U.S. intentions toward Iraq came front and center again last week with an informed leak from a U.S. military planning document including some detail on the subject. The leak and the document itself present at least two issues. The first is the indication the leak gives of the division of opinion within the U.S. government on the subject. The second -- again -- is the basic wisdom of an Iraq attack, now or later.
That the United States has prepared a concept paper for an attack on Iraq is perfectly normal. The Defense Department would be remiss if it weren't making and constantly updating such contingency plans, for China and Russia as well as for "axis of evil" states like Iraq.
The fact that a version of the contents was revealed to the press is subject to various interpretations. One theory has it that it was leaked in hopes that the level of difficulty involved in such an invasion would serve to head off the pro-Iraq-attack group within the Bush administration, mobilizing opinion against such a war.
The concept paper indicates that 250,000 U.S. troops would be needed and that the attack would include an air, sea and land assault on Iraq itself. In fact, 250,000 is probably low, given that the United States amassed 550,000 troops in the region before attacking Iraq in 1991. The plan envisages support from eight other countries, none of which has been formally approached. The United States had 31 coalition partners in the 1990-91 Gulf war.
Two weeks of Pentagon war games in March revealed the strains such a war would put on American military capacity worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of members of the National Guard and the Reserves would need to be called to active duty, for example.
A second theory as to why the plan was floated has it serving as an incentive to the United Nations to put more heat on Iraq to agree to a return to weapons inspections, suspended three years ago. Iraq has tied a renewal of weapons inspections to removal of economic sanctions. The U.N. Security Council eased sanctions May 14, keeping them in place on items with military uses but removing them on nonmilitary products. Saudi Arabia opened its border with Iraq -- closed since 1990 -- to normal trade in late May. Two days of talks between the United Nations and Iraq about weapons inspections ended unsuccessfully July 5, but will resume later in the summer.
An attack on Iraq at this time, in our view, remains a bad idea. Iraq is not Taliban Afghanistan. None of America's allies in the Gulf war supports the idea of a new attack. No one has a coherent idea of a successor regime in Iraq to an overthrown Saddam Hussein, now 65. Even the Kurds, traditional enemies of the Baghdad regime, oppose a U.S. attack, recalling how the United States under President George H.W. Bush encouraged them to revolt against the Baghdad regime in 1991, then sat on its hands while Saddam Hussein mounted a crushing retaliatory attack against them.
Finally, to attack Iraq is to mobilize all Arab nations against America, putting off for some time any chance of reaching a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. At that point, it would be the United States and Israel against the house, without even the Europeans on the American side. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon advocated this approach during his recent visit to Washington.
If avoiding such a trap means not attacking Iraq at this time, the United States should continue to develop a good plan to keep on the shelf, close at hand, but not unilaterally attacking. In the meantime, the U.N. effort to renew its inspection of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons status should be pressed forward vigorously.
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