An Iraqi Campaign Faces Many Hurdles

Vice President Dick Cheney’s ambitious 11-nation swing through the Middle East, which begins today, has as one of its critical goals lining up a consensus on what to do about Iraq. But that doesn’t mean the United States will launch an operation to oust the regime of President Saddam Hussein any time soon.

The deeper the Bush administration gets into sorting through the options, the more daunting the obstacles appear, U.S. officials concede. A conventional military campaign, if that is the route adopted, could be far more difficult than any U.S. operation in recent decades, including the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The growing belief among experts is that any serious military campaign would be difficult to launch before this fall, and perhaps not until much later.

“The level of difficulty and risk and the potential casualties will be much higher and will require a lot more planning than either Afghanistan or Operation Desert Storm,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former National Security Council staff member now at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.

Virtually every angle of the prospective operation faces major challenges.

Militarily, because of downsizing since the Cold War, the U.S. has only about half the number of divisions it did when it waged war against Iraq in 1991--and it’s still deeply involved in Afghanistan. The war in Central Asia will have to wind down before the administration can launch any serious campaign in the Gulf, analysts contend.

The broader war on terrorism also will have to reach a stage in which Washington feels confident that the major threat from the Al Qaeda terrorist group and its allies is under control.

“Imagine if a terrorist attack occurred while the U.S. was focused on Iraq,” Pollack said. “People would crucify this administration and ask why it didn’t pay more attention to the folks in Al Qaeda rather than the folks in Baghdad.”

The military also must resupply precision-guided munitions and other war materiel rapidly being depleted in Afghanistan, a process likely to take six to eight months, defense experts say.

But the most difficult challenge will be what the administration sees as a crucial preliminary step toward reducing the length and human cost of a U.S.-led mission: trying to neutralize significant numbers of the Iraqi military.

“The big question is: Can the Iraqi military be reached in some way to get them to defect or at least sit in their barracks? Is there a way to get some of them to help us rather than hinder us?” said Whitley Bruner, a former CIA officer in Iraq. “This has not been explored in any systematic way.”

On the diplomatic front, Washington must carry through with two ongoing efforts at the United Nations involving Iraq if it hopes to prevent a major international backlash. A resolution on streamlining current economic sanctions--in the hopes of increasing the flow of goods to the Iraqi people while curtailing their government’s ability to acquire war materiel--is not expected to be voted on before June.

The bigger variable is to get a team of weapons inspectors back into the country, as President Bush has demanded. In the past, Hussein has allowed inspectors in at the last minute to avoid military action against his regime--then stalled in providing access to information and sites suspected of being linked to weapons of mass destruction.

The toughest assignment for the administration, however, could be winning the support of other countries.

Much of the world has made clear its opposition to U.S. intervention to oust Hussein. The administration’s best hope, analysts say, is to construct a “silent coalition” of countries willing to support the operation privately, while persuading other nations to keep their opposition to themselves.

But even that lukewarm level of support could bear costs. Arab allies are pressing for movement on the Palestinian-Israeli front before they even discuss Iraq.

The old Mideast rule of thumb, that events on the ground overtake diplomacy, has already altered Cheney’s mission. Iraq was supposed to be the main topic of his agenda, but that has been redefined by the escalating bloodshed between Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.

All this while Afghanistan’s future continues to consume the Bush foreign policy team. The U.S. may need to help sort out the shattered country’s postwar period, as discordant ethnic and religious groups hold a loya jirga, or grand council; write a new constitution; and create a governing body to replace the interim administration. Any deterioration or internal strife there could divert U.S. attention, analysts say.

On the political front, the administration would need to mobilize a wide range of Iraqis to help manage a post-Hussein regime and ensure that the U.S. did not have to micro-manage the aftermath for a long period--something that would be unacceptable at home, in Iraq and in the wider world.

Worries About Life After Hussein

“The Iraq problem isn’t solved simply by eliminating Saddam and his family; you also have to find someone who will release people from living under a regime of fear,” said Judith Yaphe, a former intelligence analyst now at the National Defense University in Washington.

This step will be pivotal to winning support from the Arab world, which is most nervous about the potential for internal chaos and regional instability with Hussein gone.

“People are far less interested in the mechanics of ousting him than in what happens after Saddam,” said Bruner, the former CIA officer. “And this administration has not yet looked in a systematic way at what likely scenario is best for creating stability. It doesn’t want to occupy Iraq, but it also doesn’t want chaos as it backed the wrong horse.”

Yet Iraq’s modern history is riddled with unstable coalitions, coups and counter-coups until a strong leader emerged. And none of them has been democratic.

Iraq’s neighbors want the country of 22 million people to have a strong central government, for it to avoid crumbling into its three social groups: the Kurds in the north, the Shiite Muslims in the south and the Sunni Muslims concentrated in the center and around the capital.

“There’s a real danger that strong tribal and other influences will try to carve out zones of influence,” Yaphe said. “The people of Iraq have a complicated set of relationships that will dictate how long the United States might have to stay--in just the kind of situation the military doesn’t like.”

The greater the U.S. role in shaping the post-Hussein period, the less successful the aftermath is likely to be, according to Yaphe. “Our choices may not be acceptable to most Iraqis,” she said.

Potential for Regional Instability

The issue is important because the impact of a regime change in Iraq is far more extensive than in Afghanistan, Pollack said. If Afghanistan’s transformation collapsed, the country would become what it was before: a broken state. But if Iraq collapsed, that could destabilize the entire oil-rich Persian Gulf region, with a rippling impact around the world.

“It could become the Lebanon of the Gulf, with widespread impact on Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey, all countries we care about,” Pollack said.

Complicating this process will be the diverse visions Iraqis and their neighbors have for post-Hussein rule.

Economically, preparations are needed to keep oil markets from being disrupted, especially as the world struggles to pull out of a recession, analysts say. That requires an array of moves, from ensuring that other countries will make up for any cutoff of Iraqi oil to deploying troops quickly around the oil fields near the city of Kirkuk in the north and near the Kuwaiti border in the south to prevent Hussein from ordering their destruction, as he did in 1991 to Kuwait’s fields.

None of which takes into account the wild cards, such as the weather in Iraq and politics back home.

The scorching summer heat, particularly in the south, could affect weapons systems and troops. Heavy rains that begin in mid-November could slow armored vehicles.

And with the approach of November’s U.S. congressional elections, neither major American party may want to see the early stages of a military campaign weighing on voters’ minds when control of both the Senate and the House is up for grabs.