Indystar.com:Calling the plays in Iraq

[TK]

http://www.indystar.com/articles/3/091261-4263-021.html

William Raspberry

Calling the plays in Iraq

November 10, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Think of an NFL owner who knows less about pro football than, say, Dan Snyder. Then imagine him turning the decision-making over to a coach who is long on theory and lacking in actual professional experience -- like Steve Spurrier, for instance. Now, toss in a series of embarrassing setbacks and what have you got?

What you've got is either the Washington Redskins or Iraq -- the key difference being that only one of them involves destabilizing a good chunk of the world, wrecking the U.S. Treasury and an escalating number of body bags, discreetly hidden from TV cameras.

It'll probably sound like Bush-bashing, but it is becoming clearer every day -- it became crystal, with David Rieff's exhaustive piece in The New York Times Magazine of Nov. 2 -- that we went into Iraq with no postwar plan save unfounded optimism. And now, we don't know what to do next.

George Bush is not a dumb man. But before he decided to seek the presidency, he was willfully ignorant of international affairs -- or at least strangely incurious. His mind became a blank slate for neocon ideologues, whose audacious goal was to reshape the geography of the Middle East, and the 9/11 attacks gave them their opening.

What the Rieff piece makes clear is how methodically the neocons, mostly in the Defense Department, managed to strip influence and power from the experienced and knowledgeable pragmatists. The former already were enthralled by an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi. And it was mostly on Chalabi's reassurances the administration came to anticipate that, once Saddam Hussein was out of the way, the postwar pacification and democratization of Iraq would be a stroll in the park -- and all of it paid for by Iraq's oil riches. Gun 'n' fun, Spurrier might have called it.

Except it didn't happen that way. A carefully planned and executed war has been followed by a whistling-in-the-dark attempt to set things right -- so far without much outside help or any expectation that Iraqi oil will pay for any of it.

Someone has put on the Internet a fascinating passage from the first President Bush's memoir, "A World Transformed." The senior Bush is explaining why he didn't pursue and kill Hussein at the end of the Gulf War:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream . . . and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq . . . (t)here was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

One wonders if the present executive ever bothered to read his father's book.

The problem now is how to get out before an unfortunate and deadly mess becomes a full-blown catastrophe.

What now, boss?

Raspberry is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him via e-mail at: willrasp@washpost.com