could be
labelled 'neo-conservatives', now despairing and looking for an
exit," Mr Kagan, a champion of American potency, wrote in the
Washington Post. "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters
can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to
do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now," he continued,
asking why the president tolerated "a dysfunctional policymaking
apparatus".

Some neo-conservatives have called for the resignation of Donald
Rumsfeld, the defence secretary. Others blame the State Department
and Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator. Michael Rubin, a
former Pentagon analyst now with the conservative American Enterprise
Institute, has attacked the "racism and condescension" towards Iraqis
of diplomats of the State Department. "The State Department, Centcom
and CIA argument that only a strongman or benign autocrat can govern
Iraq creates a self-fulfilling prophecy," Mr Rubin wrote in the
National Review Online. Other commentators who backed the war are
starting to blame the Iraqis instead.

Opinion polls are starting to show a small US majority losing faith
in the war, but President Bush still projects an air of steadfast and
faith-based confidence.

Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, said that after the
deaths of more than 700 American soldiers in Iraq there would be "no
cutting and running", nor any lowering of the bar "which has been set
as a stable and democratic Iraq".

This gives heart to the neo-conservatives and others who fear Mr
Bush's advisers and campaign managers might hang up the "Mission
Accomplished" sign - and then head for the door.

"Our coalition is implementing a clear strategy in Iraq," Mr Bush
told the nation in his latest weekly radio address, pledging
stability and democracy. But he also warned that more violence was
likely as the handover of sovereignty approached.

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