VOL. XLVI
No 14
7
The Political Scene
American forces have reached the outskirts of Baghdad, signaling the beginning of the end game in Iraq. Accusations by senior US officials that Syria and Iran have intervened in the war have fuelled fears that Iraq is only the first target on the American hit list. US Secretary of State Colin Powell has visited Ankara and Brussels in an attempt to ease strained US relations with Turkey and the EU.
At The Gates Of Baghdad
With the arrival of US forces on the outskirts of Baghdad on 3 April, the end game in the American invasion of Iraq had clearly begun. It was less clear, not to say totally obscure, what direction it might take, how long it might last and what its political – as opposed to military – outcome might be. In the preceding days, the swiftness and ease of the American advance suggested to some military observers that the Iraqis had fallen back rather than risk a conventional military confrontation with the Americans, with the intention of staking everything on a Stalingrad-style defense of the capital whose cost in civilian and military casualties would be too high for the Americans politically. Certainly nothing in President Saddam Husain’s history suggests an unwillingness to use his own population in such an attempt to postpone the inevitable. The Americans for their part are probably hoping that, with the writing on the wall, the regime will be brought down one way or another before they have to decide what to do next. The immediate outlook, therefore, is for a pause as the US hopes for the best and brings up reinforcements. After that, though, if there is no surrender, the Americans will have to decide between a prolonged siege of the Iraqi capital which could in the end be politically costly and a street-by-street battle for the city which might be shorter but equally expensive.
Rumsfeld Accuses Syria And Iran
It is an article of faith for the civilian hawks in Washington that regime change in Iraq is only the first step in a much larger reconfiguration of the Middle East to suit American (or at least neoconservative) purposes. As Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute – the Washington think tank of choice for the neoconservative hawks – put it on 21 March, shortly after the war began, “this is a battle in a longer war. Iraq is not the war. And the war is a regional war, and we cannot be successful in Iraq if we only do Iraq alone. And I think that the terror countries bordering Iraq, namely Iran and Syria, know that.” Such remarks might be dismissed as fantasies resulting from spending too much time in an enclosed environment, but for the fact that senior US officials have taken to accusing Iran and Syria of intervening in Iraq and threatening them with unspecified consequences. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got the ball rolling on 28 March when he claimed that the US had information that “shipments of military supplies,” including night vision goggles, “have been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq…These deliveries pose a direct threat to the lives of coalition forces. We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable for such shipments.” (Just where M. Rumsfeld obtained his information is something of a mystery, since on 31 March a “senior US commander” in Qatar was quoted by AFP as saying that US forces had so far encountered no Iraqis on the battlefield carrying night vision goggles. Nonetheless, Mr Rumsfeld reiterated on 3 April that “we have seen Syria continue conducting itself in the same way it did prior to when I said what I said.”) The US Defense Secretary also said that hundreds of members of the Badr Corps – the military wing of the Iraqi Shi'a opposition group the Supreme Council for the Islamic revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – had moved into Iraq from Iran. “The Badr Corps is trained, equipped and directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and we will hold the Iranian government responsible for their actions and will view Badr Corps activity inside Iraq as unhelpful,” he added. A Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman replied on the same day that Mr Rumsfeld was “covering up the failure of the American forces…by accusing other parties of having passed military equipment to Iraq,” while Iranian government spokesman Abdullah Ramezanzadeh said on 29 March that “the Islamic Revolutionary Guards have no military connection with the Badr Brigade and SCIRI…We have stressed our policy of active neutrality time and time again since the war began.”
As the highest-profile hawk in the US administration, Mr Rumsfeld might perhaps be expected to indulge in a certain amount of bellicose rhetoric, but it was much more alarming in a regional perspective when Secretary of State Colin Powell – once, it might be recalled, the leading dove in Washington – also jumped on the anti-Syrian bandwagon. Mr Powell told a meeting of the Israeli lobby group AIPAC on 30 March that “Syria now faces a critical choice. Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Husain, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences.” The Syrians replied, perhaps somewhat irrelevantly, that Mr Powell, “like the whole world, knows that Syria has chosen to be with international legitimacy represented by the UN and the Security Council.” But if the Americans’ belligerent statements did not seem to worry Syria unduly, it appeared that they had thoroughly alarmed the Americans’ only real partner in their “coalition of the willing.” UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw when asked on 2 April whether he was worried that the impression was being created that Syria and Iran were next in line, replied: “It would worry me if it were true. It is not true, and we would have nothing whatever to do with an approach like that.”
Powell Patches Fences With Turkey
If Mr Powell had gone to Turkey before the 1 March session of parliament that turned down an American request to stage 62,000 troops through Turkey to northern Iraq, it is possible that the Turks might have acceded to the American request. Instead, his hastily scheduled 1 April visit to Ankara was clearly an exercise in limiting the considerable damage that has been done to Turkish-American relations by the blunders – on both sides – that led to the current state of affairs. In this fairly limited task he appears to have been successful, since the visit produced an agreement on the passage through Turkey of humanitarian supplies and food, fuel and medical supplies – but not, it would seem, weapons and ammunition – for US troops airlifted into northern Iraq. The Americans may also have received qualified assurances about Turkey’s intentions in north Iraq, since Mr Powell said on 2 April that “there is no need for any movement of Turkish forces across the border. We have been able to demonstrate to our Turkish friends that we are monitoring the situation closely, we have it under control.” What the Turks received in return is less clear, although a senior Turkish official was quoted by AFP as saying that the US had given a guarantee that Iraq’s Kurds would not be allowed to seize either Kirkuk or Mosul and would not advance beyond “a certain line.” Whatever the details, both sides were determined to regard the agreement as a starting point for the refurbishment of relations, and Turkish presidential spokesman Tacan Ildem was cautiously upbeat when he said on 3 April that “we are at a point where we can look with more confidence at the strength of our relations in future.” But Mr Powell’s visit was clearly only the first step in a process which is going to take a great deal more time before relations are anything like as close as before.
And Disagrees With EU On UN Role
If there is to be an international consensus on the post-war reconstitution and reconstruction of Iraq – and to judge from the scale of the task, there will need to be – some sort of effort will have to be made to mend the gaping rifts created elsewhere in the fabric of post Cold War international relations by the war. Yet there are already signs of differences between the Americans and the UK on the key issue of the post-war role of the UN. Last week, Mr Powell made it clear that Washington favors only a limited role for the UN in post-war Baghdad, saying that “we didn’t take on this huge burden with our coalition partners not to be able to have a significant dominating control over how it unfolds in the future.” But on 1 April British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw adopted a very different approach to the issue, saying that “I very much hope that following the removal of Saddam Husain’s regime, the UN will have a leading role in organizing a conference to bring together representatives from all sections of Iraqi society. The objective of such a conference would be to place the responsibility for decisions about Iraq’s political and economic future firmly in the hands of Iraq’s own people.” Mr Straw also indicated that the UK would seek new UN resolutions to affirm Iraq’s territorial integrity and endorse an “appropriate post-conflict administration.”
Given the US neoconservatives’ contemptuous dismissal of the UN as irrelevant, Mr Straw’s remarks – which appear to place the UK much nearer to the EU mainstream than the US on the issue – are unlikely to find much favor with them. Mr Powell, who of late has avoided antagonizing the civilian hawks in the Pentagon, was much more vague about the UN role as he headed to Brussels on 2 April to meet with his EU and NATO counterparts, saying that “I think there is a consensus that says the UN has a role to play. What we have to work out is what exactly is the nature of that role.” Nor does the Brussels meeting appear to have done much to narrow these differences. The EU, insofar as it is able to agree on anything at the moment, favors a “central” role for the UN – as French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin put it after “friendly and frank” talks with Mr Powell, there is a “very broad consensus” on giving the UN a central role. The Russians are clearly part of this consensus, since Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said before meeting with Mr Powell on 3 April that “we are certain, it was our opinion before the war and it remains so, that the solution to the situation and the Iraqi problem must be found under the auspices of the UN.” But neither the Europeans nor the Russians had much luck with Mr Powell, who told a press conference after his meetings that “I think the coalition has to play the leading role in determining the way forward.”
Charles Snow