Article: White House will deal with Iraq

White House will deal with Iraq
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Bush administration's internal debate on Iraq has reached the point where officials believe military or covert action against Saddam Hussein is a certainty unless he allows independent weapon inspectors back in his country.

Left unsettled, U.S. officials said in interviews, are the questions of timing and the military strategy.

One official participating in the discussions said he has "no doubt" President Bush will move to oust Saddam if the Iraqi dictator refuses White House demands on inspectors.

The inner-sanctum debate is heating up as the Afghanistan campaign enters a final phase in its mission to uproot terrorists, and the international community asks "Who is next?" in Mr. Bush's declared war on international terrorism.

In administration meetings on Iraq, three different approaches have emerged from among which the president will likely choose shortly, according to three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

•Pentagon policy-makers want to remodel the successful war strategy in Afghanistan (massive air power, covert warriors and an indigenous opposition working along with Army Special Forces) and apply it to Iraq, but on a much larger scale. This general outline is said to be favored by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who, as a civilian, advocated arming the Iraqi resistance.

•The uniformed leaders, including Gen. Tommy Franks, who as head of U.S. Central Command would run a war in Iraq, are said to argue that the strategy also must include a large number of U.S. ground troops.

•The CIA is said to advocate a coup or destabilization, not a war, to topple Saddam. The agency is said to believe that there remain officers in the Iraqi army who, given the appropriate support, could attempt to wrest power from Saddam and the ruling Ba'ath Party. These officers would then usher in a U.S.-friendly regime.

A senior military source said CIA Director George J. Tenet believes he needs a year to "till the ground" in Iraq and see whether the agency can destabilize Saddam's regime.

Whichever route Mr. Bush chooses, U.S. officials said to look for a new war policy to be in place in months.

It has been the policy of both the Clinton administration, and now the Bush government, to oust Saddam, largely through economic sanctions and the hope that some element would execute a coup.

But the September 11 attacks on America by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror group have intensified discussions inside the Bush administration on how to change the Baghdad regime.

The pro-war argument goes that Saddam's arsenal of chemical and suspected biological weapons will eventually be used by terrorists against the United States unless it takes preventative action now. In addition, Saddam is a known supporter of international terrorism — a U.S. State Department status that qualifies the regime for attack under a doctrine announced by Mr. Bush.

No direct evidence has emerged linking Baghdad to the September 11 attacks.

Officials said in interviews that Pentagon civilians are arguing against waiting for a coup. They point out that perhaps as many as six coup attempts after the 1991 Persian Gulf war ended in failure.

"What they want to do is go in and help the Iraqi opposition," said one senior official. "Kind of do what we did in Afghanistan."

But CIA officials say Kurdish opposition fighters in the north and ragtag Shi'ite fighters backed by Iran in the south are no match for Saddam's army.

"The CIA wants the coup option," said an official. "But they tried this before and it didn't work. They don't believe in resistance operations."

According to one official, even the top brass willing to wage war against Saddam say "a good number of ground troops" would be required.

Advocates of the Afghan model say the CIA and Army Green Berets will need time to train and equip an Iraqi opposition force.

"It would be a tough go," the official said.

But the source added, "You have a band of courageous civilians in the Pentagon who supported the [Afghan] Northern Alliance, and, bingo, they were right. The system is so biased against helping an insurgency. Well, it worked. They say, 'It worked in Afghanistan, but it can't work in Iraq.' The Pentagon says, 'Why not?'"

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who is skeptical of waging war against Iraq, on Sunday cast doubt that the Afghan design would work against Saddam.

"We are looking at that," he told Fox News Channel. "It's quite a different situation. I mean, it is much, much different, and I think one has to be careful before you take a cookie cutter from some other theater and apply it to another theater. But everything you have just suggested and other ideas are constantly under review within the administration."

Advocates of an expanded Afghan model contend that the State Department and CIA are badly overrating Saddam's army. They assert it is weaker today than in 1991, when the U.S. military was on the verge of destroying many top Iraqi armored units before the ground war was halted after 100 hours.

They say that precision bombing has so improved the past decade that strike fighters and bombers could take down much of Saddam's military, paving the way for opposition advances.

The United States says al Qaeda operates in as many as 60 countries. But large-scale direct military action may be required only in two: Iraq and the east African country of Somalia, where the terror group has a safe haven.

During a NATO visit yesterday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted by Reuters as saying, "There are countries that worry us because they actively support and harbor [terrorists]. It's one thing to have a cell in your country, it's another to actively support them. And Somalia is one potential country — there are others as well — a potential country where you might have diplomatic, law-enforcement action or potentially military action. All the instruments of national power, not just one."

Mr. Bush has all but directly threatened Saddam, saying at one point he will "find out" what will happen if weapons inspectors are not let in, after having been kicked out in 1998.

And Vice President Richard B. Cheney has delivered perhaps the most direct threat yet, saying, "If I were Saddam Hussein, I'd be thinking very carefully about the future, and I'd be looking very closely to see what happened to the Taliban of Afghanistan."

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011220-70369339.htm

Saddam's days are numbered.

 

Vintage Saddam. He practically invented the concept of using innocent civilians as human shields... He knows we won't bomb them. Most of his AD emplacements in Baghdad are in civilian neighborhoods. But our weapons are very accurate...

BTW, thanks for the tip, cmrockfam. Will be posting it in a minute...

 

December 20, 2001

SECRET SITES
An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work on at Least 20 Hidden Weapons Sites
By JUDITH MILLER

An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.

The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, gave details of the projects he said he worked on for President Saddam Hussein's government in an extensive interview last week in Bangkok.

Government experts said yesterday that he had also been interviewed twice by American intelligence officials, who were trying to verify his claims. One of the officials said he thought Mr. Saeed had been taken to a secure location. The experts said his information seemed reliable and significant.

The interview with Mr. Saeed was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein. If verified, Mr. Saeed's allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so.

Mr. Saeed's account gives new clues about the types and possible locations of illegal laboratories, facilities and storage sites that American officials and international inspectors have long suspected Iraq of trying to hide. It also suggests that Baghdad continued renovating and repairing such illegal facilities after barring international inspectors from the country three years ago.

Spokesmen for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department's Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment about Mr. Saeed or whether they had interviewed him.

Charles Duelfer, the former deputy chairman of the United Nations panel once responsible for weapons inspections in Iraq, said that Mr. Saeed's account was consistent with other reports that continue to emerge from Iraq about prohibited weapons activities. "The evidence shows that Iraq has not given up its desire for weapons of mass destruction," said Mr. Duelfer, who was the highest-ranking American on the United Nations panel.

Evading Restrictions

In the interview, Mr. Saeed said Iraq had used companies to purchase equipment with United Nations blessing, and then secretly used the equipment in its unconventional weapons program. One such firm, he said, was Leycochem, a construction materials company based in Cologne, Germany, that has long done business in Baghdad and other Middle Eastern countries.

In a telephone interview today, Jürgen Leyde, the managing director of Leycochem, said that his limited contracts with the Iraqi ministries of oil and industry have nothing to do with unconventional weapons and had been approved by the United Nations.

Separately, Mr. Saeed had told representatives of the Iraqi National Congress, which helped Mr. Saeed flee Iraq last August, that Iraq had tested chemicals and biological agents on Shiite and Kurdish prisoners in 1989 and 1992 at undisclosed sites in the Iraqi desert.

Mr. Saeed said that his work for the government's Military Industrialization Organization and for a company associated with it, Al Fao, continued until just before he was arrested on what he called trumped-up fraud charges and imprisoned last January in Hakamiya, where political prisoners are held. He said that he bribed his way out of jail last summer and fled Iraq after receiving a tip that he would soon be re- arrested.

To support his account, Mr. Saeed provided copies of contracts, including one involving his company, the Iraqi industrialization group and Al Fao.

Mr. Saeed said that several of the production and storage facilities were hidden in the rear of government companies and private villas in residential areas, or underground in what were built to look like water wells which are lined with lead-filled concrete and contain no water. He said that he was shown biological materials from a laboratory that was underneath Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest hospital in Baghdad.

Mr. Saeed said that he had not personally visited the lab and was not certain whether it was a storage facility for germs and other materials to be used in the program or a place where actual research and development was conducted.

"They brought me this material to ask me whether or not it had expired," he said. The Iraqis and another contractor who brought him the material to examine "told me where, and the conditions under which it was stored, and asked me to tell them whether it might still be good, even though it had been kept beyond the expiration date."

Visits to 20 Sites

He said, however, that he had personally visited at least 20 different sites that he believed to have been associated with Iraq's chemical or biological weapons programs, based on the characteristics of the rooms or storage areas and what he had been told about them during his work. Among them were what he described as the "clean room" of a biological facility in 1998 in a residential area known as Al Qrayat.

Most of the time, he said, no research or development was going on at those places while he visited, because his work involved preparing the rooms to be used for such dangerous research. Mr. Saeed said that his company had specialized in filling cement cracks in the floors and walls of such facilities, lining their floors and walls with layers of epoxy paste and other substances that would prevent leaks and enable them to be easily decontaminated, and injecting cement walls and floors with additives to resist chemical corrosion.

Mr. Saeed said that over the years he had also picked up some odd jobs. In 1999, for instance, associates in the Iraqi intelligence service had asked him to help them design a better glue for the Defense Department's hand grenades. "I devised a better glue for them," he said, "which could hold together at higher levels of heat."

Not all of his work was for the military, he said. In 1998, he received part of the contract to build the sauna rooms, swimming pool, and gym of Al Salaam Palace, one of the many lavish, sprawling palaces that Mr. Hussein had built. He said he had also built Mr. Hussein's first whirlpool bath.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/international/middleeast/20DEFE.html

Thanks, cmrockfan.

 

glynch:

Yeah, that's it. It's just a ploy to keep the war going, since your Taliban buddies fell too fast.

The indigie opposition or an Iraqi military officer would succeed Saddam until they had UN/US-supervised elections (if that's what they chose to do). You seriously don't get what's going on - we are not going to try and prop up a regime there, as we are in no mood to unnecessarily exacerbate existing Arab hatred for us by giving them another excuse. They will choose their own government - a choice they don't currently have, thanks to your buddy Saddam.

And if you think that Saddam's WMD aren't a threat... Well, I can only hope that for irony's sake your house is ground zero, because practically everyone else agrees that they are a huge concern. You are one of the few dolts in the country who isn't bothered by the prospect of catching smallpox or breathing in sarin, or having a nuke go off next door...

Next I'm sure you'll roll into a diatribe about how Saddam is a practical leader and wouldn't dare use WMD against us, etc. Go ahead. That would just show again how clueless you are, and prove to me again that you either still haven't studied the situation or you want Saddam to stay in power and build his nukes (still not sure which applies to you).

Where do you come up with this crap? Just to keep the war going, Jeebus...

 

Who are the "far right" people you're talking about, Joe Joe?

Everyone to the right of "nutcase treehugging pacifist commie" is a "far right" person in relation to glynch.

 

rimbaud:

You aren't going to try and tell us that the US created Saddam, are you? C'mon, I dare you.

(you've been taking boy's lies too seriously if you believe the US had a hand in propelling him into power - he didn't become our "friend" until the Iran-hostage situation)

This all could have been avoided if Bush Sr. would have listened to Schwartzkopf and not Powell in 1991.

Schwartzkopf wanted to get Saddam. Powell wanted sanctions and the Iraqis themselves to do it. Didn't work out too well, did it?

Talking about economic revitalization is all fine and dandy, but it's pretty pointless until Saddam's gone, until Iran's mullahs have been replaced, until the Saudi Royal family is gone, etc. Not that we're going to go to war to achieve all of those ends, but until these despotic regimes are replaced by governments who actually care about the well-being of their populations, their economies will suck. No matter how much money is poured into them.

And glynch earns every comment I make in poor taste.

 

Bigman:

I wouldn't think that glynch loves his country a single bit. He is totally incapable of pointing out a single positive thing the US has ever done, but he is ready and willing to point out even the possibility of the absence of altruistic motive or action.

He will try to label himself as the altruistic defender of peace and freedom, but I personally think the reality is that he couldn't care less about saving anyone's lives or defending anyone's freedom. I think he's a PC thug who follows in the footsteps of Berkeley's greatest marxist and anti-US heroes; he will masquerade as a humanitarian, while promoting policies that will get more people killed than necessary. Some people who do this are actually well meaning but naive, but I don't think this is the case with glynch. I mean, he wants to leave Saddam in power and let him have his WMD, so what does that tell you?

My guess is he hates this country. If he loves it, then he's sure got a funny way of showing it.

 

cmrockfan:

Actually, at the time Schwartzkopf did want to go after Saddam, but he has since changed his tune. He and Powell actually had a pretty big feud over it for a couple of years after the war. Since then though, he's found it fairly profitable to get back into Powell's (and the media's) good graces by clinging to the then-administration party line of "well, going after Saddam was never part of the mission"... But at the time he was livid about the decision to leave Saddam in power.