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British spies in Iraq
to incite revolt British and American agents are on the ground in Iraq fomenting revolt among opposition groups and potential traitors in Saddam Hussein's inner circle as part of a covert campaign to topple him, senior officials disclosed last night. The admission, on the eve of a conference of Iraqi opposition figures in London, is powerful evidence of a renewed determination in Washington and London to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.
Although the officials conceded that the CIA and MI6 operations were unlikely to succeed without direct military action, a senior source in the Bush administration said that the world should not be misled by the lack of overt military activity. "American personnel are supporting the Iraqi opposition and working with dissatisfied elements within Saddam's regime, even though he has killed quite a few of these people. Britain is involved too," the official told The Telegraph. "We could wake up one morning and find regime change in Baghdad has happened completely unexpectedly. It would be hard to do but it's not impossible." British officials sought to play down the significance of the operations, saying they were no different in character from what had been happening in Iraq since 1991. One diplomat said: "We could get lucky and Saddam could be killed or overthrown. But do I think it will happen? No." Military plans to overthrow Saddam are being drawn up by US central command in Florida and should be on President George W Bush's desk this summer. A full-scale invasion could take place as early as the end of the year. Senior aides have said that the outside time limit for removing Saddam is 2004, the end of Mr Bush's first term of office, but action is likely to be taken much earlier. One said that next January or February was the optimum time to strike. The plan gaining most support within the Bush administration involves the use of 250,000 troops invading Iraq from Turkey in the north and Kuwait and Qatar in the south. Such an operation could comprise two US Marine Corps divisions and 15 wings of US fighters and bombers in addition to as many as 25,000 British troops. But the Bush administration official said: "The thing people need to remember is in addition to the possibility of another Desert Storm there are less visible things we can do." He said that there were grave fears about how Saddam would react to a major attack. "Saddam could well respond with a Hitler's bunker type of mentality and hit Israel and Turkey with chemical or biological weapons. "That is one reason why planning for this has to take fundamental account of the prospect of Saddam doing something completely irrational. It's also another reason to see if we can do it in a way other than conventional military operation." Saddam did not use weapons of mass destruction during the 1991 Gulf war because he was explicitly told that if he did so he would be removed from power. "This time it's different as regime change is the only aim. He already has strategic warning so he's not going to just sit there." The danger of large numbers of casualties was a primary factor in the military planning, which was going on "24 hours a day", he said. "If the choice is between doing it too quickly and losing troops and allies and taking the time to do it right then the question answers itself." The official said there was "no disagreement" between the US and Britain over the war on terrorism despite festering disputes over other areas of policy such as steel tariffs, the Middle East and the International Criminal Court. "On weapons of mass destruction, we share the same data therefore we share common assessment of threat. "The debate is only over tactics. A lot of other European countries don't see the same threat because we don't share intelligence with them." He rejected the idea that the Palestinian issue should be dealt with before Saddam was tackled, stating that the Iraqis and some Arab states were trying to aggravate the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel as a deliberate tactic. "That's always their alternative - getting people diverted and saying you can't do anything about Iraq until you've sorted out the Palestinian question. But we could be waiting 30 years. The answer is you have to do both at the same time." Tony Blair has urged Mr Bush to wait for calm in the Middle East before acting against Iraq. Britain has also stressed that European and Arab allies will be needed, although a coalition on the scale of 1991 is not envisaged. The Bush administration has agreed that all diplomatic avenues should be seen to have been explored and is awaiting the outcome of talks with Iraq about the return of United Nations weapons inspectors. But one senior British diplomat conceded that it was extremely unlikely that Saddam could satisfy the Americans. "The bar is somewhere between extremely high and impossibly high," he said. Talks about inspectors ended without agreement last week but Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, said yesterday that his country was ready to resume discussions with the UN. Mr Bush hinted last week that military action against Iraq could be drawing nearer. "I'm involved in the military planning, diplomatic planning, financial planning . . . reviewing all the tools at my disposal," he said. After a summit at Mr Bush's ranch in Texas in April, Mr Blair, in a passage of a speech he had drafted himself, said: "We must be prepared to act where terrorism or weapons of mass destruction threaten us. "If necessary, the action should be military and again, if necessary and justified, it should involve regime change." After
Saddam As we report on pages 14 and 15, the Bush Administration has determined that Saddam Hussein must go. What is now at stake is the "how" and the "when" - and, most critically, what happens thereafter. The Americans are currently toying with three broad models, in ascending scale of human and financial cost, for getting rid of the Ba'athist strongman. The first is based on the campaign of the Afghan mujahideen of the 1980s to eject the Soviets: supply lots of weapons to indigenous resistance forces to kill as many of the enemy as possible, with a minimal Western (covert) presence on the ground. The second is based on the Afghan campaign against the Taliban last year: US special forces operating alongside local fighters with American close air support. The third - as illustrated by the recent leak in the New York Times - is a full-scale conventional military invasion with several hundred thousand men. None of these models is necessarily mutually exclusive: the Americans could try out option two but be ready to adopt option three should things go wrong. Certainly, the Saudis and some Gulf states would be more willing to assist in option two if they knew they had the latter safety net. These regimes are reluctant to stick their heads above the parapet for another botched attempt to topple Saddam, after the fashion of the administrations of the first George Bush and Bill Clinton, only to find that they have still to live in the neighbourhood with the regional bully. Whichever of these plans turns out to be most viable, it is vital that the Iraqi opposition plays an important public role in this campaign. There is a natural prejudice in the militaries of great powers to do the whole thing themselves and not to have to worry about the complicating factor of stitching local (irregular) allies into the plan of battle. But such an approach would be short-sighted. Just as French self-esteem after the nightmare of Nazi occupation and Vichy collaboration was restored by the participation of the Free French in the liberation of their country, so the stability of a post-Saddam Iraq would be enormously enhanced if the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and others, can pull their weight. The more such forces do, the greater their prestige and the less exposed they will be to charges of being Western stooges. Many of the same strictures apply to the equally natural tendency of espionage agencies to cook up a coup d'etat with some high-ranking Iraqi military officer. Quite apart from the comparative unfeasibility of this project - the closer you get to Saddam, the greater his power and fore-knowledge of any plot - it is also undesirable. As Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party noted recently, the political future of Iraq must be determined by transparent, not secret, means. The last thing Iraq needs is another Shah of Iran-type figure, imposed by the CIA and MI6 through covert action. Instead, what is needed is a programme of overt training of INC cadres. The first requirement is for instruction in air-to-ground liaison in directing the US Air Force and the RAF to their targets. The second is for training with light anti-tank weapons: the psychological effects of local forces competing with Saddam's armour, even on half-way equal terms, would be enormous. Nothing would surely be more symbolic of the forthcoming empowerment of the Iraqi people. Bush sets the clock
ticking for war John Keegan, Defence Editor, correctly predicted how quickly
Saddam would buckle in the Gulf war. Here he explains how the campaign to unseat
him will unfold Private conversation with those in a position to know seems to make it certain that the United States will attack Iraq within the next six months, with the purpose of toppling Saddam Hussein from power for good. The Bush administration will not be deterred by European protests or by the fear of alienating regional governments in the Middle East or South Asia. It has decided that Saddam threatens America's vital interests by his known and unrelenting efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and by his undoubted, though unproven, sponsorship of terrorism. The American judgment is that the longer Saddam is left in power, the more dangerous he will become. President Bush Junior is determined to conclude the business his father left unfinished in 1991. The first war on Iraq was not fought to topple Saddam, but to expel his troops from Kuwait, which they had illegally occupied in August 1990. In that respect, it was an old-fashioned war about sovereignty and the legitimacy of government. That being so, President Bush Senior set himself to acquiring as many allies as possible, the more from the Middle East itself the better, in order to invest the campaign with an incontestable aura of legality. His diplomacy was extremely successful, bringing contingents to the zone of operations from such unlikely countries as Syria and Egypt. This time, the United States is less likely to bother with cosmetics. Saddam has carefully given no casus belli and it may be difficult for Washington to frame legally watertight reasons for going to war. True, Iraq has defied the United Nations by expelling its weapons inspectors but it is by no means certain that the Security Council will endorse an invasion. The United States is unlikely to be deterred. As long as it can secure the co-operation of those countries whose territory it needs as bases or whose forces it believes will further the success of the mission, it will attack. The protests of bystanders will fall on deaf ears. Few allies are needed. In 1990-91, America enjoyed the wholehearted co-operation of Saudi Arabia, which had good reason to fear that Saddam might move on from Kuwait to invade its own oil-bearing region across the border. Saudi Arabia was valuable as a base for the United States not only because of its proximity but also because, over the previous 30 years, it had, with American assistance, constructed four "military cities", which provided the US expeditionary force with airfields, military ports and logistic and repair facilities. This time, the co-operation of Saudi Arabia is more doubtful. Short-sightedly, it seems to have decided that Saddam is no longer an immediate threat, while the popularity of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world makes it more anxious not to be seen to be behaving in an anti-Islamic way. America is not in a mood to care. It calculates that the measures it has taken to assure alternative sources of oil supply, particularly from the former Soviet Union, not only make it less dependent on Saudi oil but actually make the Saudis more dependent on the American market. All it needs to prosecute the second Iraq war are proximate bases - and those it believes it can find in Turkey, the smaller Gulf states and the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics. Turkey would be the land base, the Gulf states would provide maritime staging facilities, Central Asia is already providing airfields lying within operational range of Iraq's air space. The incentives to the ex-Soviet territories to participate lie not only in increased oil sales, but in offers of financial assistance and direct development aid. In 1991, the American-led coalition attacked Iraq from its southern, narrow end. Their thrust was aimed at the downstream stretches of the great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the bottom of the great Mesopotamian plain, which falls only six feet in 150 miles. The nature of the chosen terrain was a principal reason for the discontinuance of the operation when total victory was within grasp. At that time of the year, February, the snow melt off the Zagros mountains on the Iraq-Iran border floods lower Iraq, creating vast temporary lakes, covering hundreds of square miles. The coalition forces were stopped from going on to Baghdad in part because of the fear that the plains were about to turn into a bog. Next time, Iraq should be invaded on a broad front across its border with Turkey. The terrain in the north is more broken but not susceptible to floods. Much of it, moreover, is inhabited by Kurds, who are hostile to Saddam's regime, warlike and likely, despite some misgivings, to co-operate with the invasion forces. Mosul and its environs hold much of Iraq's oil, moreover, and has good roads leading towards Baghdad. Iraq is better invaded from the north than the south. The precondition, however, is Turkey's co-operation. Washington is working on the problem. Turkey inclines strongly to the West. Its prosperity depends on Western trade and it has recently suffered an economic downturn, making Western economic assistance attractive. The regime, explicitly secular, is hostile to the Islamic movement. Historically, the Turks look down on Arabs, once their colonial subjects. Iraq was a collection of Turkish provinces until 1918. If America works the diplomatic levers skilfully - and provided Turkey emerges from its current political crisis - Ankara should come on side. Once a great power, Turkey has no objection to regaining local great power status, with American help. The small Gulf states are likely to do as America wants. So are the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics, whose economic welfare is likely to benefit more from Washington than from a Moscow still struggling with its post-collectivist problems. America is therefore likely to get the local allies it needs. Further away, it can count on the support of several countries whose armed forces will be useful, particularly Britain, Australia and perhaps New Zealand, which maintains highly efficient special forces units. It is unlikely that America will look for other military help. Its own armed forces are at a peak of efficiency and, thanks to their intervention in a number of small wars in the last 10 years, have a large proportion of experienced soldiers and junior leaders. Half-hearted European participants will probably not be wanted. How would a second war on Iraq go? The first war was a grossly unequal contest. Despite Saddam's boasts of his readiness to fight "the mother of all battles", his army was heavily outnumbered and technically quite inferior. His air force literally ran away, to shelter in Iran. This time, he will be weaker still. He has been unable to re-supply since 1991, his equipment has deteriorated, his stocks of munitions are depleted, his cherished "secret weapons" are still struggling to emerge from his primitive laboratories. The population of Iraq is only 22 million, less than one tenth that of the United States, and his country's principal export, after oil - which he can export only with foreign permission - is dates. Iraq is recognised to be one of the more advanced Arab states. There is a high degree of literacy, the regime is nominally secular, women enjoy a degree of equality unknown in, say, Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, it remains a poor, backward and completely unindustrialised country. It depends for its military strength on arms supplies from Russia and China, most of which were cut off years ago. To any Iraqi with a knowledge of the history of the American civil war, the prospect of a war between Iraq and the United States must resemble that of the defiance of Arkansas or Alabama to federal authority. Iraq is bound to lose, quickly, completely and perhaps painfully. The Telegraph correctly predicted the outcome of the last war. The mistake it made - I was a party to it - was to expect that a defeat so complete as transpired would not end in Saddam's overthrow by coup. It may have been President Bush Senior's mistake also. His son is unlikely to make that mistake again. If the Iraqis will not dispatch their leader, the invading forces will do the work for them. Saddam, his awful family and his venal supporters are living on borrowed time. They have less than a year to enjoy their depredation of their homeland. Saddam lives on
borrowed time Amnerin Zaman, our Instanbul correspondent, has just returned
from northern Iraq. She found the opposition divided and lacking
credibilty As scores of exiled military officers gathered in London yesterday to plot the downfall of Saddam Hussein, other key Iraqi factions ridiculed their efforts. It was a further display of the disunity that traditionally bedevils Iraq's unwieldy array of opposition figures. "We do not take any of this seriously, it is a big joke," said Hoshyar Zebari, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the main factions in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. The so-called Free Officers, mainly mid- to high-ranking military who defected from Saddam's army over the past decade, will convene for the next three days. They will be led by Brig Gen Tawfiq Al-Yasiri, who rebelled against Saddam in the Babylon region south of Baghdad after the Gulf war. The ethnic Arab general had been wounded and was flown to Saudia Arabia by the Allies then moved to London. In 1998 he established the Iraqi National Coalition, which groups exiled Iraqi officers and has close links with another prominent coalition group, the Iraqi National Congress, led by the flamboyant businessman Ahmad Chalabi. Another key figure is Gen Saad Ubeidi, who led the Iraqi army's psychological warfare unit against the Muslim Shi'a majority in the south. According to Kurdish leaders, both groups have little if any credibility both among key opposition factions, in Washington or within Iraq itself. "Any Iraqi officer who leaves the Iraqi army is dead, of no significance," said Mr Zebari. The squabbles are mirrored by arguments within the Bush administration over which group to back. Mr Chalabi, a long-time favourite of the CIA in particular, has lost his shine in recent years over allegations that he misused congressional funds appropriated to his group under Washington's Iraq Liberation Act. This week, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said of the London gathering: "This is not a conference that we've supported financially, but we do support the idea of a broad-based military conference. "We hope the conference helps the Iraqi community move closer to a goal of a better future for the Iraqi people after Saddam Hussein. "A State Department officer from embassy London will attend the event," he added. Western diplomats privately agree that the London meeting will yield few results. But Gen Al-Yasiri told the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat that the group would create "a civilian constitutional government" for Iraq. The absence of Lt Gen Nizar Al-Khazraji, a former army chief of staff who is exiled in Denmark, has weakened the Free Officers' credentials. A more credible alliance is the one formed recently between Mr Barzani's KDP, his arch-rival, Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shi'a group linked to Tehran. They were joined by the Iraqi National Accord Movement, led by Iyad al-Allawi, an Iraqi Arab who has worked closely with the CIA. Representatives from the "Group of Four" travelled to Washington last month to meet CIA and State Department officials. They presented a list of demands in exchange for their support for any "regime-changing" operation against Saddam. That support is seen as crucial chiefly because the Iraqi Kurds, with some 50,000 men under arms, are the only organised armed opposition movement within Iraq. They have controlled an area the size of Switzerland since the Gulf war. The Kurdish safe haven that is protected by British and US warplanes based in southern Turkey has served as an escape route for defecting Iraqi intelligence, military and other prominent officials. Kurdish officials continue to keep contact with Iraqi army officers. SCIRI, for its part, has played a key role in organising Shia rebels in the southern marshlands, which are also protected by coalition planes. There are several key obstacles, however, that continue to complicate relations between the Iraqi Kurds and the Bush adminstration. One is that the Kurds insist on guarantees that they be allowed to form a loose federation with any future government in Baghdad and that Iraq's main oil-producing province, Kirkuk, be their regional capital. Turkey, a key Nato ally which played a pivotal role during the Gulf war, is expected again to figure prominently in any operation against the Baghdad regime. Turkey has, however, threatened to intervene militarily should the Kurds loosen their ties with Baghdad, fearing that such moves would re-ignite separatism among its own restive Kurds. Another obstacle is the prevailing lack of trust. The KDP leader, Massoud Barzani, in particular, has made no secret of his qualms over US motives and for good reason. President Bush's father encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam at the end of the Gulf war then failed to protect them against Iraqi troops who killed them in their thousands. "What if his son were to behave like his father?" asked Mr Barzani in a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph at his mountain headquarters in northern Iraq. But the distrust cuts both ways. When Mr Barzani invited Iraqi troops to help him capture the key city of Erbil from Mr Talabani's forces in 1996, Saddam's forces seized the opportunity to slaughter hundreds of INC men and forced the CIA to evacuate the Kurdish enclave overnight. Prince Adil Mohamed ibn Faisal, heir to the Iraqi throne, is in jail in Morocco after using false identity papers to flee "persecution" for refusing to support Saddam's opponents. Abderrahim Jamai, his lawyer, told AFP he was arrested on June 26 and was refused bail when he appeared in court in Wednesday. The prince's Hashemite family could prove vital in a post-Saddam Iraq. While Prince Adil, 41, is a contender for a unifying role, there is enthusiasm in Washington for giving the job to Prince Hassan idn Talal of Jordan, brother of the late King Hussein.
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