[IP] Bush runs out of options
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 08:11:23 -0400
From: "Kobrin, Steve" <KobrinS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Bush runs out of options
To: "'dave@xxxxxxxxxx'" <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Worth reading from today's Financial Times. Seems to go straight to the
heart of the matter.
Steve
Bush runs out of options as chaos deepens
By Guy Dinmore
Published: May 6 2004 21:04 | Last Updated: May 6 2004 21:04
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Iraq's deepening crisis has left the Bush administration with few options,
and although the US has entrusted the United Nations with the task of
finding a way towards political stability and elections, officials and
analysts close to the White House admit that hopes of success are receding
fast.
Insiders describe a lack of direction and a prevailing sense of gloom and
desperation in the administration. This gloom has only been intensified by
the exposure of torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
Analysts point to an absence of clearcut strategy that has seen repeated
personnel changes and policy reversals resulting from continuous battles
between the State Department and the Pentagon. The White House national
security advisers are blamed for not resolving the interagency battles.
This "dysfunctional" administration as described by Robert Kagan, a
prominent foreign policy thinker, is mirrored by an increasingly public
battle of recriminations among President George W. Bush's conservative
supporters.
While Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy, may be able to put
together a weak caretaker government with limited authority by the June 30
target date set for the handover of sovereignty, many in the administration
fear violence will derail meaningful, UN-supervised elections set for
January 2005.
"They [the administration] are flying blind," comments one former official
just back from service in Baghdad. "They recognise it is a mess. There is
no consistency in vision and when they do agree, there is no consistency in
implementation.
"We are seeing a devolution of powers in an absence of clear strategy.
Local commanders are making local decisions that have profound implications
for the rest of the country."
Marina Ottaway, analyst with the Carnegie Endowment, says the Bush
administration has run out of options and is already lowering expectations
of what Mr Brahimi can achieve.
Anthony Cordesman, just back from Iraq for the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, says political tension has escalated and security
deteriorated to such an extent that the US no longer has a viable military
solution to fighting insurgents.
The US lacked effective options "other than to turn as much of the
political, aid, and security effort over to moderate Iraqis as soon as
possible, and pray that the United Nations can create some kind of climate
for political legitimacy," he wrote this week.
This sense of confusion was highlighted last week in the Sunni town of
Falluja, where Marines failed to dislodge insurgents and then turned for
help to local militia and former Saddam-era officers. The Arab world and
many Iraqis saw the outcome as a rebel victory.
"The insurgents want political recognition. They want to make Falluja a
Ba'athist mini-state," said Entifadh Qanbar, Iraqi National Congress spokesman.
Among the Shia majority in Najaf and Karbala, there is a sense of outrage
that ex-Ba'athists are being allowed to return. For the Shia, who were
brutally suppressed under Saddam Hussein, the move reaffirms suspicions
that the US intends to repeat history and install a Sunni strongman.
And the US failure to disband the many militias and private tribal armies,
or integrate them into a national army, reflects how Iraq is splintering in
the absence of a strong central government.
How it will end few care to predict. But there is increasing talk - some
close to the administration call it "plan B" although it does not exist as
such - of engineering Iraq's division into three loosely-linked
mini-states, perhaps a confederation.
At best it will be a controlled fragmentation, as advocated by former US
ambassador Peter Galbraith, into a system resembling the former Yugoslav
model of republics. The danger is a bloody Balkan-style break-up as Kurds,
Sunni Arabs and Shia fight for disputed territory and resources.
Mr Galbraith, who has long been associated with the Kurdish cause and also
served in the Balkans, believes Iraq "is not salvageable as a unitary
state". Writing in the New York Review of Books, he also says a break-up is
not a realistic possibility "for the present" because of hostility from
neighbours wary of similar demands for self-rule by their own Kurdish and
Shia communities. Attempts to define the specifics of a federal Iraq were
abandoned during the writing of the interim constitution.
For many conservatives in Washington - especially the ideologues who
envisaged Iraq as a shining example of America's power to bring about
change - talk of lowering expectations or allowing Iraq to fall apart
smacks of "cut and run".
"I find even the administration's strongest supporters, including fervent
advocates of the war a year ago and even some who could be labelled
'neo-conservatives', now despairing and looking for an exit," Mr Kagan, a
champion of American potency, wrote in the Washington Post. "All but the
most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration
officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month
from now," he continued, asking why the president tolerated "a
dysfunctional policymaking apparatus".
Some neo-conservatives have called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld,
the defence secretary. Others blame the State Department and Paul Bremer,
the US civilian administrator. Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon analyst now
with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has attacked the
"racism and condescension" towards Iraqis of diplomats of the State
Department. "The State Department, Centcom and CIA argument that only a
strongman or benign autocrat can govern Iraq creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy," Mr Rubin wrote in the National Review Online. Other commentators
who backed the war are starting to blame the Iraqis instead.
Opinion polls are starting to show a small US majority losing faith in the
war, but President Bush still projects an air of steadfast and faith-based
confidence.
Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, said that after the deaths of
more than 700 American soldiers in Iraq there would be "no cutting and
running", nor any lowering of the bar "which has been set as a stable and
democratic Iraq".
This gives heart to the neo-conservatives and others who fear Mr Bush's
advisers and campaign managers might hang up the "Mission Accomplished"
sign - and then head for the door.
"Our coalition is implementing a clear strategy in Iraq," Mr Bush told the
nation in his latest weekly radio address, pledging stability and
democracy. But he also warned that more violence was likely as the handover
of sovereignty approached.
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