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In
Saddam's Future, A Harder U.S. Line John
Lancaster, Washington Post Staff Writer At the governor's mansion in Austin last year, a top foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush casually suggested to the Republican presidential candidate that "we ought to have been rid of Saddam Hussein a long time ago." The adviser instantly regretted his words. "A light went off in my head that maybe this would be taken amiss," recalled the adviser, who feared that Bush would interpret the comment as criticism of his father, President George Bush, for halting the 1991 Persian Gulf War with the Baghdad regime still intact. The adviser need not have worried. While avoiding specific commitments, Bush has vowed publicly that he would adopt a more aggressive posture than President Clinton has taken toward Iraq. Several of his top foreign policy advisers have publicly advocated a plan by Iraqi opposition groups to overthrow the regime with a U.S.-backed offensive from enclaves carved out of southern and northern Iraq. Their views suggest that the opposition plan--which has been embraced by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress but derided by critics as a recipe for an Iraqi version of the Bay of Pigs fiasco--almost certainly would win renewed attention in the early months of a Bush presidency. "We eventually have to undermine [the Iraqi leader's] position within his own country . . . and that means slowly taking away pieces of his territory," Robert Zoellick, an undersecretary of state in the Bush administration who is advising the Texas governor's campaign, said at May 19 forum sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "We have started to do that in the north. I believe we could do that in the south. I believe that in part this involves [American] air power. It might involve more." Despite its stated policy of "containment plus regime change" in Baghdad, the Clinton administration's support for the Iraqi opposition has been modest. In 1998, Clinton reluctantly signed legislation authorizing the Pentagon to give the Iraqi National Congress (INC)--an umbrella organization for opposition groups--$ 97 million in goods and services. Thus far, however, the administration has made good on only about $ 20,000 of that sum, the cost of a two-week course for three Iraqis on civil-military relations. The opposition also has received $ 64,000 in direct economic aid, mostly to rent, staff and equip a London office. But administration officials have ruled out arms deliveries as premature. There are now signs that Vice President Gore is trying to distance himself from the administration's Iraq policy. He has agreed to meet with INC representatives in Washington on June 26 and recently told an audience of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, "It is our policy to see Saddam Hussein gone." An adviser to the Gore campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Democratic candidate is eager to communicate that "although there may be hesitations" within the administration about the wisdom of aggressively backing the Iraqi opposition, "he doesn't share these." The adviser emphasized, however, that Gore is under no illusions about the difficulty of dislodging Saddam Hussein and regards the opposition plan as but one of a number of potential avenues for doing so. "It's important to create . . . many elements in the equation," the adviser said. "Some elements may be more viable than others, but there's no way of knowing that until they're tested." The emergence of the Iraqi opposition as an issue in the campaign coincides with mounting fears that Iraq is renewing efforts to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the absence of U.N. arms inspectors, who left the country on the eve of U.S. and British airstrikes in December 1998. At the same time, growing Arab and international concern about the extent of human suffering in Iraq has eroded support in the U.N. Security Council for the far-reaching economic embargo at the heart of the administration's containment policy. "Iraq is unfinished business," said Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "One of the difficulties our policy confronts is that it's very difficult to reconcile our goals. On the one hand, we want to resume inspections of Saddam Hussein's weapons facilities. In order to do that, you have to have a lot of cooperation. But at the same time, we want to overthrow him. It's hard to reconcile those." Administration officials defend their approach as the best among bad options. They say that their support for the opposition is genuine, citing progress in helping the INC to organize and heal internal rivalries, and that they do not rule out eventually providing the group with arms. They note that they have supported U.N. efforts--such as removing the ceiling on Iraqi oil sales--to ease the effect of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis. Gore's national security adviser, Leon Fuerth, told the Washington Institute forum that the continued threat posed by Saddam Hussein is, "to be fair, a legacy bequeathed to us by the last Bush administration, which had a sword at his throat at the end of the Gulf War and elected not to use it." Fuerth was referring to the decision by President Bush and his senior advisers--including Gen. Colin L. Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--to permit Saddam Hussein to withdraw his forces from Kuwait and southern Iraq with half his Republican Guard intact. Baghdad later used those forces--including helicopters that the allied commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, had granted permission to fly--to smash a rebellion by Iraq's Shiite Muslim and Kurdish populations. The Bush administration had encouraged the uprising. At the time, Bush and his advisers said they did not want to be seen by Iraq's Arab neighbors as "piling on" and feared that continuing the war would cause the breakup of Iraq. They also said they expected Hussein's regime to collapse on its own in a matter of months. Several of those aides have since gone public with their misgivings about Bush's decision to end the war when he did. They include Paul Wolfowitz, who served as the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy in the Bush administration and now advises the Texas governor's campaign. Whatever his regrets, Wolfowitz, like others on the campaign team, has defended the elder Bush's overall conduct of the war while faulting the Clinton administration for permitting the Iraqi leader to grow stronger than he was when Bush left office in January 1993. In a Feb. 25, 1998, open letter to Clinton, Wolfowitz joined fellow Bush campaign advisers Richard Armitage, Dov S. Zakheim and Richard Perle--as well as other conservatives--in urging the administration to recognize a provisional government of Iraq headed by the INC. Among other measures, the letter called on Clinton to "help expand liberated areas" in southern and northern Iraq "by assisting the provisional government's offensive against Saddam Hussein's regime logistically and through other means." That, in effect, is the same plan that has long been advocated by Ahmed Chalabi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated banker and founding member of the INC who is the group's most visible spokesman in Washington (Chalabi lives in London but travels here frequently). Asked during a Jan. 26 candidates' forum about Saddam Hussein's staying power, George W. Bush warned that, "If I found in any way, shape or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I'd take 'em out." Bush has not tipped his hand on whether he thinks the INC plan is a good idea, although, said Condoleeza Rice, the former Bush administration official who heads the governor's foreign policy team, "There's a widespread belief that the administration has not been as supportive as it might be to the opposition." Said another Bush foreign policy adviser, "We have every reason to expect the worst of that man. . . . I think we're maybe in the process of losing the war we seemed to have won." Such language has helped create expectations within the Iraqi opposition that a Bush presidency would be considerably more hospitable to its goals than the current one. But an administration official who deals with Iraq policy said that Bush advisers may be getting ahead of themselves by suggesting that the United States should provide arms and air cover for an opposition military campaign. "The preponderance of opinion among military experts seems to be that more U.S. military support would be required than proponents of the idea admit," the official said. "I don't dismiss it out of hand as crazy, but I'm not satisfied that the debate has been resolved."
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