Facing The Unknown
Still more violence in Iraq--and lots more questions
Early on in yet another miserable week in Baghdad, America's dashing proconsul issued an admittedly tentative but determinedly upbeat assessment of the way things were going. The flames of the conflicts west and south of the Iraqi capital had been temporarily damped down, and an uneasy military standoff had taken their place. That prompted Paul Bremer to announce that things, suddenly, seemed "relatively stable." Bremer, sadly, spoke too soon. Hours later, a series of suicide bombings in the southern city of Basra had Bremer not only eating his words but voicing the fear of nearly everyone in Iraq that the violence may continue to escalate as the June 30 deadline nears for handing over limited sovereignty to Iraqis. U.S. intelligence officials suspect the bombings may be the work of al Qaeda associate Abu Musab Zarqawi. "Let's not give the terrorists a victory," Bremer implored, "by being able to derail the process that was agreed to."
If anyone could actually remember what the process was, besides the apparently immutable fact of the June 30 handoff, he or she wasn't saying. And last week, more than ever, there was about the American-led venture in Iraq a decidedly schizophrenic quality. As the corpses were cleared from the streets of Basra, American marines outside Fallujah were warning that a bloody assault on the heavily armed insurgents within the city was virtually "inevitable." The prediction, and the continued standoff near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, added more vitriol to Iraqi criticisms of the American occupiers and had even independent observers remarking that the three-week-long uprising had reduced parts of Iraq to the levels of last summer's postwar lawlessness. Riding the tide of bad news, Spain and Honduras announced their troops were pulling up stakes and heading home, as the Bush team worked to shore up its other coalition partners.
In Washington, however, the talk was of peace. Sort of. There was nothing wrong with Iraq, senior Bush administration officials said, that couldn't be managed with a few more troops and dollars. How much, of course, was apparently anyone's guess. Already, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has extended the tours of 20,000 troops by an additional three months. But Gen. John Abizaid, the overall commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, may decide he needs more, in which case Rumsfeld, who has been saying for months that more troops aren't the answer, now says he'll send more. All clear? As for the money, Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy and an intellectual godfather of the Iraq venture, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that yes, well, the Pentagon would be coming back to Congress seeking funds to pay for both the increased combat operations and the increase in troop levels. Estimates range as high as $70 billion. Wolfowitz, like Rumsfeld, has also been telling anyone who would listen over the past year that more troops weren't the answer in Iraq.
Then, of course, there's the little matter of that June 30 deadline. With less than 10 weeks to go, everyone from Bremer to Rumsfeld to Wolfowitz is projecting a "what, me worry?" attitude. The Alfred E. Neuman impressions are all the more remarkable for the fact that no one--literally no one--can say just to whom the Americans are going to hand over governing authority. The deadline is tight, but President Bush, who spent much of the time before the war dissing the United Nations and much of the time since acting as if it didn't exist, has suddenly changed his tune. Now, Lakhdar Brahimi, a soft-spoken septuagenarian diplomat who is the U.N.'s top gun in Iraq, is the repository of all wisdom, it seems. Brahimi has a plan for a new caretaker government, Bush has pointed out, and that's whom America's going to hand off power to. But there are just a few catches. Bush makes clear that there will be limits on the new government's powers and that U.S. forces will remain the final authority on security matters. And even Brahimi can't say exactly what this new government would look like. Yes, it will have a president, a prime minister, and two vice presidents, or maybe two deputy prime ministers (the details remain to be worked out). And, yes, it will be counseled by a conference of as many as 1,000 Iraqis. George W. Bush promised Iraqis democracy, and if Brahimi's concept works, even without elections, it looks as if they'll be getting at least a version.
"Rose-colored glasses." With so much uncertainty, there has been the predictable talk of quagmire and calls for pulling the plug. But they have been relatively few, and mostly muted. Most Americans, polls show, are still willing to try to get things right in Iraq. It won't be easy. "The work that must be done in Iraq," warns Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "will test our national fortitude." Wolfowitz, in his testimony last week, sounded a similar theme. "I'm not here to paint a rosy picture or to view this through rose-colored glasses," he said. "There are enormous problems."
Voters, clearly, are waiting for some kind of resolution of those problems. A slight majority of Americans now disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq, but they nevertheless believe that he can do a better job than John Kerry. In Indianapolis, where Senator Lugar was once the mayor, Lucinda Kahl, 41, is among the nearly 60 percent of Americans who, according to polls, think the nation is now bogged down in Iraq. "Things are going very bad," she says, sipping on a hot chocolate at a Starbucks. "I don't think we need to put any more troops there, and I think we need to get out the ones we already have there."
Such sentiments could change--quickly--depending on how things go in Iraq. A recent Washington Post -ABC News poll found that 54 percent disapprove of the way the president is handling Iraq, while 45 percent approve. That should worry the White House, though those same respondents, by a 47-to-42 margin, said that they would vote for Bush over Kerry if the election were held now. But having sold the war once to the American people, Bush today finds himself having to sell it over and over again. April was the single most deadly month in Iraq, with 105 American troops killed in the first 22 days.
Bearing burdens. While it is unlikely to prove militarily significant, the violence has changed things. The kidnappings and attacks on westerners are forcing contractors like Siemens and General Electric to suspend some projects and pull workers out, making it difficult for Bush to deploy his most potent weapon--the billions of dollars Congress appropriated to help rebuild the country. Even if the violence abates and the Brahimi plan is put in place, it may be hard to win the support of many ordinary Iraqis. Baghdad will have no control over U.S. troops and few reliable security officers of its own.
For months, U.S. officials had been boasting that there were more Iraqis than Americans working to secure the country. Those assurances provided a glimmer of an exit strategy. But the uprisings have punctured that vision. Most of the Iraqi guards have little training and even less motivation. Many now say the Pentagon leadership insisted, for political reasons, first on using a smaller force than necessary after the war and then on a faster shift to Iraqi security forces than was responsible. Says Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq analyst at the CIA now at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy: "The administration's determination to generate numbers has come at the expense of quality security forces that can actually do the job." Adds Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle: "The cost, both in terms of human life as well as in resources, has become deeply troubling. . . . There is no way that this country ought to be called upon to bear the burden and the responsibility as single-handedly as it has."
Any new money the Pentagon seeks for Iraq would come on the heels of the $87 billion Congress approved last year to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration has consistently said that that money would be enough for the rest of the year and that there would be no request for additional war funding until January, conveniently, right after the election. But the recent violence has changed those calculations. Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says keeping those 20,000 troops in Iraq for another three months will cost roughly $700 million. The Pentagon, he added, may overspend by some $4 billion by the end of the year. Another thing no one in the administration anticipated just a year ago.
With Kevin Whitelaw and Marc D. Allan
This story appears in the May 3, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.