Pentagon’s Free Rein Raises Tensions in Administration

At the start of the war with Iraq, President Bush put the Pentagon on a long leash. He said he wasn’t going to micromanage military commanders, that they could make “operational” decisions on their own.

Last week, one of those decisions was to airlift a controversial Iraqi-exile leader -- Ahmad Chalabi -- into his native country, along with hundreds of his armed supporters. To many in Washington and overseas, the airlift looked like a political move to anoint a new Iraqi president in defiance of the White House, which has been decidedly cool toward Chalabi.

The question many observers are now asking is whether the president made the Pentagon’s leash too long -- or even whether the Department of Defense has slipped off it altogether.

“It looks like bureaucratic freelancing that is effectively king-making in Iraq,” said Peter Singer, a national security analyst at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “That’s very dangerous.”

The Chalabi affair is only the latest episode in a long-standing feud between parts of the Bush administration -- primarily the departments of Defense and State -- over Iraq policy in particular and foreign policy in general. But it is raising eyebrows higher than previous disputes because of the perception that the Defense Department is now not only defying the wishes of the State Department, but also may be defying the wishes of the White House.

“I think you have people trying to create facts on the ground: Chalabi’s back. Don’t ask too many questions,” said a former government official who, like many interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified. “The Pentagon took the ball and ran, and they are trying to take it as far down the field as they can.”

The crucial issue, he said, is whether the White House is following a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with the Pentagon.

“There have been times when [Secretary of Defense Donald H.] Rumsfeld has gotten out ahead of the administration, and no one has seemed to mind,” another former government official said.

Chalabi is a favorite of a group of civilian, neoconservative policymakers in the Pentagon that include Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.

But Chalabi is looked upon with suspicion by the State Department and CIA, who see him as a self-promoter without much support inside Iraq. After he landed April 6 in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, there were reports of anti-Chalabi protests.

“There is almost a willful ignorance by some of the civilians in the Pentagon about the difficulties of nation-building,” Singer said.

In public, White House officials have taken a position on Chalabi closer to that of the State Department, saying that exiles have much to offer their homeland, but that they “have a lot of work to do” to earn the confidence of their countrymen.

White House officials acknowledged that Bush did not explicitly approve the Chalabi airlift in advance.

The president, aides say, was briefed days earlier that the Pentagon was planning to help repatriate Iraqi exiles, often called “free Iraqis” in the administration’s lexicon.

What the president was not told was exactly which free Iraqis were going to get a Pentagon ride. The president left the question of who, when and how to the Pentagon.

The term “free Iraqis” has been used loosely and variously by Bush administration officials. Originally, it referred to a group of exiles in training in Hungary to assist U.S. military forces as translators and guides. Only a few dozen completed the training and none was involved in the airlift. More recently, administration officials have used the term “free Iraqis” to refer to exiles, and sometimes to refer to both exiles and any Iraqis in territory “liberated” by coalition forces.

Whether or not terminology was to blame, at least some senior White House staff members were surprised to learn after the fact that the Pentagon airlift of free Iraqis ferried only Chalabi and his supporters.

Still, one White House official said that no department or agency was acting independently of the White House.

“The policy is the president’s policy,” he said. “I’m sure there are certain people in various places and agencies who are going to want to create this perception that they are running things and that this is their own social science experiment. But it’s just not the case.”

Be that as it may, observers say, any perception of disagreement between parts of the government is damaging.

“It makes it much more difficult to negotiate overseas because other nations try to split you apart or play one off against the other,” said David Gergen, who served as a top advisor to Republican and Democratic presidents alike. “It’s clearly in the president’s interest to knock heads together and stop the squabbling.”

A certain amount of tension is to be expected. In nation-building, there is a trade-off between efficiency and legitimacy, one former government official noted.

The most efficient way to form a new government is simply to install one, even if it comes to be seen as a puppet. The most legitimate way is to have a U.N.-sponsored process that results in internationally recognized national elections, even if it winds up taking a long time.

In this tug-of-war, the Defense Department tends to favor efficiency, and the State Department tends to favor legitimacy. But because the Pentagon is running the war, the balance of power at the moment is tipped in its direction.

“In all war situations, the locus of activity, the focus of power, shifts to the Pentagon. That’s as it should be,” one of the former government officials said. But with the war winding down, “it’s extremely important that the center of gravity shift back to the National Security Council.”

The council is supposed to play the coordinating role between the three major foreign-policy agencies -- State, Defense and the CIA. But in this administration, observers say, the council has become more advisory and less of a referee.

As a result, the feud is likely to continue until Bush himself steps forward to end it.

“I’m absolutely certain the president is unhappy about the publicity,” Gergen said. “I can’t imagine he’s going to let this go on much longer.”

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Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.