Hostilities force Bush into deep hole
The Guardian 05/19/04


The Pentagon was attempting the difficult task of digging itself out of the hole dug by the Abu Ghraib prison outrage when it suffered yet another potentially serious setback in Iraq.
As in Najaf and Falluja and at other flashpoints, US forces appeared to have been sucked in by the insurgents' strategy: fighting back, killing civilians and in turn strengthening the rebels' support base.

George Bush continued to paint a determinedly optimistic picture, insisting that "a lot of progress" had been made towards the transfer of sovereignty on June 30, despite the assassination at the weekend of the head of the US-appointed governing council, Abdul Zahra Othman, also known as Izzadine Salim.

He also claimed that 11 ministries were being "capably run by Iraqi citizens".

But across town in Congress even those instinctively sympathetic to the US military cause in Iraq were warning that America was facing a strategic disaster.

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, told the Senate foreign relations committee.

The apocalyptic language is becoming increasingly common here among normally moderate and cautious politicians and observers.

Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, said: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq.

"We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction.

"There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire."

The growing fear is that the US will able neither to defeat the insurgents in Iraq nor to find an honourable means of withdrawal, while every week there will be an haemorrhaging of US credibility in the Arab world and far beyond.

"With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?" said Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the foreign relations committee.

Meanwhile, traditional conservatives who see American interests in the Middle East as focused on a regular supply of oil are anxious because it has pulled its troops out of one big producer, Saudi Arabia, without establishing a sustainable military presence in another, Iraq.

"Anyway you look at this, outside the most extreme optimistic assessments, we end up weaker," a senior Republican international strategist said.

The conservatives' growing awareness that failure may be imminent has generated a backlash against the more radical "neo-conservatives" such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, who are blamed for persuading President Bush that an invasion would be relatively easy.

Anthony Cordesman, a military scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the most serious problem in US government was "the fact that a small group of neo-conservative ideologues were able to substitute their illusions for an effective planning effort by professionals".

General Hoar was equally scathing about the calibre of the Bush administration.

"The policy people in both Washington and Baghdad," he said, "have demonstrated their inability to do a job on a day-to-day basis this past year."

Administration critics, as well as a growing number of Republican moderates, are arguing that to salvage the situation in Iraq the administration will have to jettison many of its other policy goals and political ambitions.

For example, it will have to give up all hope of establishing permanent military bases in Iraq, securing advantages for US firms, and staying out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert at the National Defence University, says the minimal US goals should include "a state free of terrorism, a state free of weapons of mass destruction, a government, if not friendly, at least not hostile to the US and Israel", and a clear intention not to have "long-term designs on military bases or control of oil".

First, the US has to be seen to be transferring at least some power to Iraqis. Mr Bush predicted yesterday that the leaders of a new caretaker government would be picked "in the next couple of weeks".

But Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy who is supposed to select that government, is reported to be facing extreme difficulties in finding fresh faces to fill the top jobs, particularly since the assassination of Mr Salim.

There is increasing speculation that, in the absence of any better options by the transfer date of June 30, nominal sovereignty will be handed to the governing council, which has very limited credibility with ordinary Iraqis.

Meanwhile, the head of US central command, John Abizaid, warned that the period after the handover could be even more violent than the present, perhaps requiring the deployment of more US troops.

That would be politically damaging for the president, but so would a descent into more chaos in Iraq.

As Mr Bush nears re-election, the burden of Iraq grows heavier with every passing week.