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Plan resurfaces to target Saddam
Iraqi attack blueprint emerges
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday December 28, 2001
The Guardian
The US joint chiefs of staff are considering an ambitious plan for the
military overthrow of Saddam Hussein, officials said yesterday.
The plan has been drawn up by President Bush's counter-terrorism adviser,
General Wayne Downing, and the rebel Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Variations of the plan have been touted by the INC in Washington for the
past eight years, but the involvement of Gen Downing and the speedy defeat
of the Taliban in Afghanistan has made the prospect of a change in regime
in Baghdad far more feasible.
The plan, originally dubbed the "End Game" by the INC leader, Ahmad
Chalabi, is remarkably similar to the US strategy used in Afghanistan.
US-trained Iraqi rebels, backed by a few thousand American special forces
and considerable air support, would draw the cream of the Iraqi army into
an open battle and bomb it out of existence, thus triggering a mutiny
within the ranks of Saddam's forces.
"Ahmad came up with the plan in 1993, but no one from the Clinton
administration would take it on," said Francis Brook, an INC adviser. He
added that the plan is now being honed in the Pentagon.
"They appear to be refining our plan. We talk regularly to the Pentagon but
it's one-way traffic. They ask us questions but they don't tell us much.
They put 50 colonels on to something like this, working on 50 different
contingencies."
Iran's cooperation with the US in the Afghan war has also raised INC and
Pentagon expectations of similar help against Baghdad. In April, the
Iranian government allowed the INC to open US-funded offices in a plush
northern suburb of Tehran. It marked the first time since the Iranian
revolution in 1979 that Washington allowed government funds to be spent
inside Iran.
The state department, the CIA and some of the Pentagon's uniformed top
brass are highly sceptical of the Downing-INC plan and have pointed to the
failure of two previous unsuccessful insurrections against Saddam, in 1991
and 1995.
Moreover, the critics argue, the London-based INC does not have anything
like the military presence or structure of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance,
while the Iraqi regular army is a force of 500,000 men equipped with heavy
armour - a much more powerful force than the Taliban.
"People are getting pretty excited about the so-called 'Afghan model', but
there is no comparison whatsoever," said a Pentagon consultant.
The US armed forces Central Command, based in Florida, would oversee any
operation in Iraq, and it is known to be reluctant to plunge in. Its former
commander, General Anthony Zinni, derided the plan as the "Bay of Goats", a
reference to the disastrous 1961 attempt to land an anti-Castro force in
the Bay of Pigs. However, Gen Zinni's successor, General Tommy Franks, is
thought to be less fiercely opposed.
Under the Downing-INC plan, a force of about 5,000 INC fighters would cross
into Iraq from Kuwait and seize a deserted airbase near Basra, tempting
Saddam to send his crack Hammurabi tank division to the south, where it
would be a sitting duck for US bombers.
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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