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As the administration of U.S. 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 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 18.6 billion dollars 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 dollars 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 counterinsurgency
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, nighttime 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 ret. Rear
Adm. David Oliver, who just returned from a high-level CPA job. While Gen.
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 Lt. Col. Nathan Sussaman, the commander of a battalion that 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 9/11 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, 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.
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 postwar Iraq.
In the run-up to the 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. 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 are
united, 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 Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and
secretary of state during the first Gulf War, 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) | 
