WASHINGTON: War has been declared in Washington, but not against any foreign country, at least for the moment.

Rather, the war, which should switch into high gear when Congress returns from its August recess early next month, is for the heart and mind of President George W. Bush, who will come under excruciating pressure by November to decide whether or not the United States will go to war against Iraq some time during the first half of next year.

For now, the war is strictly among Republicans — between the conservative realists who dominated the administration of former president George H.W. Bush and the predominantly neo-conservative coalition of hawks clustered in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

A series of leaks this month from senior military brass, who have grown increasingly distrustful of the adventurism of their civilian bosses, marked the preliminary skirmishes in the conflict.

The war burst into the open last week when the elder Bush’s national security adviser, ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, lambasted the idea of war with Iraq in the editorial pages of the staunchly hawkish Wall Street Journal.

Arguing that war against Baghdad would likely destroy international co-operation for the ‘war against terrorism’, Scowcroft also warned that it “could well destabilize Arab regimes in the region, ironically facilitating one of Saddam’s strategic objectives”.

Scowcroft, who doubles as the chairman of the current Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and hence has access to top-secret intelligence, also cast doubt on rumours of any link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, let alone Iraqi involvement in the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Left alone, the Scowcroft op-ed would have created a stir. But it became a sensation when the ‘New York Times’ the next day cited Scowcroft’s dissent in its lead article headlined, ‘Top Republicans Break with Bush on Iraq Strategy’.

Citing Scowcroft’s article and a column by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger — who argued that war against Iraq could be justified but that Washington had to do much more to cultivate public support at home and abroad — the Times also quoted unnamed senior State Department officials who said they were trying desperately to halt the course toward war in intra- administration debates.

The Times also quoted another former Republican secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, as sharing Scowcroft’s views, and cited a Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee as leading the forces opposed to the war.

The response was not long in coming. On Monday, readers got a double blast, aimed at both the Times and Scowcroft, by two leading neo-conservative organs, the Wall Street Journal’ and the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, which often speak for the Pentagon and Cheney hawks in the administration.

In its lead editorial titled ‘This is Opposition?’, the Journal ridiculed the notion of a split in Republican ranks and went after Scowcroft, and Secretary of State Colin Powell as practitioners of ‘realpolitik’.

“So it typically favours ‘stability’, even when it’s imposed by dictators, over democratic aspiration,” according to the Journal, which went on to catalogue a series of “mistaken judgments” allegedly made by Scowcroft, Eagleburger and Powell during the first Bush administration.

On the list were: the failure to intervene against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic; favouring the maintenance of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev; and, worst, urging Bush I to “stop the Gulf War early, based in part on a CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) fear that a divided Iraq without a dictator was worse than a ‘stable’ Iraq ruled by Saddam or his Baath Party successor”.

In a second article, the Standard weighed in with its own attack on Scowcroft and the Times. The article, ‘The Axis of Appeasement’, was penned by the publication’s chief editor, William Kristol, who doubles as co-founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a five-year-old front group that consists of close associates of the Pentagon-Cheney forces.

“European international-law wishfulness and full-blown Pat Buchanan isolationism are the two intellectually honest alternatives to the Bush Doctrine,” he added. “Scowcroft and the Times wish to embrace neither, so they pretend instead to be terribly ‘concerned’ with the administration’s alleged failure to ‘make the case’ (for going to war).”

On one side, the ranks will be led by Rumsfeld and Cheney and their cheerleaders at the Journal, the Standard, and a handful of other publications; on the other will stand the Bush I veterans, led by Scowcroft outside the administration and Powell and the not inconsiderable help of the military brass within.

How the Democrats weigh in — and they, too, face strong divisions on the issue of war with Iraq — remains to be seen.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.