The War Has Begun in the GOP

Is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq an immediate threat to the safety of the United States? President Bush says yes; Brent Scowcroft, his father’s former national security advisor, says no.

Should the United States make its goal the ouster of Hussein? Vice President Dick Cheney says yes; former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger says maybe not.

And should the United States invade Iraq without first gaining authority from the United Nations? Aides to Bush and Cheney say yes; former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who also served under Bush’s father, says no.

All summer long, the debate over U.S. intervention in Iraq has whirled into full force. If the answers aren’t yet clear, at least the questions increasingly are.

And so far, the debate is almost entirely between two camps of Bush Republicans, with Democrats on the sidelines.

One camp, often known as “neoconservatives,” includes the president, the vice president, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others in office.

The second camp, historically dubbed “realists,” includes Baker and Scowcroft.

But the debate has heated up enough for more pungent terms to arise. Neoconservative columnist William Kristol, once an aide to the first Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, derided Scowcroft and his ilk as “appeasers”--a fighting word in foreign policy circles. Scowcroft refused to respond, at least on the record, but his friend Lawrence S. Eagleburger--another former secretary of State--has dismissed the neocons as “chest-thumpers.”

Most Democratic leaders haven’t said much except to urge President Bush to consult with Congress before he goes to war. “They’re sitting back laughing,” said a top GOP figure in the debate. “If we’re fighting with each other, they don’t want to get in the way.”

But they may be missing out.

“This is a vitally important debate--a debate over the difficult question of when preemptive military action is justified,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It turns out that it’s hard to take the United States to war ... and it ought to be. But that difficulty may be a sign of the health of the American system.”

Bush and his aides have said that they welcome the debate, and have emphasized that the president has not yet decided what military course to take. “It would be a mistake to read what we have been saying as a sign that some kind of action is imminent,” a White House official said Tuesday.

Here are the principal points of the debate so far:

* Is Iraq an immediate threat to the United States?

All year long, the president has warned that Hussein might give chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda--but the evidence of links between Hussein and Al Qaeda has been slim.

In a speech in Nashville on Monday, Cheney emphasized a different side of the Iraqi threat. If Iraq develops nuclear weapons, he said, “Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.”

That appeared to be a response to Scowcroft, who argued in the Wall Street Journal that the threat has been exaggerated.

“Saddam is a familiar dictatorial aggressor, with traditional goals,” he wrote. “There is little evidence to indicate that the United States itself is an object of his aggression. Rather, Saddam’s problem with the U.S. appears to be that we stand in the way of his ambitions. He seeks weapons of mass destruction not to arm terrorists, but to deter us from intervening.”

If Hussein acquires nuclear weapons, Scowcroft argued, the U.S. should act then. But for now, the administration’s war on terrorism should come first--and invading Iraq would disrupt that effort.

* Should the United States insist on overthrowing Hussein, or can Iraq be contained through new and tougher U.N. weapons inspections?

Bush and his aides have decided that the only way to ensure that Hussein will not attack his neighbors, or use weapons of mass destruction, is to topple his government. “It’s the stated policy of this government to have a regime change,” Bush said last month.

One of the few Democrats to speak out at length on the issue, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has argued that regime change is not necessary--and that U.S. aims could be achieved by sending U.N. arms inspection teams back into Iraq.

“I believe that Iraq and Saddam Hussein are contained pretty well within this sanctions box,” Albright said last week on PBS’ “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” referring to the U.N.’s military and economic sanctions. “ ... I think that it would be very good if we could get the inspectors back in.”

Many of the Republican “realists” have taken a middle position, arguing that the United States should try inspections first and resort to war only if they fail.

Kissinger, secretary of State under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has argued that U.N. inspections would either weaken Hussein’s regime or give the U.S. a stronger case for military action.

“If it were possible to devise an inspection system that Saddam would accept, and if it were possible to implement it and to enforce it on him, I think that would bring about ... a significant regime change,” he said on PBS. “But I do not believe that that is possible without the threat of war.”

But Cheney dismissed the idea: “On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box.”

* If the United States decides to invade Iraq, should it seek authority from the United Nations?

Bush and his aides have promised to “consult” with Congress and with U.S. allies before launching military action, but they have made no promise to bring the issue before the U.N. Security Council.

Unofficially, many neoconservatives dismiss the U.N. as a needless impediment to U.S. action and reject the idea that an American president should seek some outside blessing before acting against an enemy like Hussein.

But the “realists” argue that seeking U.N. authority is a good idea, in part because it would help persuade other countries to join in.

Baker, who said he supports the goal of “regime change,” argued in a column in the New York Times: “Seeking new authorization [from the U.N.] now is necessary, politically and practically, and will help build international support.”

“What [the realists] are arguing is not a case against preemptive action, but a case against unilateralism,” Mandelbaum said. “The United States fought a lot of major wars in the last century, but none of them without allies.”

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.