Return-Path: <sentto-279987-5130-1028692250-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Tue, 06 Aug 2002 20:53:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 4941 invoked by uid 510); 7 Aug 2002 03:49:35 -0000 Received: from n23.grp.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.66.79) by all.net with SMTP; 7 Aug 2002 03:49:35 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-5130-1028692250-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.66.97] by n23.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 07 Aug 2002 03:50:50 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_7_4); 7 Aug 2002 03:50:50 -0000 Received: (qmail 13946 invoked from network); 7 Aug 2002 03:50:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.217) by m14.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 7 Aug 2002 03:50:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (12.232.72.152) by mta2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 7 Aug 2002 03:50:49 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id g773p1w24864 for iwar@onelist.com; Tue, 6 Aug 2002 20:51:01 -0700 Message-Id: <200208070351.g773p1w24864@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 20:51:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [iwar] [fc:Rumors.Of.War] Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=5.0 tests=DIFFERENT_REPLY_TO version=2.20 X-Spam-Level: Newsweek August 12, 2002 Rumors Of War The way some civilian leaders talk, a showdown with Iraq is all but inevitable. That has the brass worried. The road to Baghdad begins with a battle in Washington By John Barry and Roy Gutman The "Future Of Iraq Project" is holding its second two-day working session this week at the State Department. Participants will enthusiastically sketch out their plans for running Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone. At the first session, in July, a group of 10 Iraqi exiles and a few Western observers debated issues of "transitional justice": reforming the courts, ending police abuses and looking at amnesty for some rights violators. This week's theme is "public finance," things like eradicating corruption, restoring Iraq's international credit rating and finding and taking back the billions allegedly stolen by Saddam and his sons. Everyone involved agrees the talks are a splendid idea. "We should have done this years ago," says a European diplomat. There's just one problem. Saddam isn't cooperating. Despite the Bush administration's repeated vows to remove the Iraqi dictator, and despite the "battle plans" slathered across the pages of The New York Times in recent weeks, no one in Washington knows how to get him out. Bush keeps demanding that U.S. military planners give him more options, but they have delivered nothing but staff college exercises-and "second rate" stuff at that, says a military source who has seen it. The brass are understandably reluctant to send insufficient troops into a battlefield as challenging as Iraq. But more than that, they can't possibly plan an invasion until the political leaders tell them a few basic things like where the soldiers can be based and which countries will permit overflights. And those questions are easy next to the real monster: what happens after Saddam is out? There's no clear answer. Even if by some miracle a strong democratic leader were to emerge, the country's basic institutions are hopelessly compromised-and no such miracle seems to be in the works. This week the exiled leaders of six dissident groups will try formulating a political platform. The most prominent of them, Ahmed Chalabi, has the backing of congressional conservatives and civilian hawks at the Pentagon, but he has few friends elsewhere. The CIA refuses to work with him. The State Department, which was providing support to his Iraqi National Council under a 1998 mandate, has finally run out of patience with his fast-and-loose accounting practices. Now the Pentagon is taking his intelligence operation under its wing, but no one expects him to stay out of mischief. So far the big battles are in Washington, not Baghdad. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only combat veteran among Bush's senior aides, is said to be determined that if U.S. troops are committed, they go in with overwhelming force. Vice President Dick Cheney (who had student and parent deferments during Vietnam) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (a Navy pilot in the years between Korea and Vietnam) are eager to finish the job Bush's father started when he was president. And they seem to think they can do it with far fewer troops than U.S. military leaders would like. By Rumsfeld's orders, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been shut out of the planning process-a decision that has only added to the generals' unhappiness. The recent spills to the press are a measure of how serious it is. Leaked war plans can get people killed. No one knows that better than the military. Someone talked despite the risk. As the Times reported, the first invasion scenario involved roughly 225,000 troops sweeping into Iraq from the north, south and west. The whole scheme depended on the cooperation of Iraq's Arab neighbors, and they don't seem at all interested-especially not Jordan, whose supposed participation was blazoned all over the front page. Since then the military's Central Command planners have worked up a total of six broad concepts ranging from "Desert Storm Lite" (the in-house nickname for the original idea) to a bare-bones Special Forces operation to spark an uprising against Saddam. None of the plans looks very convincing, sources say, when the action reaches Baghdad. The city is a 1,600-square-mile sprawl with countless hiding places and some 4 million potential human shields. No one in Washington doubts that the U.S. military is capable of taking Saddam out. Still, the cost in human lives, both American and Iraqi, could be horrendous. Even so, the Bush administration is quietly getting ready for a fight. U.S. munitions plants have put on extra shifts to rebuild arsenals depleted during the Afghan war. A few hundred uniformed personnel are working as advance teams in Jordan and elsewhere, assessing the need for new airstrips, wider roads and the like. And even before Saddam became a priority target, the U.S. Department of Energy was working to get America's strategic petroleum reserve up to its full capacity of 700 million barrels-enough to meet U.S. energy needs for more than 80 days in a crunch. The question is whether America can go it alone. Last week Jordan's King Abdullah, who has publicly denounced the administration's war threats as "ludicrous" and "a tremendous mistake," visited Bush in Washington. The king says that even Bush's closest ally in the war on terror, Tony Blair, shares his concerns. Britain's prime minister is still being as tactful as possible about his reservations, but he's expressing them more and more forcefully. The Brits are "asking us, 'How do you propose to keep law and order the day after?' " says a senior Bush aide. "And when there's no concrete answer, the question comes back: 'OK, how long are we going to be occupying Iraq?' No one has any answer to that question." Last week Baghdad tried to avert a showdown. The Iraqi government offered to talk about letting U.N. arms inspectors back into the country-on certain conditions. Saddam loves to play that game. This time the hawks want the Security Council to say no, even if Saddam drops his conditions. What if the inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction? International sanctions would have to be lifted. Saddam would be free to stay in power as if nothing had ever happened. Intolerable. With Christopher Dickey in Amman, Tamara Lipper in Washington and Sam Seibert ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Will You Find True Love? Will You Meet the One? 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