Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
The proposals, according to administration officials who have been developing them for several months, have been discussed with Bush in considerable detail. They amount to the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the end of World War II. Starting this week, the president's foreign policy "principals" are expected to shape the final plan in a series of White House meetings, and then formally present them to the president. While many elements remain highly classified and some are still being debated, as Bush's team attempts to allay concerns that the United States seeks to be a colonial power in Iraq, the broad outlines show the complexity of the months ahead and some of the difficulties that would follow even a swift and successful attack. Among the main features are the following: The Pentagon is preparing for at least a year and a half of intense military control of Iraq, with forces that will keep the peace, hunt down Saddam's top leaders and stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and, in the words of one of Bush's senior advisers, "keep the country whole." A civilian administrator - perhaps designated by the United Nations - would run the country's economy, rebuild its schools and political institutions, and administer humanitarian programs. Only key senior officials of Saddam's government would be "removed and called to account," according to a document summarizing plans for war trials. People in the Iraqi hierarchy who help bring down the government would be promised leniency. While publicly stating that Iraqi oil will remain what a senior official calls "the patrimony of the Iraqi people," the administration is debating behind the scenes how to administer conflicting claims to the oil, and how to restart the fields after military action. The fields would be seized quickly to avoid their destruction. The question of Iraq's role in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is still being debated. After lengthy debate, especially between the Pentagon and the State Department, the White House has rejected, for now, the idea of creating a government in advance of any invasion. Administration officials involved in the planning caution that no matter how detailed their plans, many of the key decisions will have to be made on the ground in Iraq. So for now they have focused on legal precedents - including an examination of the legal basis for taking control of the country at all - and a historical study of past successes and failures in nation-building, reaching back to the American administration of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, and the occupations of Japan and Germany. The administration came to power opposed philosophically to the whole idea of using the American military for this purpose. The plans to be presented to Bush will include several contingencies that depend heavily, officials say, on how events unfold in the next few months. "So much rides on the conflict itself, if it becomes a conflict, and on how the conflict starts and how the conflict ends," said one of Bush's top advisers. "There are a number of military options, not all of them the options that everybody seems to have in mind at this point." Much also depends on whether the arriving American troops are welcomed or shot at, and the Central Intelligence Agency has been putting together scenarios that range from a friendly occupation to a hostile one. "Anyone who tells you with certainty how it is going to go doesn't know what he's talking about," said an intelligence official. Yet under all of the possibilities, the American military would remain the central player in running the country for some time. The Pentagon has warned that it will take at least a year to be certain that all of Saddam's weapons stores are destroyed. Notably, the administration's description of its goals includes these two objectives: "preserve Iraq as a unitary state, with its territorial integrity intact," and "prevent unhelpful outside interference, military or nonmilitary," an apparent warning to neighboring states. Administration officials insist that U.S. military forces will not stay in Iraq a day longer than is necessary to stabilize the country. "I don't think we're talking about months," one of Bush's top advisers said of the Iraqi occupation. "But I don't think we're talking a lot of years, either." When administration officials first began publicly discussing the idea of an American military administration for Iraq, the reaction in the Arab world was swift: They wanted no American Caesar in Iraq, no symbol of a colonial governor or commander. "The last thing we need," said a senior official, "is someone walking around with a corncob pipe, telling Iraqis how to form a government." As a result, the steering group on Iraq policy is now discussing a hybrid command with a U.S. military commander in charge of security, preventing revenge attacks and seeking out the weapons of mass destruction, but some kind of civilian administrator of essentially equal influence to get the schools running, the oil fields pumping and the economy restarted. It is not clear whether that administrator will be an American, or if the United Nations would take the lead in that part of the operation. It is widely assumed that in the first chaotic months, the military commander would have the supreme authority. "Remember, you will have decapitated the command and control for the Iraqi military forces," said a senior administration official. "Who is going to make sure that score settling does not break out, that there are not fights between the various ethnic communities? It is going to have to be the U.S. military for some period of time, and if there is a military command, there will certainly be a military commander." But the handover of more and more responsibility from the military administration to an international civilian administration and ultimately to an Iraqi-run government is still murky. "We know one thing," said a diplomat involved in the planning. "Things will have to come together a lot faster than they have in Afghanistan." There is no more sensitive question for the administration than how to deal with Iraq's oil reserves - the second largest in the world, behind Saudi Arabia's - and how to raise money from oil sales for rebuilding without prompting charges that control of oil, not liberation of the Iraqi people, is Bush's true aim. Already administration officials have been carefully coached to talk about Iraqi oil as the property of the Iraqi people, a first effort to defuse the issue. But inside the White House, the major concern is that Saddam has plans to destroy the oil infrastructure in the first days of any war, and to make it appear as if the destruction was the work of U.S. forces. "What happens if he started systematically destroying the fields?" asks a senior official. "It's a big source of concern, and we are trying to take account of it as we plan how to use our military forces." The White House has already concluded that the United Nations' oil-for-food program, under which Iraq is currently permitted to sell a limited amount of oil for humanitarian purposes, will have to be quickly amended so that oil revenues can be used more broadly in the country. But it is still unclear how the administration plans to finesse the question of Iraq's role in OPEC and who would represent occupied Iraq at OPEC meetings. The administration is already anticipating that Iraq will be charged by neighboring Arab states of pumping oil beyond OPEC quotas. One official said that Washington "fully expects" that the United States will be suspected of undermining the oil organization, and it is working on strategies, which he would not describe, to allay those fears. Bush has been warning for months that generals who obeyed any orders to use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops would be punished, perhaps as war criminals. Now, as part of the effort to undermine Saddam's government and get evidence that has so far eluded United Nations inspectors, the White House is putting a slightly different spin on that kind of talk. Those who have helped build Saddam's weapons stockpile, officials say, can win some redemption by helping inspectors and U.S. forces. This approach is part of a strategy to encourage a coup and convince military leaders and scientists to give up the country's chemical and biological stockpiles and its nuclear research efforts. The draft White House plan also notes that "government elements closely identified with Saddam's regime, such as the revolutionary courts, or the special security organization, will be eliminated, but much of the rest of the government will be reformed and kept." Already the CIA and others have drawn up detailed lists of Saddam's top command, including his sons and other relatives, his trusted leaders from his hometown of Tikrit, and the heads of his security forces who would be likely to be put on trial. But the administration is not publishing those lists, in hopes of splitting factions away from the regime. Within the State Department, there is discussion of some kind of "truth and reconciliation" process, modeled after the one in South Africa, that could publicly shame, but not necessarily punish, human rights violators. But that process may be run by Iraqis, with U.S. or UN supervision to make sure it does not turn into revenge-taking. Few issues have divided the administration more bitterly than how to create a transitional Iraqi government that could serve as a bridge between the U.S. military occupation and a permanent, democratic Iraqi government. In recent months Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has stepped in, as a senior aide said, "to make sure there was not a public food fight on this one." White House officials insist that those divisions have now been resolved, and that while planning is going forward the United States will not overtly install a provisional government or designate its leaders. Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune |