Jim Lobe

One year after invading US and British forces consolidated their control over Iraq, the US appears to be back at square one, if not in negative territory, over how to ensure that control in the short to medium term. The problem, however, is that the administration lacks any comprehensive strategy and remains internally divided over precisely what to do. Neo-conservatives remain strongly opposed to giving the UN a major substantive role in any aspect of the occupation or abandoning plans to ensure that their Iraqi collaborators, notably Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi, retain power in any transition.

The administration’s latest policy revision was confirmed in Baghdad on Friday with the announcement by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer that the “de-Ba’athification” policy he carried to Iraq almost 11 months ago had been ‘’poorly implemented’’ and needed to be reviewed.

The plain meaning of his remarks, despite his continued insistence that the policy ‘’was and is sound’’, was that thousands of former senior and mid-level members of the Ba’ath Party of former President Saddam Hussein will now be brought back into the government, especially the military and the police, presumably to secure the stability and order that some 160,000 US and British troops and their auxiliaries from the ever-shrinking ‘’coalition of the willing’’ have been unable to impose. Bremer’s announcement followed by just a few days another by Bush himself that UN’s special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi will be given the lead to determine the shape and composition of a new transitional authority that will replace the current Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) from Jun. 30, when ‘’limited sovereignty’’ will revert to Iraqis, until elections for a new government can be held, hopefully in January 2005.

Suddenly the administration, which was in the process of drawing down its troops from 150,000 to about 100,000 by the Jun. 30 transition date, was facing what many now call popular uprisings in both the ‘’Sunni Triangle’’ and among the majority Shiite population, whose acquiescence in the US-led occupation has long been seen as absolutely indispensable to the success of Washington’s Iraq agenda. US efforts to suppress the insurgency in Fallujah were, by all accounts, politically disastrous. That US-trained and supervised Iraqi military and security forces by and large failed to back up coalition troops during the fighting has added to the sense that Washington’s hopes of transferring security duties to Iraqis and withdrawing most of its forces to discreet bases away from population centres were based on wishful thinking.

The problem is that the US reaction appears driven more by ad hoc emergencies than an overall strategy for both stabilising the country and implementing a credible ‘’exit strategy’’. As a result, each policy issue is likely to be the subject of major internal fights between the ‘’realists’’, based in the State Department, the uniformed military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the neo-conservative hawks around Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, fights of the kind detailed in reporter Bob Woodward’s new insider account, ‘Plan of Attack’. — IPS