George W. Bush has insisted that this war is about liberation, not occupation, and even buck privates on the battlefield are expected to toe the line. But it’s no surprise the Marine at Umm Qasr was confused. The mixed message coming from the front lines reflects a still-heated internal conflict back home about what to do with postwar Iraq, how central and long-lasting America’s role will be and how the United Nations will fit in. The debate could determine whether President Bush manages to assuage the deep anger dividing him from much of the world–or aggravates it.
Bush vowed on March 17 to “work closely with the international community” after Saddam falls. He also said he would “quickly seek new Security Council resolutions to encourage broad participation in… helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq.” But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who’s actually going to be running Iraq for some time, has a plan that looks somewhat different from what Jacques Chirac and other defenders of multilateralism might like to see. Elements of it are also meeting stiff resistance at the State Department.
Rumsfeld intends to make Iraq the first test of what his aides say is a new concept of nation-building–though that is not a term the Pentagon chief would use. (He considers it “arrogant,” says an aide.) The plan relies on swiftness and efficiency, reflecting Rumsfeld’s deep opposition to long-term peacekeeping, which he believes has created a permanent dependency in places like Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. The opening campaign involves “rolling reconstruction” by teams of engineers, aid officials and Iraqi exiles who are embedded in combat units and move in almost as the bullets stop flying. The point: to get the maximum done in the shortest time possible, while ensuring that American forces still play the central role. Several big contracts, including a $600 million award for roads, bridges, schools and other major reconstruction, are to be handed out this week. But so far they are going only to U.S. firms that have security clearance, officials say. Other contractors will take over Iraqi government ministries and select officials to run them. While U.S. officials may play an oversight role for as long as two years, Rumsfeld doesn’t want to see hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops there for nearly that long. “I’ll probably come back to hate this answer, but I’m talking months,” says a senior Defense official.
Defense planners emphasize that the United Nations will have a significant role, especially exemplary humanitarian agencies like the World Food Program and UNICEF, but it will not run the rebuilding effort. (That’s in part a reaction to the slow going in Afghanistan.) “The main lesson we learned is that you need unity of command,” says one senior administration official involved in the planning. The U.S.-centric scheme could put –Bush at odds once again with his chief ally, Tony Blair. The British prime minister pressed Bush to call for new U.N. resolutions affecting postwar Iraq in his remarks at the Azores summit on March 17. NEWSWEEK has learned that Blair did this as part of a deal to persuade Clare Short, a key minister in his cabinet, not to resign over the war. But French President Chirac last week vowed to veto any attempt in the United Nations to “legitimize the military intervention” and “give the belligerents the powers to administer Iraq.” Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov also suggested that Moscow would veto any attempt “to legitimize the military operations and the postwar [political] setup in Iraq.”
State Department officials, fearing a further global and Arab backlash, are pushing for a major U.N. role like that played by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in Afghanistan. But USAID administrator Andrew Natsios tells NEWSWEEK that “it has not been resolved yet what role the U.N. will play.” And for now the U.N. Security Council has been reduced to dickering over its one remaining source of authority, the U.N. oil-for-food program, which expires June 3. A Pentagon official says the U.S. occupation forces do intend to take over the oil-for-food program, with its network of 15,000 Iraqi functionaries. And they want to keep the program fairly intact because “it is an incredibly efficient distribution process.”
Another test of Rumsfeld’s accelerated approach to nation-building will be the makeup of the new Iraqi government. Here, too, an internal debate has festered over the role of Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime Washington player who helped to persuade Defense hawks like Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, head of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, that Saddam must be ousted. But some State Department officials fear that Chalabi, who’s been out of Iraq for four decades, will not be accepted inside the country.
Defense hawks want to set up an interim authority quickly, giving a dominant or key role to exiles, especially Chalabi’s group, the Iraqi National Congress. The State Department, which is less concerned with Rumsfeldian efficiency than with creating a regime that has international legitimacy, would prefer to wait for a Baghdad conference planned for four to six weeks after the war ends. That would make the advent of “Iraqi democracy” more inclusive, bringing in some 60 Iraqi exiles picked at a recent London conference along with as many as 180 delegates selected internally from Iraq’s 18 provinces. But the Defense hawks “want the Baghdad conference to basically rubber-stamp” a Chalabi-dominated interim government, says a Capitol Hill official privy to the debate.
One risk of Rumsfeld’s in-and-out approach is that it might not achieve the fundamental transformation of Iraq that Bush wants. Here, too, the internal debate persists. A senior Pentagon official insists the occupation forces intend to “rebuild, not just reform” Iraq’s military. But officials involved in the rebuilding process have said they don’t intend to demobilize the Iraqi Army at all; instead, they want to use it as a reconstruction corps. The Pentagon also hopes to use a “de-Baathized” core of professional Iraqi soldiers to supply security and peacekeeping: another way of achieving Rumsfeld’s vision of a limited U.S. “footprint.” In addition, “most of the Iraqi bureaucracy, and most of the Iraqi infrastructure, will be left intact,” says a senior State Department official. Trying to leave so much in place, while dismantling decades of totalitarian oppression, may be the U.S. military’s toughest task yet. Especially if Bush can’t bring his warring factions together back home.
