Something to ponder over as we await Bush's speech tonight or in the morning
for some of us.
----------

washingtonpost.com
Debate Over Iraq Focuses On Outcome
Multiple Scenarios Drive Questions About War

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 7, 2002; Page A01


Congress plans this week to debate a joint resolution that would give
President Bush broad powers to disarm Iraq -- including the authority to
invade the country and depose President Saddam Hussein.

The resolution is expected to pass easily, in part because leading Democrats
want to get the issue of war behind them, and in part because there is
widespread agreement on Capitol Hill that Hussein must be dealt with. "We
begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to
the peace and stability of the Middle East," said Sen. Carl M. Levin
(D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

There is also general agreement that if it comes to war, the United States
will win.

But beyond this first level of agreement lie major disputes over important
questions -- about the alternatives to war, the timing and, most of all, the
outcomes. The debate in Congress is likely to distill these disputes.

And although these questions may not be answerable without a crystal ball --
experts have already debated them without reaching consensus in
congressional hearings, op-ed and journal articles, speeches and interviews
-- they frame the risks and the assumptions of the U.S. approach.

Here are eight of the most important questions:

1) Can Hussein be "contained" and "deterred"?

For more than 50 years of the Cold War, the United States faced an enemy
armed with thousands of high-yield bombs mounted on sophisticated missiles
and managed to avoid a direct military confrontation. How? By "containing"
the enemy -- that is, trying to prevent communist expansion -- and
"deterring" attacks with threats of apocalyptic retaliation.

Some experts believe that this strategy, applied aggressively, can work with
Iraq. After all, continued containment and deterrence is the U.S. policy for
dealing with Iran, which is widely believed to be more advanced in nuclear
capability and deeply involved in supporting terrorists. Brent Scowcroft,
the national security adviser to then-President George H.W. Bush, recently
argued that "Saddam is a familiar . . . traditional" case, "unlikely to risk
his investment in weapons of mass destruction, much less his country, by
handing such weapons to terrorists" or by using them for blackmail. "While
Saddam is thoroughly evil, he is above all a power-hungry survivor."

Hussein's behavior has not always squared with this view. In 1993, he tried
to use secret agents to assassinate George H.W. Bush, and Iraqi guns
routinely fire at allied aircraft over the Iraqi "no-fly" zones. But
proponents of continued containment think there is a line that the Iraqi
leader will not cross for fear of the consequences.

This assumption drives the thinking of figures such as Morton H. Halperin of
the Council on Foreign Relations, who advocates a policy of tougher weapons
inspections and a more effective embargo on trade with Iraq --
"containment-plus," as he calls it. This strategy, "if pursued vigorously .
. . will, in fact, succeed in preventing Saddam from using weapons of mass
destruction or supplying them to terrorist groups," Halperin recently
assured Congress.

But many people, President Bush among them, believe deterrence is no longer
enough after the Sept. 11 attacks -- not when weapons might be delivered
secretly to fanatics willing to destroy themselves in an attack. Sen. John
W. Warner (R-Va.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee,
put it this way: "The concept of deterrence that served us well in the 20th
century has changed. . . . Those who would commit suicide in their assaults
on the free world are not rational and are not deterred by rational concepts
of deterrence."

2) Is Hussein in league with al Qaeda?

Somewhere, there is a cold, hard answer to this question, but so far, no one
has publicly proved it one way or the other. Though administration officials
have charged that al Qaeda operatives are living in Iraq, the same is
believed to be true of more than 50 other countries. Daniel Benjamin, former
director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council, recently
argued that secular Iraq and fundamentalist al Qaeda are natural rivals, not
co-conspirators.

But if the answer is yes, it strengthens the case for moving quickly.

"We must remove threats such as those [posed by] Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda
and other terrorist groups," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney
told a Senate hearing. The same gaps in intelligence gathering that make it
hard to know whether Hussein deals with al Qaeda make it dangerous to assume
he doesn't, McInerney argued. "We face an enemy that makes its principal
strategy the targeting of civilians. . . . We should not wait to be attacked
with weapons of mass destruction."

3) Is disarmament possible without "regime change"?

No one in the mainstream believes that Hussein will disarm voluntarily, but
some experts -- including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- entertain
the possibility that he will if it is his last hope of survival.

That said, skepticism is very high that the Iraqi weapons problem can be
solved while Hussein runs the country. Charles Duelfer, a veteran of
previous weapons inspections in Iraq, recently said, "In my opinion, weapons
inspections are not the answer to the real problem, which is the regime."
Finding and destroying offending weapons now would not prevent the regime
from developing new ones after the inspectors have left.

Even many proponents of renewed U.N. weapons inspections see them mainly as
a tool for building international support for war. As retired Gen. Wesley
Clark, a former supreme commander of NATO, put it: "The closer we get to the
use of force, the greater the likelihood that we're going to see movement on
the part of Iraq -- even though it's a very small likelihood. And the more
we build up the inspections idea, the greater the legitimacy of the United
States effort in the eyes of the world."

4) In the event of war, what would Hussein's military do?

There are two scenarios: one ghastly, one hopeful.

In the first, his commanders fire chemical and biological weapons into
Israel, trying to ignite a pan-Arabic war, and lob gas bombs at approaching
U.S. troops. In the other, Iraqi officers refuse to commit such futile war
crimes in the face of certain defeat and turn on the dying regime.

"Most of the army does not want to fight for Saddam," McInerney maintained.
"We are already seeing increasing desertions from the regular army as well
as the Republican Guards." He cited reports from inside Iraq that Hussein
has arrested or executed scores of disaffected officers and won't allow even
some elite Republican Guard units into Iraq's cities, for fear of a coup.
"That's why I think there will not be urban fighting."

But retired Gen. Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of U.S. Central
Command, sees it differently. "The nightmare scenario is that six Iraqi
Republican Guard divisions and six heavy divisions, reinforced with several
thousand antiaircraft artillery pieces, defend the city of Baghdad. The
result would be high casualties on both sides, as well as in the civilian
community . . . [and] the rest of the world watches while we bomb and have
artillery rounds exploded in densely populated Iraqi neighborhoods," Hoar
testified before Congress. "It looks like the last 15 minutes of 'Saving
Private Ryan.' "

5) What would the Iraqi people do?

Again, there are two scenarios (always with the possibility that the truth
is somewhere in between).

One emphasizes the relative sophistication and education of the Iraqi
population, and its hatred for Saddam Hussein. These qualities, according to
the optimists, would make the Iraqis unwilling to defend him, grateful for
the arrival of American liberators and ready to begin building a new,
pro-Western country as soon as the smoke cleared. "We shall be greeted, I
think, in Baghdad and Basra with kites and boom boxes," Arab scholar Fouad
Ajami of Johns Hopkins University has predicted.

The aftermath of the war would not necessarily be chaos, Duelfer has
theorized. "There are national institutions in Iraq that hold the country
together: the regular army; there's departments of agriculture, irrigation;
there's a civil service."

The pessimistic view emphasizes the deep divisions in Iraq. There are Kurds
in the oil-rich north, yearning for an independent state. There are Shiite
Muslims concentrated in the South and seething at the discrepancy between
their large numbers and small influence in Iraq. For all their education and
institutions, Iraqis do not have experience with self-government. Iraq might
trade one despot for another.

In this scenario, the only thing that could prevent a messy breakup of the
former Iraq would be a long American occupation -- a prospect the Bush
administration has been reluctant to discuss.

6) How will the Middle East react to the war and to the subsequent peace?

This may be the most potent of the unanswered questions. Here, there seems
to be agreement that rank-and-file Muslims won't like an American war in
Iraq. Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, has
referred to the "al-Jazeera effect" -- millions of Muslims watching
televised scenes of destruction and death, and blaming the United States.
Halperin is one of many who have theorized that al Qaeda recruiters would be
inundated. "Certainly if we move before there is a Palestinian settlement .
. . what we will stimulate is a large number of people in the Arab world who
will be willing to take up a terrorist attack on the United States and on
Americans around the world."

Some experts predict that the regional reaction would then go from bad to
worse.

According to Geoffrey Kemp, director of Regional Strategic Studies at the
Nixon Center in Yorba Linda, Calif., "Iranians . . . worry about a failed or
messy U.S. operation that would leave the region in chaos. They would then
be on the receiving end for possibly millions of new Iraqi Shi'a refugees."
Mark Parris, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq's northern neighbor, Turkey,
has raised the specter of a war between the Turks and the Kurds over the oil
cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. The fragile reign of Jordan's moderate King
Abdullah II would be shaken by an expected anti-American reaction among that
nation's many Palestinians. Said Kemp: "The Saudis will ride it out, the
Egyptians will ride it out, the Qataris will -- but we're all a little
worried about the king." Against this, there is a school of thought that
says a moderate government in Iraq could lead to modernization and
liberalization throughout the region. "A year after [Hussein falls], Iran
will get rid of the mullahs," McInerney recently predicted. "The jubilation
that you see in Baghdad . . . will change the whole tenor of the world, and
the sum of all your fears will disappear, I assure you."

7) Would a military campaign in Iraq help or hurt the war on terrorism?

Sources as diverse as the conservative Weekly Standard magazine and former
president Bill Clinton scoff at the idea that it would be too much to pursue
al Qaeda and deal with Iraq simultaneously, both saying: "The U.S. can walk
and chew gum at the same time." However, former NATO commander Clark worries
about "a diversion of effort" on the part of U.S. military and intelligence
forces, and Halperin counsels that there is a limit on the number of things
government bureaucracies can handle at once.

But the deeper problem, many believe, is that U.S. action in Iraq could
spoil the spirit of cooperation with many nations -- including many Arab
nations -- that is essential to fighting terror.

To "drive a stake in the heart of al Qaeda," Hoar recently said, it is
essential to have "broad support from our European allies and from our
friends in the Arab world." Like many experts, he believes that a war in
Iraq could dry up that support like fire under a damp skillet.

On the other hand, retired Gen. John Shalikashvili, a former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff -- while insisting on the importance of building more
international support for U.S. policy on Iraq -- has argued that dealing
with Iraq cannot, ultimately, be separated from the war on terror. "It
really falls under the same umbrella," he told a Senate committee. "The war
against terrorism isn't just al Qaeda. . . . It is also denying terrorists
the means of getting to weapons of mass destruction."

8) In the end, will the United States be more secure?

One's answer to this question is a sort of scorecard for one's answers to
the previous seven. If Hussein is indeed impossible to deter and willing to
engage in terror, if a new regime is the only way to eliminate the threat he
poses, and if that can be done with a minimum of chaos and relatively few
bad consequences -- then the case for war might seem strong. Different
answers to these questions can change the equation dramatically.

In the coming debate, Americans will watch scores of elected leaders wrestle
with some or all of these disputes, but if the resolution passes, as
expected, they will ultimately come to a final calculus on a single desk. As
Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said last week: "You don't have
all the answers and you never will have all the answers. . . . It rests in
the hands of the president of the United States."

Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.



© 2002 The Washington Post Company




_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
http://www.hotmail.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~