> Philadelphia Inquirer - February 13, 2002
>
> 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.
This follows the LA Times piece Monday which broke this story.
Let me make a few points.
1. The problem with these stories is that they're not really new. "Regime change" was the official Iraq policy of the Clinton administration too. Several CIA coups were attempted and failed. Clinton even had a State Department official named Frank Ricciardone who was sort of the Minister of Regime Change. He met with Kurdish leaders, Turkish officials, and, presumably, Iraqi defectors. Nothing came of it.
2. There have always been 2 strategies for toppling Hussein: (1) Overthrowing the entire Ba'ath regime using the Iraqi National Congress "opposition forces," versus (2) finding an Iraqi general from within the regime to take Saddam's place - a much more limited option. The crazies - neocons, hawks, and Congressional GOP - always favored the INC.
But the serious experts - like former chief of Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, and most of the uniformed career Pentagon officers - knew it could never work. So they favored trying to find a potential military coup-maker. But that's really hard to do.
The real shift in the Bush admin. recently has been the defeat of the Wolfowitz-Perle crowd who were arguing in favor of supporting the INC and using it as a sort of a Northern Alliance for Iraq. Until December-January, they were the only people talking about overthrowing Saddam, so theirs was the leading policy option, by default. But the administration has now finally ruled it out.
The Jan. 2 Ha'aretz had this story before anyone else, as far as I can tell. It said:
"The defense establishment here believes that the Bush administration has given up trying to find an Iraqi version of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, so Washington is busy studying intelligence profiles of top Iraqi army commanders who could take control in Baghdad concurrent with or immediately after the start of an American campaign."
3. Here's the crucial point: It is only because Wolfowitz's crazy INC scheme has finally been taken off the table that Colin Powell has been able to throw his weight behind a "get rid of Saddam" policy. It is more of a move back to the center than a further swing to the right. But in leaking the news, the administration seems to be putting the opposite spin: making it seem more like Powell has swung over to the right. Still, all this simply leaves the administration back at square one. They've still got to succeed where Clinton failed: figure out how to get the Iraqi military to turn against Saddam.
4. There are a couple residual consequences of this policy shift. One is that any new Iraqi government will almost certainly lack the facade of decency like the one the US has managed to drape around the Afghan government, with Hamid Karzai. Saddam is to be replaced by someone exactly like Saddam. In fact, the leading candidate is a guy named Nizar Khazraji who actually led the invasion of Kuwait and helped gas the Kurds. He's currently the subject of a human rights investigation by the Danish courts. That's a big image problem.
The other consequence is that if you leave the Ba'ath party structure in place running Iraq, you're leaving behind a deeply, deeply anti-American bunch of cadres. Saddam is actually a moderate within his party. The rest of the bureaucracy is seething with hatred for the US after a decade of sanctions, bombing and humiliation. So it's not even clear how pro-American this government will be.
So this isn't just a matter of a determined Bush finally steeling his nerve.
Seth