Associated Press. 22July 2002.
No Iraq War Plan Yet, but Tough Talk in
Suggests the First Battle Has Begun.
WASHINGTON -- Saber rattling in Washington and defiant warnings from Baghdad may be the early stages of political and psychological maneuvering that would be a prelude to a second Gulf War.
Even administration officials are talking in terms of a postwar Iraq.
"What's going to come afterwards," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said last week, is not only going to benefit ordinary Iraqis but will also "remove a great danger" to Americans.
"I think it will be another act of liberation," he said.
Some outside the administration see a deliberate psychological aim behind such talk.
"We may already be executing a plan," says retired Army Gen. Fred Woerner, a former commander in chief of U.S. forces in South America.
"Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something" to justify a U.S. attack or to make concessions? he asks.
"Somebody knows, but I sure don't."
Although the U.S. military has thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the Gulf area and theoretically could launch an attack at any time, there are no strong signs that war is imminent.
Bush, while talking tough about Iraq, has not yet fully consulted America's skeptical allies, enlisted political support from Congress or prepared the American public for the risks inherent in a new war.
Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes Iraq knows it cannot win a conventional war against the United States, whose military strength has in many ways increased since the 1991 Gulf War while Iraq's has slipped or decayed. Therefore, it will search for ways to deny Arab support for direct U.S. military action, he said.
"The key battle is already underway and is largely political," Cordesman wrote in an assessment early this month.
"Iraq's best strategy is to defuse the political momentum for a major U.S. attack," he wrote.
Iraq's recent accommodations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait may be part of such a strategy. Baghdad has pledged to respect Kuwait's sovereignty and to restore full relations with the country it invaded in 1990.
Without mentioning
News reports in recent weeks have described planning for a
major military operation in
Cordesman thinks Iraq may reach some sort of arrangement with the United Nations to allow for a resumption of weapons inspections, which ended in December 1998. This could make it harder for Bush to make a case for attacking Iraq without a provocation or evidence that it has nuclear weapons.
Saddam is publicly defiant. In a speech July 17 marking Iraq's national day, he said foreign schemes to overthrow him would fail.
"The wind will blow away foreign rattling as the noise of an evil tyrant," he said.
Short of a large-scale military invasion, the United States already may be undertaking covert action inside Iraq to weaken Saddam's government, according to Ivo Daalder, a Brookings Institution analyst.
"I'm sure they're trying covert (action), including certain special forces," Daalder said.
"They may well hope that that's going to resolve it, but I wouldn't count on it."
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