WASHINGTON: Vice President Cheney’s ambitious 11-nation swing through the Middle East, which begins this week, has as one of its critical goals lining up a consensus on what to do about Iraq. But that doesn’t mean the United States will launch any time soon an operation to oust the regime of President Saddam Hussein.
The deeper the Bush administration gets into sorting through the options, the more daunting the obstacles appear, US officials concede. A conventional military campaign, if that is the route chosen, could be far more difficult than any US operation in recent decades, including the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The growing consensus among experts is that any serious military campaign would be difficult to launch before the fall, and perhaps not until much later.
“The level of difficulty and risk and the potential casualties will be much higher and will require a lot more planning than either Afghanistan or Operation Desert Storm,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former National Security Council staffer now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Virtually every angle of the prospective operation faces major challenges.
Militarily, due to downsizing since the Cold War, the United States has only about half the number of divisions it did when it waged war against Iraq in 1991 — and it’s still deeply involved in Afghanistan. The war in South Asia will have to wind down before the administration can launch any serious campaign in the Persian Gulf, analysts contend.
The broader ‘war on terrorism’ also must reach a stage in which Washington, D.C, feels confident that the major threat from Al Qaeda and its allies is under control.
“Imagine if a terrorist attack occurred while the US was focused on Iraq,” said Pollack. “People would crucify this administration and ask why it didn’t pay more attention to the folks in Al Qaeda rather than the folks in Baghdad.”
The military also must resupply precision-guided munitions and other war materiel rapidly being depleted in Afghanistan, a process likely to take from six to eight months, military experts say.
But the most difficult challenge will be what the administration sees as a crucial preliminary step toward reducing the length and human cost of a US-led mission: trying to neutralize significant numbers of the Iraqi military.
“The big question is: Can the Iraqi military be reached in some way to get them to defect or at least sit in their barracks? Is there a way to get some of them to help us rather than hinder us?” said Whitley Bruner, formerly a CIA officer in Iraq. “This has not been explored in any systematic way.”
On the diplomatic front, Washington, D.C, must carry through with two ongoing efforts at the United Nations involving Iraq if it hopes to prevent a major international backlash. A resolution on streamlining a current economic embargo is not expected to be voted on before June.
The bigger variable is to get a team of weapons inspectors back into Iraq, as President Bush has demanded.
The toughest assignment for the administration, however, could be winning support of other countries.
Much of the world has made clear its opposition to US intervention to oust Hussein. The administration’s best hope, analysts say, is to construct a “silent coalition” of countries willing to support the operation in private, while convincing other nations to keep their opposition to themselves.
And even that lukewarm level of support could bear costs. Arab allies are pressing for movement on the Palestinian-Israeli front before even discussing Iraq.
The old Middle East rule of thumb — that events on the ground overtake diplomacy — has altered Cheney’s mission. Iraq was supposed to be the main topic, but the agenda has been redefined by the escalating bloodshed between Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.
And on the political front, the administration will need to mobilize a wide range of Iraqis to help manage a post-Hussein regime so the United States does not have to micro-manage the aftermath for a long time — which would be unacceptable at home, in Iraq and in the wider world.
This step is pivotal to winning support from the Arab world, which is most nervous about the potential for internal chaos and regional instability after Hussein is gone.
And with the approach of November’s US congressional elections, neither major US party might want to see the early stages of a military campaign weighing on voters’ minds when control of both the Senate and the House is up for grabs. —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.