August 4, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 24,1423

WASHINGTON: Historians may well conclude that the battle to topple Saddam Hussein began in Washington during the sultry, steamy summer of 2002.

What may ultimately conclude with US forces fighting their way through the streets of Baghdad erupted last month in the front pages of leading US newspapers, which tripped over themselves reporting the latest top-secret “battle plans” reportedly under consideration by President George W. Bush’s advisers.

The unusual political theatre continued this week with two days of extraordinary hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly debating the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and the pros and cons of military action. The hearings were designed to ignite a public debate about the merits of Bush’s call for “regime change” in Baghdad.

And next week, leaders of six feuding Iraqi opposition groups will meet in Washington, as the United States tries to forge some measure of cohesion and unity in their efforts to oust Saddam Hussein.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon will take over some of the funding from the State Department for the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based group that has had differences with State over its accounting practices.

The leaks about war plans were so contradictory that they appeared to reveal an administration sharply divided over exactly how to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. Or was it a careful campaign to confuse the enemy and catch him off guard?

An invasion would require 250,000 US troops attacking Iraq from three directions, one leaked report said. Another advocated an “Afghanistan” model, using Iraqi opposition groups backed by US air power and small numbers of ground troops and relying on the Iraqi military to defect. Still another spoke of invading Iraq “inside-out” by capturing Baghdad in a swift strike and then going after Saddam’s weapon stockpiles and command hideouts.

There were also reports that the military’s top brass opposed attacking Iraq without provocation, and was aligning with Secretary of State Colin Powell — a former general — against top civilian hawks such as Vice President Richard Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in urging a more cautious approach.

Rumsfeld was so incensed by the first leak that he said the leakers should be jailed and requested an FBI investigation. But that didn’t stop the reports, and by the end of July a trickle had become a flood.

But are all these plans under consideration? Or are the “exclusive” leaks an attempt to prepare the US public and allies abroad for the inevitability of military action while confusing Saddam Hussein about the threat he faces?

“This is the administration, after all, that early on in the war on terrorism announced that it was setting up an agency within the Defence Department to manufacture lies, ostensibly to confuse the enemy,” notes Wesley Pruden, editor of The Washington Times.

US officials are not in any hurry to sort out the contradictory news leaks.

“I think that if Saddam Hussein picked up America’s newspapers and read them, he’d be really confused right now,” White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said on Thursday. “Not a bad outcome.”

Another salvo in the Battle for Baghdad occurred this week, when Rumsfeld charged that Iraq was maintaining mobile laboratories for biological weapons. He also cast doubt on whether any new United Nations inspection regime would be effective in detecting and dismantling Iraq’s chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programmes.

Fleischer also chimed in, saying “the president’s level of skepticism is high” that any new UN inspection programme would be effective.

In that context, Iraq’s invitation on Friday for the top UN inspector to visit Baghdad and discuss a resumption of inspections came as no surprise in Washington.

The stakes for Saddam Hussein in this diplomatic war-before-the- war are high, because he knows he stands little chance of winning a military conflict.

“Iraq has been involved in a political struggle against the US and its neighbours ever since the ceasefire in the Gulf war,” military strategist Anthony Cordesman told the Senate committee this week.

That diplomatic campaign, Cordesman said, “is an extension of war by other means.”—dpa