Bush planning to topple Hussein
Aides say that although no military action is in the works, the President has decided the Iraqi leader poses too much of a threat.
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott Inquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - President Bush has decided to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal, senior U.S. officials said yesterday.
No military strike is imminent, but Bush has concluded that Hussein and his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs are such a threat to U.S. security that the Iraqi dictator must be removed, even if U.S. allies do not help, said the officials, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.
"This is not an argument about whether to get rid of Saddam Hussein. That debate is over. This is . . . how you do it," a senior administration official said in an interview with the Inquirer Washington Bureau.
The President's decision has launched the United States on a course that will have major ramifications for the U.S. military, the Middle East's future political alignment, international oil flows, and Bush's own war on terrorism. Russia and most of America's European allies have expressed alarm about the administration's escalating rhetoric on Iraq.
The course also is fraught with potential military difficulties, with most experts on Iraq warning that a campaign there would not be as swift or virtually free of American casualties as Afghanistan. There, rebels of the Northern Alliance, backed by U.S. commandos and massive U.S. airpower, quickly overthrew the Taliban regime.
Nevertheless, one foreign leader who met Bush recently came away "with the feeling that a decision has been made to strike Iraq, and the 'how' and 'when' are still fluid," added a diplomat who asked not to be further identified.
The CIA, senior officials said, recently presented Bush with a plan to destabilize Hussein's well-entrenched regime in Baghdad. The plan proposed a massive covert action campaign, sabotage, information warfare, and significantly more aggressive bombing of the "no fly" zones over northern and southern Iraq. U.S. and British forces patrol the zones to prevent Iraqi planes from bombing opposition forces.
Bush reportedly was enthusiastic, and although it could not be determined whether he gave final approval for the plan, the CIA has begun assigning officers to the task.
Bush also is dispatching Vice President Cheney next month on a tour of 11 Middle East nations, including many of Iraq's neighbors, whose leaders are leery of a U.S. attack on Baghdad.
While the mission's purpose has been portrayed publicly as sounding out Middle Eastern leaders on Iraq policy, Cheney in fact will tell them that the United States intends to get rid of Hussein and his regime, several top Bush aides said.
"He's not going to beg for support," one senior official said. "He's going to inform them that the President's decision has been made and will be carried out, and if they want some input into how and when it's carried out, now's the time for them to speak up."
In the lead-up to Cheney's trip, however, a sharp debate has erupted within the administration over what role Iraqi opposition groups should play, particularly the main group, the Iraqi National Congress.
Officials in the Near East Division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service, warn that the INC, a coalition of Hussein opponents, is divided by internal feuds and almost certainly penetrated by both the Iraqi and Iranian intelligence services.
"Where the INC is concerned, no real covert operation is possible," said one U.S. intelligence official with experience in the area. "The INC isn't the Northern Alliance, and the [Iraqi] Republican Guards aren't the Taliban." In fact, one U.S. intelligence official said Iraqi opposition leaders already have been heard talking about the new campaign to oust Hussein.
Hawks in the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are pushing for a major role for the INC. Their position was strengthened last month, when Bush called Iraq part of an "axis of evil." These officials believe the brunt of the fighting can be borne by Iraqi opposition forces - primarily ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south - with assistance from U.S. airpower and CIA and special forces advisers on the ground, following the Afghanistan model.
Uniformed military officials, however, are skeptical of the opposition groups, doubtful that Hussein's military will crumble the way the Taliban did and worried that large numbers of U.S. troops could be called on to rescue opposition forces if they get bogged down or trapped.
The Pentagon's existing contingency plans for an invasion of Iraq call for the use of 200,000 American ground troops, U.S. officials said. A decade after the Persian Gulf war, Iraq is believed to have around 400,000 active-duty troops, one quarter of them in elite units such as the Republican Guard, and some modern weaponry.
However, the United States may not have the extensive use of bases in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere that it enjoyed during the gulf war. While many of Washington's Arab allies may go along in the end, for now they oppose "regime change" in Iraq and worry about its effect on populations already angered by nearly 17 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
There are other major uncertainties about a U.S. attack on Iraq that, unlike the gulf war, would be intended to remove its leader. One is whether Hussein, with nothing to lose, would lash out at U.S. forces, Israel or Arab states backing the United States with Scud missiles tipped with chemical or biological weapons.
Another is the lack of U.S. intelligence assets on the ground to work with opposition forces, assess the strength of Hussein's regime and recruit defectors. The CIA this year began to reconstitute a small presence in northern Iraq, working with the INC, an official said.
Finally, an attack could endanger close U.S. allies such as Jordan, which imports all of its oil from Iraq. "Definitely, it's a nightmare scenario for us," an Arab diplomat said yesterday.
Bush should keep the focus on fighting international terrorism, where he has broad international backing, Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy said. "If you mix two issues together, you will lose this focus," he said in an interview last week.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Warren P. Strobel's e-mail address is wstrobel at krwashington.com.