The fact about the move against Iraq is that, because he does not want to deal with the Israel lobby, President George W. Bush is looking for a war. He tried to inveigle Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into peace negotiations. Sharon totally ignored Bush’s gesture and has taken increasingly belligerent actions to forestall real peace negotiations of any kind.
Instead of making it clear that there would be no more money from US taxpayers for Sharon’s war against the Palestinians until peace negotiations were under way, Bush simply ignored the subject. Although there still is a very outside chance that Bush will stick to his guns, more and more it seems that the Israel lobby will have its way and Sharon’s war will continue for at least another year. If that is indeed the case, Bush may feel he needs to start another war quickly in order to cover up his failure of nerve.
Thus the Pentagon hawks’ war party, looking for red meat in the form of Iraq, is well under way. The people who have touted the war thus far are a small but powerful minority. They are Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, chairman of the unofficial Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon; and Douglas Feith, the Department of Defense undersecretary of policy. Vice President Richard Cheney is also a member of the war party, and possibly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well.
On the other side are a large number of Pentagon career officials still on active duty. Along with them are many State Department members and, of course, Secretary of State Colin Powell. Intriguingly, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice seems unwilling to speak up on the matter, which seems to have become her trademark. She appears to be a Bush loyalist who merely provides the intellectual input to make Bush’s own somewhat incoherent thoughts more polished.
A heavyweight in favor of dealing with the war on terrorism and calming the battle between the Israelis and Palestinians before moving on to other problems such as Saddam Hussein is retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the official President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Although Wolfowitz and Perle get the publicity, thanks to the well-honed Israel lobby, Scowcroft has much more intellectual weight and experience than the Wolfowitz-Perle cabal.
If the Iraqi president stops bargaining, the debate could end just as suddenly as it began. Even if he decides to tough it out as he did in 1990, the war party nevertheless will still have to prove its case.
Except for Israel, there are no obvious US allies with whom the war party can take cover. As it stands, it seems unlikely that any of the 22 Arab League members will join in the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle-Feith crusade, meaning there will be no Middle East bases from which to launch a US attack. Turkey might be induced to support the US war party. That would create many problems within the country itself, however, given the unstable situation with the Kurds, and Turkey’s serious internal situation. It is, therefore, unlikely that, given Turkey’s European Union ambitions, Ankara would do anything to imperil that prospect.
This writer believes that Turkey will eventually opt out of any such coalition. The United States would then be all alone — except, of course, for Israel.
There are other formidable objections to be overcome by the war party. Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies paid 80 percent of the Gulf war expenses. The United States and other Western countries had to come up with only 20 percent. This time, however, the US would have to provide virtually all the bankrolling.
In the just-concluded Senate debate, there were many intangibles to the cost of sustaining a war against Iraq, so that estimates are very hard to gauge. The “nation-building” aspect of post-attack Iraq might be relatively limited if the US got some serious support in the three territories that constitute Iraq — the Kurds in the north, the Sunni in central Iraq and the Shiite in the south. Or it might turn out that these areas will fall into violent quarrels that take many years to pacify. One of the problems is that, to date, Iraqi opposition groups have not jelled into a viable force. Nor is it clear when that might happen.
There is still much work to be done. One thing is certain, however: if Washington tries to speed up all this preparatory work just to find an excuse to avoid dealing with the Israel
The Afghanistan war was a windfall for Ariel Sharon, because it delayed making peace with Palestine. Now the attempt to speed up a confrontation with Iraq once again provides an excuse for delay with the Palestine problem. If sanity prevails, however, the Saddam Hussein problem probably will have to wait for another time, given the lack of US allies.
No doubt George W. Bush will have to look again for another war in lieu of dealing with the Israel lobby, which Bush so desperately wants to avoid. But the Israel lobby will not go away. The only thing that will stop the endless succession of one disaster after another will be to stop the money flow that Sharon needs to keep his war going.
— Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
