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CounterPunch
December
14, 2002
American Journal
Iraq After D-Day:
The Cordesman Memo
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Napoleon would sketch out in an afternoon the
new constitution and legal arrangements for one of France's imperial
conquests. In Washington today, there's no such panache, no Jacques-Louis
David limning Bush in imperial drapery and resplendent crown
(though surely Josephine's heart beats beneath Laura's delicious
bosom). All over town, lights blaze far into the night as staffers
at the Pentagon, State Dept. and National Security Council pore
over blueprints for invasion and the possible lineaments of a
post-Saddam Iraq. You'd have to go back to Kennedy-era nation-building
to find equivalent hubris and expectancy.
But as the war planners irritably deride
Iraq's 12,000-page chronicle, detailing its abandonment of weapons
of mass destruction, a briefer memo sets forth with sarcastic
glee all the reasons that even now Bush and his inner circle
should think again and perhaps shrink back, even as George Bush
Sr. did, from seeking to install an American mandate in Baghdad.
On Washington's carousel, Anthony Cordesman
is a prominent fixture, currently headquartered in the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, prime Republican think
tank on K Street, where an elevator ride can confront you with
museum pieces stetching all the way back to Reagan's first NSC
adviser, Richard Allen. Cordesman has held down big jobs in the
Defense and Energy departments, has served as Senator John McCain's
national security assistant and strides confidently before the
cameras whenever ABC News summons him for analysis and commentary.
Unusually, given this sort of curriculum
vitae, Cordesman is a pretty smart fellow. We must ask, therefore,
why he felt impelled, from all his dignity as the Arleigh Burke
Chair at CSIS, to issue a "rough draft" memo, dated
December 3 and now sparking its way around town, that derides
Operation Oust Saddam as the recipe for a bloody mess. So? Bloody
Mess has been a standing item on the American imperial menu for
more than a century. It's a specialty of the house. Maybe Cordesman
wants an "I told you so" on record. Maybe he's irked
at a setback in his private political agenda. Whatever his motives,
he paints with deft strokes an unflattering record of all those
blueprints now being staffed out in Washington's drafting studios.
Political etiquette requires Cordesman
to couch his criticisms in "Here's how we should plan it
better" mode, but it's clear he sees no such possibility
in the offing, as he prods through the plans with his scalpel.
Title of paper: "Planning for a
Self-Inflicted Wound: US Policy to Shape a Post-Saddam Iraq".
Theme: Operation Oust Saddam is an "uncoordinated and faltering
effort." We should "admit our level of ignorance."
"Far too many internal 'experts'" have scant working
knowledge of Iraq, writes Cordesman, who actually knows a lot
about the place.
The sales job for Operation Oust Saddam
has been lousy: "We face an Arab world where many see us
as going to war to seize Iraq's oil, barter deals with the Russians
and French, create a new military base to dominate the region,
and/or serve Israel's interest. Our lack of clear policy statements
has encouraged virtually every negative conspiracy theory possible."
Rather unconvincingly, Cordesman adds that we must "prove
we are not a 'neo-imperialist' or 'occupier.'" Stigmatizing
what he calls "the US as Liberator Syndrome" Cordesman
warns that "we may or may not be perceived as <liberators.S>
We may well face a much more hostile population than in Afghanistan.
We badly need to consider the Lebanon model: Hero to enemy in
less than a year."
He notes "an unpredictable but inevitable
level of collateral damage and civilian casualties" and
deplores the arrogance among planners for gaming out a "best-case
war." To the contrary, Cordesman warns, "we may have
to sharply escalate and inflict serious collateral damage."
Given the shape Iraq is in after the
Gulf War and a decade of sanctions, one can easily envisage what
that means. Riffling through the nation- and democracy-building
game plans, Cordesman bleakly declares them "mindlessly
stupid." In words that should hang on the wall of every
liberal interventionist, he says fiercely that "Iraq cannot
be treated as an intellectual playground for political scientists
or ideologues, and must not be treated as if its people were
a collection of white rats that could be pushed through a democratic
maze by a bunch of benevolent US soldiers and NGOs."
Forget the carny lingo about building
democracy. America's priorities are already "non-democratic,"
since "we virtually must enforce territorial integrity,
and limit Kurdish autonomy." There are, Cordesman maintains,
already US war plans that call for an early US military presence
in Kirkuk to insure the Kurds do not attempt to seize it. Long-term
efforts to establish some kind of Kurdish autonomy may go the
same way as those early in the last century, which ended with
British planes seeking to enforce the League of Nations mandate
by poison gas. The Iraqi National Congress, he sneers, is far
stronger inside the Washington Beltway than in Iraq.
As for the Shiites in the south, Cordesman
seems to imply, no autonomist momentum should be allowed to develop,
nor civil society permitted to flourish far beyond the existing
supervision of the police and armed forces, which, after necessary
purging at the top, should remain in place. Most of the existing
structure of the Iraqi government is "vital." Iraq
"is not going to become a model government or democracy
for years."
What kind of economy would the US proconsul
be supervising? Cordesman offers a reality check. Even before
the Gulf War and sanctions, Iraq was plummeting from its peak
at the start of the 1980s, when per capita oil wealth stood at
$6,000, as against $700 now. Only twenty-four out of seventy-three
oilfields are working, and anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent
of the wells are at risk. These days, with a population expected
to reach 37 million by 2020 (up from 9 million in 1970), unemployment
stands at more than 25 percent, with 40 percent of the population
under 15.
It doesn't take long to run through Cordesman's
eleven pages, and the momentum of the argument is clear enough,
as clear as the same arguments were to Bush the Elder and his
advisers back in 1991: Why get deeper into this mess? Let Saddam
keep his security forces intact and butcher the Shiites. Offer
protection to the Kurds and let the place stew under the weight
of sanctions.
Only in one respect does Cordesman part
company with reality. He predicts that "everything we do
from bombing to the first ground contact with Iraqis will be
conducted in a media fishbowl." Now, just as it knows how
to create Bloody Messes, Empire knows how to ignore them later.
So will the Bloody Mess in Iraq get bloodier
still? I'd say at this point the odds are even.
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