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THE IRAQ HAWKS by Seymour Hersh, New Yorker
NEW YORKER
December 24, 2001 issue
THE IRAQ HAWKS - Can their war plan work?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?011224fa_FACT
In November of 1993, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National
Congress, an opposition group devoted to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein,
presented the Clinton Administration with a detailed, four-phase war
plan entitled "The End Game," along with an urgent plea for money to
finance it. "The time for the plan is now," Chalabi wrote. "Iraq is on
the verge of spontaneous combustion. It only needs a trigger to set off
a chain of events that will lead to the overthrow of Saddam." It was a
message that Chalabi would repeat for the next eight years.
Chalabi, who is fifty-six, was born into a wealthy Iraqi Shiite banking
family and earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University
of Chicago. He received money and authorization from the Clinton
Administration to put his plan into effect, and by October, 1994,
a small C.I.A. outpost had been set up in an area in northern Iraq
controlled by the Kurds. Chalabi's headquarters were nearby. His plan
called for simultaneous insurrections in Basra, the largest city in
southern Iraq, which is dominated by disaffected Shiites (Saddam and
his followers are Sunnis), and in Mosul and Kirkuk, Kurdish cities in
the north. Massive Iraqi military defections would follow. "We called
it Chalabi's rolling coup," Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent in charge,
recounted.
At the time, Baer has written in "See No Evil," a memoir to be published
next month, "the C.I.A. didn't have a single source in Iraq. . . . Not
only were there no human sources in country, the C.I.A. didn't have any
in the neighboring countries-Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia-who
reported on Iraq. Like the rest of the U.S. government, its intelligence-
gathering apparatus was blind when it came to Iraq."
In March, 1995, Chalabi's insurrection was launched, and failed
dramatically. "There was nothing there," Baer told me. "No one moved
except one Kurdish leader acting on his own-three days too late. Nothing
happened." As far as recruiting agents from inside the Iraqi military,
"Chalabi didn't deliver a single lieutenant, let alone a colonel or a
general." Baer emphasized that he wasn't dismissive of Chalabi himself,
because, as he put it, "Chalabi was trying." Even so, Baer said, "he was
bluffing-he thought it was better to bluff and try to win. But he was
forced to play bridge with no trump cards." Baer went on, "He always
thought it was a psychological war, and that if Clinton would stand up
and say, 'It's time for the guy to go,' people would do it."
Chalabi had written in his war plan that if there was "no movement" and
if Saddam was permitted to export oil, "then the psychology of the people
will turn. Saddam will appear to open [for] them hope for the future. At
that point he will have escaped." A month after the failed insurrection,
the United Nations Security Council allowed Iraq to resume oil sales
under its Oil for Food program, insuring a flow of money to the regime.
By late 1996, the Iraqi Army had all but driven Chalabi's operation out
of northern Iraq. A hundred and thirty Iraqi National Congress members
were executed. Chalabi managed to maintain his hold on the I.N.C.,
despite repeated charges from the coalition's members of mismanagement,
corruption, and self-aggrandizement, and he moved his anti-Saddam base
to London. His plans were largely written off by the State Department
and the C.I.A. America's goal would be to pursue Saddam's removal by
military or political coup, and not by open rebellion. "I don't see an
opposition group that has the viability to overthrow Saddam," Marine
Corps General Anthony Zinni, the commander of the United States Central
Command (CENTCOM), who is now serving as the U.S. special envoy to the
Middle East, later told a Senate committee. "Even if we had Saddam gone,
we could end up with fifteen, twenty, or ninety groups competing for
power."
Chalabi bore his fall from official favor gracefully. Disdainful of the
Clinton Administration, which he felt had abandoned him in northern Iraq,
he took his campaign to the press and to Congress, and the I.N.C. soon
emerged as a rallying point for political conservatives and for many of
the former senior officials who had run the Gulf War for the first
President Bush.
In February of 1998, forty prominent Americans-including Caspar
Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, and Donald Rumsfeld, all former Secretaries
of Defense-signed an open letter to President Clinton warning that
Saddam Hussein still posed an immediate threat, because of his stockpile
of biological and chemical weapons. They urged that the government once
again consider fostering a popular uprising against the Iraqi government.
Echoing Chalabi's 1993 war plan, the letter writers argued that Saddam's
weakness was his lack of popular support: "He rules by terror. The same
brutality which makes it unlikely that any coups or conspiracies can
succeed makes him hated by his own people. . . . Iraq today is ripe for
a broad-based insurrection." Their first two recommendations were that
the I.N.C. be recognized as the provisional government of Iraq and be
reinstalled in northern Iraq. Another recommendation urged the Clinton
Administration to release Iraqi assets frozen at the time of the Gulf
War, which total more than $1.5 billion, to help fund the provisional
government.
The letter, like similar pleas from congressional Republicans, failed
to bring about a change in policy, although eight months later President
Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated ninety-seven
million dollars for training and military equipment for the Iraqi
opposition. Because of continued skepticism within the government, the
I.N.C. has received less than a million dollars of that money, but the
State Department has provided the group with roughly ten million dollars
in routine operating funds.
During the Presidential campaign last year, George W. Bush and Al Gore
both promised support for the opposition to Saddam-Bush said he would
"take him out"- if he continued to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Most arms-control experts believe that Iraq has in fact continued
to develop such weapons, but after the election Condoleezza Rice,
the national-security adviser, made it clear, according to a former
government official, that the new Administration would not make Iraq
a priority. "Her feeling was that Saddam was a small problem-chump
change - that we needed to wall him into a corner so we could get on
with the big issues: Russia, China, NATO expansion, a new relationship
with India and, down the road, with Africa," the former official said.
Before September 11th, according to one of Chalabi's advisers, the
I.N.C.'s war plan revolved around training, encouraging defectors, and
American enforcement of the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. The idea was
to recruit two hundred instructors and put them to work training a force
of five thousand or more dissident Iraqis, reinforced by soldiers of
fortune, some of whom, inevitably, would be retired Americans who had
served in Special Forces units. The United States would also be asked
to institute a no-drive zone, backed up by air strikes, to protect the
insurgents from attack by Iraqi tanks.
A Chalabi adviser explained, "You insert this force into southern Iraq" -
the site of most of Iraq's oil fields-"perhaps at an abandoned airbase
west of Basra, and you sit there and let Saddam come to you. And if he
doesn't come you go home and say we failed. This is not the Bay of Pigs."
On the other hand, the adviser said, "if the insurgent force took Basra -
that's the end. You don't have to go to Baghdad. You tie up his oil and
he'll collapse."
Then came September 11th, and the quick victories in Afghanistan, where
the combination of internal rebellion, intense bombing, and Special
Forces deployment turned the Taliban out of power within weeks. Ahmad
Chalabi has now given the Bush Administration an updated war plan,
which calls not only for bombing but for the deployment of thousands of
American Special Forces troops.
There is a second significant addition to the plan: the participation
of Iran, which fought a protracted war with Iraq during the nineteen-
eighties. The government of President Mohammad Khatami, America's
newfound partner in the war against the Taliban, has agreed to permit
I.N.C. forces and their military equipment to cross the Iranian border
into southern Iraq. An I.N.C. official told me that the Treasury
Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control gave the organization
special approval to open a liaison office in Tehran. (American companies
are forbidden under federal sanctions law to do business with Iran.)
The office opened in April. "We did it with U.S. government money, and
that's what convinced them in Tehran," the I.N.C. official said. "They
took it as a sign from the United States of a common interest-getting
rid of Saddam. The way to get to him is through Iran."
Once inside Iraq, according to Chalabi's scenario, the I.N.C. would
establish a firebase and announce the creation of a provisional Iraqi
government, which the Bush Administration would quickly recognize.
Nearly two-thirds of the Iraqi population are Shiites, and they are
seen as potential allies in a political uprising. The United States
would then begin an intense bombing campaign, as it did in Afghanistan,
and airlift thousands of Special Forces troops into southern Iraq.
At the same time, I.N.C. supporters in the north, in the areas under
Kurdish control, would begin signalling that they were about to attack.
If all went as planned, dissent would quickly break out inside the
Iraqi military, and Saddam Hussein would be confronted with a dilemma:
whether to send his élite forces south to engage the Americans or,
for his own protection, keep all his forces nearby to guard against an
invasion from the north.
Chalabi's new plan also calls for the United States to provide funding
for an I.N.C. mobile assault force of six battalions of armed Toyota
four-by-fours, equipped with machine guns, recoilless cannons, and
antitank missiles. "If you did that, there would be massive defections,"
the I.N.C. official told me. The six battalions, he said, could stop
an Iraqi counterattack by two armored divisions. Two preliminary target
areas have been isolated, both near airbases that, once secured, could
be used to fly in American Special Forces troops. The attack plan was
worked out with the help of a retired four-star Army general, Wayne
Downing, and a former C.I.A. officer, Duane (Dewey) Clarridge, who have
served as unpaid consultants to the I.N.C. (Downing was appointed by
President Bush in October to be the deputy national-security adviser
for combatting terrorism.)
Downing, who ran a Special Forces command during the Gulf War, was
convinced that the I.N.C., with airpower and a small contingent of
well-trained Special Forces, could do the job inside Iraq. He was privy
to one of the most astonishing engagements of the Gulf War: In mid-
February of 1991, a Delta Force troop of sixteen men on night patrol
south of Al-Qaim, near the Syrian border in western Iraq, was overrun
by a large enemy force, and the Iraqis wounded two Americans. The Delta
troops, operating from heavily armed vehicles, counterattacked with
grenade launchers and machine guns (a maneuver known as Final Protective
Fire) and killed or wounded an estimated hundred and eighty Iraqis,
with no further injury to themselves. One American veteran of the
Gulf War told me, "In the west"-where Delta operated-"there was little
opposition, and we had freedom of movement"; that is, the troops were
operating on their own. "Downing loved it."
America's success in routing the Taliban has improved Chalabi's standing
with some elements of Washington's defense community. "They believe
they have found the perfect model, and it works," a defense analyst
said of the updated war plan. "The model is bombing, a modest insertion
of Special Forces, plus an uprising." Similarly, Tim McCarthy, a former
United Nations weapons inspector, acknowledged that "the one thing the
I.N.C. has going for it is that, once someone puts their stake down,
the Iraqis will have to go after them. Saddam will have to send his
Hammurabi after them"-the Iraqi Army's élite armored-tank division.
Once Saddam made his move, McCarthy said, his forces would be exposed
to American air strikes, "and then they are toast."
Many of the people who signed the 1998 open letter to Clinton urging
American support for Iraqi insurgents are now in positions of authority
in the Bush Administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld;
his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; and Douglas Feith, an Under-Secretary of
Defense. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, was also a
signatory. One of the drafters of the letter was Richard Perle, the
longtime conservative foreign-policy adviser in Washington, who has
turned the obscure Defense Policy Board, which he chairs, into a powerful
platform for advancing policies dear to the Republican right. In the past
few weeks, Perle and another I.N.C. supporter, James Woolsey, a former
director of the C.I.A., have inspired a surge of articles and columns
calling for the extension of the Afghan war into Iraq.
The Pentagon officials, buttressed by Perle and Woolsey, are at odds
with the State Department-specifically, with their fellow letter-signer
Richard Armitage, who has now become, in private, an opponent of the
revised Chalabi plan. "I've got to believe that Wolfowitz and Feith are
angry" at Armitage, one friend of all three men told me. "They feel he's
betrayed a fundamental conviction they shared."
"September 11th changed the whole equation," said the former New York
congressman Stephen Solarz, who helped Perle draft the 1998 letter.
"Before then, an argument could be made that deterrence worked." In
recent speeches and articles, Perle has dwelled on the potential threat
from Iraq. Last month, at a meeting in Philadelphia of the Foreign
Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank, Perle said, "The
question in my mind is: Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best? Do
we wait and hope he doesn't do what we know he is capable of, which is
distributing weapons of mass destruction to anonymous terrorists, or do
we take preëmptive action? . . . What is essential here is not to look
at the opposition to Saddam as it is today, without any external support,
without any realistic hope of removing that awful regime, but to look at
what could be created."
One of Armitage's supporters in the internal debate, a former high-level
intelligence official, wondered scornfully if the Perle circle's
enthusiasm for Chalabi's plan grew out of their unease about the first
Bush Administration's decision in early 1991, when they were in power,
not to seek Saddam's demise at the end of the Gulf War. "It's the revenge
of the nerds," he said. Also, he said, "They won in Afghanistan when
everybody said it wouldn't work, and it's got them in a euphoric mood of
cockiness. They went against the established experts on the Middle East
who said it would lead to fundamental insurrections in Saudi Arabia and
elsewhere. Not so, and anyone who now preaches any approach of solving
problems with diplomacy is scoffed at. They're on a roll."
Armitage views the I.N.C.'s eagerness to confront Saddam, the former
official told me, as ill-considered. "We have no idea what could
go wrong in Iraq if the crazies took over that country," the former
official said, referring to religious fundamentalists. "Better the devil
we know than the one we don't." He described Armitage as confident that
he could block the plan, and frustrated by the amount of time he has
been forced to spend on the issue. "Dick says no way. He's going to
win it." Otherwise, he added, "he knows it's going to be a political
disaster."
A senior Administration official depicted Chalabi as "totally charming,"
but said that the Administration had no intention of allowing "a bunch
of half-assed people to send foreigners into combat." Of Chalabi and
his supporters in and out of government, the senior official said, "Who
among them has ever smelled cordite? These are pissants who can't get
the President's ear and have to blame someone else. We're not going to
let them lead others down the garden path." The I.N.C., he added, is not
the only Iraqi opposition group being funded by the Bush Administration,
and not the only group capable of "working through Iran."
Secretary of State Colin Powell, known to be skeptical of the I.N.C.,
has "backed away from the infighting," a senior general explained, and
left it to Armitage, his trusted colleague, "to stall them off four
or five months. There's a lot of ways to squeeze Saddam without using
military force." More focussed sanctions would be one logical step, but
the Bush Administration last month agreed to delay for six months its
insistence on "smart sanctions," which would enable the United Nations
to crack down on "dual use" goods, which could be employed for military
or civilian purposes, while allowing medicine, food, and other essentials
to flow. The Iraqi regime now exports an estimated two million barrels
of oil daily under the Oil for Food program. Major purchasers include
ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other American companies, who routinely buy the
oil through third parties. As many as eight hundred thousand barrels of
that oil a day end up in the U.S. market.
In recent weeks, Chalabi's revised war plan, augmented and modified by a
Pentagon planning group authorized by Paul Wolfowitz, has made its way to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff for evaluation. It has left some military men
cold, and prompted a debate about the lessons learned from Afghanistan
and how they can be applied to Saddam. "There's no question we can take
him down," a former government official told me. "But what do you need to
do it? The J.C.S. is feeling the pressure. These guys are being squeezed
so hard."
Some of the concerns were articulated by Robert Pape, a University of
Chicago political scientist who has written widely on airpower. "The
lesson from Afghanistan is less than meets the eye," Pape told me.
"Airpower is becoming more effective, but the real lesson is that you
need significant ground forces to make the strategy effective. The
Taliban, which controlled fifty thousand troops, were thinly dispersed
and never in total control of the country. We don't have an armed
opposition already in Iraq like the Northern Alliance." A former senior
State Department official depicted the I.N.C. proposal as "highly risky,
because two things they can't control have to happen. There's got to be
an uprising against Saddam, and our allies have to join us in country."
A senior intelligence official similarly debunked the notion that what
worked in Afghanistan would necessarily work in Iraq as equivalent to
"taking the show from upstate New York to Broadway."
The military's response has been cautious and bureaucratic. A former
official told me that the Joint Chiefs ordered their staff to "come up
with a counterproposal," which is now in the planning stages. An Air
Force consultant said that the I.N.C. is not included in the Pentagon's
planning, adding, "Everything is going to happen inside Iraq, and Chalabi
is going to be on the outside." According to a senior Bush Administration
official, two senior American diplomats were recently sent to northern
Iraq to talk to Kurdish opposition leaders and "check out who's got go
and who's got no go."
Generals and admirals have been among the most outspoken critics of
Chalabi's proposals. In his years of planning at CENTCOM, General Zinni
concluded, according to a Clinton Administration official, that a prudent
and successful invasion of Iraq would involve the commitment of two
corps-at least six combat divisions, or approximately a hundred and fifty
thousand soldiers-as well as the ability to fly bombing missions from
nearby airfields. In an essay published last year in the United States
Naval Institute Proceedings, Zinni, who was on the eve of retirement,
wrote about what it would take to "drive a stake" through the heart of
someone like Saddam:
You must have the political will-and that means the will of the
administration, the Congress, and the American people. All must be
united in a desire for action. Instead, however, we try to get results
on the cheap. There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi
Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London
gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with
ninety-seven million dollars' worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq.
And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely.
One of the officials currently involved in the Pentagon's planning
said that he, too, had doubts about the efficacy of an I.N.C. armed
insurrection, even one backed up by American warplanes and Special
Forces. "If you go to war and don't address the root political problem,
why bother?" he asked. "All we're going to get is another tyrant in
five years. If this is the war to end all jihads, it's got to have a
broad-based political agenda behind it."
One of Zinni's close aides told me, "Our question was 'What about the
day after?' How do you deal with the long-term security aspects of Iraq?
For example, do you take the Republican Guard" - the military unit most
loyal to Saddam - "and disarm it? Or is it preferable to turn it from
having a capability to protect Saddam to a capability to protect Iraq?
You've got Kurds in the north, Arab Shia in the south, and the Baath
Party in the middle, with great internal tribal divisions. There's
potential for civil war. Layer on external opposition and you've got
a potential for great instability. I'm a military planner and plan for
the worst case. As bad as this guy is, a stable Iraq is better than
instability."
When I asked James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, about these
concerns, he said, "Iraq has its tribal factions and regional loyalties,
but it also has a very sophisticated and intellectual infrastructure of
highly educated people. There's no reason they couldn't establish a
federalized-or loosely federalized-democracy."
"The issue is not how nice it would be to get rid of Saddam," a former
senior Defense Department official told me. "Everybody in the Middle
East would be delighted to see him go. The problem is feasibility. We
looked at all these plans and always came to the conclusion that the
external opposition did not have the armed ability to deal with Saddam's
police state."
President Bush has not yet decided what to do about Iraq, according to
the senior Administration official. Until he has, he said, the State
Department will continue to give financial support to opposition groups,
including the I.N.C. In a Washington Post interview earlier this fall,
Condoleezza Rice used a football metaphor to indicate that all options
remain open. "We will be calling audibles every time we come to the
line," she told the columnist Jim Hoagland.
There is evidence that Saddam Hussein is rattled by the war talk in
Washington. "The Iraqis are scared to death," one intelligence source
said. The intelligence community, according to a former official, has
also received hints-however hard to credit-that the Iraqis might be
willing to join in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Conciliatory messages
were relayed through diplomatic channels in Canada, and eventually
reached the White House.
Inside the Administration, there is a general consensus on one issue,
officials told me: there will be no further effort to revive the U.N.
inspection regime in Iraq. The inspectors were withdrawn in late
1998, after seven years of contentious and sometimes very successful
inspections, and Iraq has refused since then to accept a new wave of
inspectors. "I've been told that senior U.S. officials have little
faith in the viability of the new inspection regime," one disarmament
expert told me.
There is every indication that the next few months, as the President
struggles to reach a decision, will produce more, perhaps much more,
of the same: continued American patrolling of the no-fly zones in the
south and north of Iraq and occasional bombing of military targets.
A retired flag officer described the approach as deterrence: "We have
to make sure that Saddam knows that if he sticks his head up he'll get
whacked." Error! Unknown switch argument.
Copyright © CondéNet 2001. All rights reserved.
* * *
EPIC Op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune
San Diego Union-Tribune
Thursday, December 13, 2001
Enough damage to the Iraqi people
by RAMZI KYSIA
I'm in the heart of Baghdad. I'm speaking with Bassel Hameed, who
manages the Zahrat al-Kaleej Apartments. Like most of the older
people here, he treats me with kindness and warm hospitality, despite
my American nationality.
"Americans are on top," he tells me. "They are first in technology.
They are first in military. Everything belongs to them. But they
should not think they are the only people in the world. We are also
in the world."
In the endless fight between the United States and Iraq, the Iraqi
people are caught between a dictator and a democracy. As America's
war in Afghanistan winds down, the focus is shifting to Iraq. President
Bush has put Iraq on notice: let weapons inspectors back into the
country, or face the consequences.
The following day, an elated William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly
Standard notorious for several "attack Iraq" letters, was reported to
be confident a war would soon be waged against Iraq. "Now, Mr. Kristol
says, there's no need for letters to the president," The New York Times
reported.
Media speculation that Iraq will be hit next is rampant. It's as if U.S.
pundits such as Kristol are forgetting the devastation that has already
been wrought throughout that country. In 1991, during the six-week
Persian Gulf War, the United States dropped more than 88,000 tons of
explosives on a country two-thirds the size of Texas. This was more
firepower than was used by all sides during World War II. It compelled
Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. It also devastated the country.
The Jordanian Red Crescent Society estimated 113,000 civilians killed
in the 1991 conflict. And that was only the beginning.
After Desert Storm, the international blockade was kept in place
to force the Iraqi government to comply with U.N. Security Council
dictates. It was madness to link the well-being of a civilian population,
suffering in the immediate aftermath of a devastating bombing campaign,
to the vagaries of a brutal dictator. It was, and is, an act of
collective punishment. And it has been spectacularly unproductive at
doing anything other than killing massive numbers of human beings.
To some degree, sanctions are crumbling now. Smuggling is widespread,
yet serves only the wealthiest 10 percent. Iraq's general population
is left impoverished by low wages, hyperinflation and chronic
unemployment. Iraq's once prosperous middle class has all but vanished.
The sanctions have wrecked this economy.
And if smuggling cannot take the place of normal economic activity,
then neither can a handout. The U.N. "Oil-for-Food" program provides
an average of $150 per person per year -- helping to make Iraq, by
design, among the poorest nations in the world.
The central, shattering truth is the death of hundreds of thousands
of innocents, with thousands more dying every month. According to the
United Nations, more children have died in Iraq due to the sanctions
than all U.S. combat deaths during all the wars of the 20th century.
According to U.N. agencies and relief organizations in Iraq --
organizations such as UNICEF and the International Committee of the
Red Cross -- sanctions have been a major factor in the estimated
500,000 deaths among children under the age of 5 between 1991 and
1998. That's 125 World Trade Centers, full of babies and toddlers,
crashing to the ground.
Iraqis have suffered enough. If the United States wages another war
against Iraq, more will suffer, proving Bassel's point that Americans
"think they are the only people in the world." Let's show that we're
better than that.
Kysia serves on the board of directors for the Education for Peace in
Iraq Center (www.saveageneration.org) and is in Iraq as part of a peace
delegation. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
Copyright 2001 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
TAKE ACTION. Write a Letter to the Editor in support of Ramzi's eloquent
appeal for an end to the siege and war against Iraq. Letters should be
sent in c/o Letters Editor, The San Diego Union-Tribune, PO Box 120191,
San Diego, CA, 92112-0191, or fax (619) 293-1440, or
e-mail: letters@uniontrib.com.
--
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