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] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~