Another struggle is gripping Washington - the one that will shape the future of Iraq. Bush's inner circle is fighting to gain his ear, and the result of this contest will have an impact even greater than that of the war
Ed Vulliamy in New York and Kamal Ahmed in London Sunday April 6, 2003 The Observer
At Hillsborough Castle near Belfast tomorrow, President George W Bush will sit down with Tony Blair to discuss phases two and three of the conflict in Iraq. With confidence growing that the military campaign is coming to a conclusion, all eyes are refocusing on the political aftermath. If the coalition of the willing thought the military campaign was difficult to plan for, the opportunity for elephant traps ahead is growing.
Already there is talk of splits and tensions. The US Defence Department, under Donald Rumsfeld, would like an American-dominated interim administration. Colin Powell and his staff at the State Department realise that a broad coalition of international interests and the United Nations will need to be involved. Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National Security Adviser who speaks daily to Tony Blair's foreign policy chief, Sir David Manning, has also promoted a 'UN-endorsed' route allied to ultimate American leadership. Each is playing a game of cat and mouse, a feint here, a jab there, to try to ensure that their scheme comes out on top.
The British Government insists that there is still a huge amount to negotiate and almost all issues 'are up for discussion'. The subject will form the spine of the Blair-Bush summit, with Blair insisting both on the involvement of the UN and fewer unilateral announcements about the future of the country from, according to senior government sources, 'some elements of the Bush adminstration'. The Pentagon's list of people who could run the interim administration, including the hardline hawk and former CIA head, James Woolsey, which was revealed in leaked documents last week, brought signs of exasperation from this side of the Atlantic.
'It was a convenient leak,' said one Whitehall official. 'They put their names out and then it's up to everyone else to debate that plan rather than other options. But that is all it was, an option. Nothing has been settled.'
Phase two comes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. Under American and British military command, civil servants from both countries will 'run' Iraq after what is described as a 'regime collapse'. That adminstration will then lead to phase three, the interim administration under Jay Garner, the retired general in charge of reconstruction. Last night it was reported that Garner was planning to move into Umm Qasr, the Iraqi port, to start work on phase three.
One Pentagon source claimed that the plans were in place and those who opposed the war will be sidelined. 'It is America's own plan, to enact as we see fit, with our coalition allies,' said the official. 'France wants a postwar role? They've got to be kidding.'
America entered the war aiming to install a military government purge the remnants of Saddam's regime, supervise an interim period during which a new government would be nurtured, then hand over to the Iraqi administration.
In addition to urgent aid and reconstruction, the US envisages maintaining a massive standing army, paying salaries to two million civil servants, rebuilding the Iraqi army and oil industry, and keeping the country running under US military administration.
In memoranda to the White House last week, Rumsfeld proposed that an interim government composed of Iraqi exiles under US tutelage should be installed in areas of the country under US control, even before fighting has concluded. The administration would report to General Tommy Franks, the military commander in Iraq, and, in turn, to his boss, Rumsfeld.
The establishment of an embryonic government while the war continues will be discussed early this week by Bush, with Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA director George Tenet and Powell - said by sources to be backing UN involvement in the reconstruction of Iraq.
A colony of potential US administrators has assembled in waiting, along a stretch of Kuwaiti seaside villas, speaking well or not-so-well of the man regarded as the real architect of the new order, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, or 'Wolfowitz of Arabia' as he's been dubbed.
But Washington itself is riven over these arrangements, with hostility again spilling over between Powell and Rumsfeld, as in the lead-off to war. The infighting has been so acrimonious that - The Observer is told - Garner has even told associates he has considered resigning before he has begun.
The debates are over the role - or not - of the United Nations, and the part that Iraqi exiles are to play. Pentagon sources tell The Observer that they are determined to sideline the UN and to impose the Rumsfeld plan. 'This war proceeds without the UN,' said one official. 'There is no need for the UN, which is not relevant, to be involved in building a democratic Iraq.'
UN official Shashi Tharoor said that the body was keen to join the humanitarian relief effort and participate in governing the country, but only if mandated by the Security Council.
However, many relief organisations - including Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiers - have said they will refuse to operate under such arrangements. Thirteen leading non-governmental aid groups have sent a letter to George Bush urging him to 'ask the UN to serve as the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq'.
The immediate crisis facing any new Iraqi administration will be a humanitarian one, but the US insists that the relief effort will take place under military supervision. Tharoor said that under international law, 'the responsibility for protecting civilians caught up in war or conflict falls on the belligerents.
'But if the Security Council entrusts us with a portion of this task, we shall not be found wanting. However, the last thing we need is another poisoned chalice - we have had enough of those.'
He points to the three recent precedents in which the UN has taken over post-conflict situations - East Timor, Kosovo and Afghanistan - 'each of which is unique. They are different models, and there is room for a fourth model.'
In practical terms, that could mean a reversal of the pre-war chemistry on the Security Council, with the US opposing motions by France or Russia for a UN mandate, or it could mean a French veto of US plans to deploy the UN under military rule.
Meanwhile, the Americans lay their plans regardless, with some controversial names emerging for the postwar government. Woolsey is a controversial figure, principally for his proximity to those who harbour fervent ideological commitment to unchallenged US power in the region and the world.
Speaking to a group of college students in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Woolsey described the war in Iraq as the onset of the 'Fourth World War' (the third being the Cold War), saying: 'This Fourth World War, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us.'
He claimed the new war faces three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the 'fascists' of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists such as al-Qaeda.
'As we move toward a new Middle East,' he said, 'over the years and, I think, over the decades to come...we will make a lot of people very nervous. Our response should be, "Good! We want you nervous. We want you to realise now, for the fourth time in 100 years, this country and its allies are on the march."'
Woolsey was a member of the Project for the New American Century, a forum that laid out plans for global, unchallenged American power. He now sits on the powerful Defence Policy Board, a hawkish semi-official ideological body that advises the Pentagon.
The man entrusted to broadcast the new order to Iraqis over television and radio airwaves will be Robert Reilly, who, as head of Voice of America, relayed information to the communist bloc during the Cold War.
The Observer has also learnt the identity of the person who will be the new viceroy of Baghdad: Barbara Bodine, former ambassador to Yemen, known for a mixture of her expertise in the region and fervent hostility to a politically organised Muslim world.
Baghdad will be one of three administrative areas, the others being territory around Mosul in the North and Basra in the South 'the same provinces with which the Turkish Ottomans ruled what is now Iraq for four centuries'.
Within Washington, there is also bitter disagreement over the position of exile groups as opposed to Iraqis still living in their country, whom the State Department wants to be nurtured into a government.
The State Department favours keeping military rule with the present Iraqi government apparatus largely intact while a number of Iraqis living under Saddam can be nurtured and until elections can be held.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, counters that there are too few people left in the Iraqi regime who can be trusted, and - having studied the de-Nazification of Germany - wants a restructuring of government departments and a purge of the Baath party and bureaucratic apparatus, with exiles assuming an early role.
Controversy especially surrounds the exiled Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, a banker, former aristocrat in the monarchist Iraqi regime overthrown in the Fifties, and since convicted in absentia in Jordan for fraud and embezzlement.
Chalabi is backed by friends in the Pentagon to head the formation of a provisional government. But he is suspected by the State Department and CIA, which believe that he has little chance of rallying support in Iraq after nearly half a century in exile. The CIA severed its relationship with Chalabi after the INC was unable to account for millions of dollars in covert US aid.
As a result, Chalabi is currently slated for a position on an advisory council of exiles, with which he has declared himself dissatisfied. However, Pentagon sources tell The Observer that his position is 'under review; he may yet play a very important and senior role'.
A leading role for the INC would dovetail with information from sources telling The Observer that the list of Iraqi exiles to be invited into government is being drawn up by the number three at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, working directly to his immediate superior and longtime friend, Wolfowitz.
Feith is a pivotal member of the neo-conservative group, having worked with fellow-hawk Richard Perle on a paper for the Israeli Likud Party in 1996, urging a 'clean break' with the peace process.
'It looks like we are on the verge of further alienating allies,' said one State Department official, 'and it looks like we are going to do exactly what we promised we would not - take small groups of exiles with limited influence in Iraq and bring them in as the bulk of a transition government.'
One senior former diplomat in Baghdad and elsewhere in the region told The Observer: 'There are no serious Arabists left in the government now; only those who have been telling the White House what it wants to hear. The dragons have taken over'.