Global Policy Forum

By Jim Lobe *

While U.S. 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 debate 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 neoconservative and unilateralist hawks in and around the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but 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 (CIA), and the military itself. They are aided by former top officials in the George H.W. Bush administration (1989-1993).

New and Old Battles

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 the UN Security Council before launching an invasion, and even over how to invade Iraq.

The hawks, who opposed going to the UN, initially favored an invasion plan that called for U.S. Special Forces, working with local militias in Kurdistan and other "liberated" parts of Iraq, to direct U.S. air power against strategic targets, bringing about the collapse of the Hussein government in much the same way that the Taliban was defeated in Afghanistan. As insurance, the plan called for some 70,000 U.S. 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. Ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni, Powell's Mideast adviser, who served in the late 1990s as the commander of the U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

Although air power and Special Forces will still be given major roles, Washington will deploy only about 1,000 U.S.-trained Iraqis who will mainly act as guides, translators, and military police. Added to these forces, however, will be between 200,000 and 250,000 U.S. troops in Kuwait and possibly Turkey, most of whom will be part of the invasion force. Although the army and marine corps are still arguing for more reinforcements, the general battle plan has been agreed upon.

New Consensus Breaks Down about Post-Invasion Iraq

But this agreement on the battle plan does not mean there is any consensus about the configuration of a post-invasion Iraq--over which both factions are still at odds.

The neoconservatives in Rumsfeld's and Cheney's office see the invasion of Iraq as the first step in a profound transformation of the Arab world. It is this faction that has argued for establishing a U.S. military occupation similar to that which followed World War II in Germany and Japan. Indeed, a seminar put on 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 U.S. carried out a de-Nazification of Germany almost 60 years ago.

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

Finally, the same group has pushed for the United States to take control of Iraqi oil fields and installations after the war, both to protect and rehabilitate them, but also to pay for the costs of 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 (OPEC).

The realpolitikers, on the other hand, think these plans are as dangerous as the hawks' initial ideas about a military campaign. Their rebuttal was laid out in a new study by a 25-member task force released by the influential Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy, named for Bush Senior's secretary of state. Headed by Edward Djerejian and Frank Wisner, two retired foreign service officers who held top diplomatic positions under Bush Senior, the task force rejected virtually every key position pushed by the hawks.

Losing the Peace

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 U.S. 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."

Moreover, 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, European Union, and the UN--in support of the road map leading to a viable and independent Palestinian state by 2005. Failing such steps, "the United States may lose the peace, even if it wins the war," warns the report.

* Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. This analysis originally appeared in the Asia Times.

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