I have recently interviewed several dozen people about what could be expected in Iraq after the US dislodges Saddam Hussein. I talked to spies, Arabists, oil company officials, diplomats, scholars, policy experts and many active and retired soldiers. They were from the US, Europe and the middle east. Some firmly supported a pre-emptive war against Iraq; more were opposed.
I began my research with the view that forcing "regime change" on Iraq was our era's grim historical necessity: starting a war would be bad, but waiting to have war brought to us would be worse. This view depended to some degree on trusting that the US government had information not available to the public about how close Saddam is to having usable weapons of mass destruction.
The importance of imagination in thinking about war was stressed to me by Merrill McPeak, a former US air force chief with misgivings about a pre-emptive attack. When America entered the Vietnam war, in which McPeak flew combat missions, the public couldn't imagine how badly war against a "weak" foe might turn out. Since that time, and because of Vietnam, we have generally overestimated the risks of combat. America's small wars in Grenada, Haiti, and Panama have turned out better than many experts predicted. The larger ones, in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, have too. The Somalia episode is the main exception-when fighting stateless foes, we have under-estimated our vulnerabilities.
In 1990, as the US prepared to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, McPeak was air force chief of staff. He thought that war was necessary and advocated heavy bombing in Iraq. Now he opposes an invasion, largely because of how hard it is to imagine the consequences of America's first pre-emptive war-and its first large war since the Spanish-American war in which it would have few or no allies. Wars change history in ways no one can foresee.
Some members of the war party initially urged a quick in-and-out attack. Their model was the three-part formula of the "Powell doctrine." First, line up clear support-from America's political leadership, if not internationally. Then assemble enough force to leave no doubt about the outcome. Before the war starts, agree on how it will end and when to leave. This model has become unrealistic. Getting Saddam out will mean bringing in men, machinery, and devastation. If the US launched a big tank-borne campaign, tens of thousands of soldiers, with their ponderous logistics trail, would be in the middle of a foreign country when the fighting ended. If the US military relied on air power against Baghdad, it would kill many civilians before it killed Saddam. One way or another, America would leave a large footprint on Iraq, which would take time to remove.
And, having taken dramatic action, we would be seen-by the world and ourselves, by al-Jazeera and CNN-as responsible for the consequences. "It is quite possible that if we went in, took out Saddam, and then left quickly, the result would be an extremely bloody civil war," says William Galston of the University of Maryland, who was a marine during the Vietnam war. "That blood would be on our hands." Most people I spoke to, whether in favour of war or not, recognised that military action is a barbed hook: once it goes in, there is no quick release.
Postwar problems in Afghanistan have underscored a growing consensus on Iraq: the war itself might be quick, perhaps even quicker than the rout of the Taleban. But the end of the fighting would hardly mean the end of a US commitment. In August, as warlords reasserted their power in Afghanistan, General Franks, the US commander, said that US troops might need to stay in Afghanistan for years.
In Afghanistan, the US was responding to an attack, rather than initiating regime change. It had broad international support and the Northern Alliance to do much of the work. Because the Taleban and al Qaeda finally chose to melt away rather than fight, US forces took control of the major cities with relatively little unintended damage. And still, getting out will take much longer than getting in.
Some proponents of war view a long involvement in Iraq as a plus. If the US went in planning to stay it might do the opposite of destabilising the Arab world. Richard Perle, a key member of the war party, argued in the Daily Telegraph "that Saddam's replacement by a decent Iraqi regime would open the way to a far more stable and peaceful region. A democratic Iraq would be a powerful refutation of the patronising view that Arabs are incapable of democracy."
Some regional experts make the opposite point: that a strong, prosperous, confident, stable Iraq is the last thing its neighbours want to see. Others pooh-pooh the notion that any western power, however hard it tried or long it stayed, could bring about any significant change in Iraq's political culture.
Regardless of these differences, the day after a war ended, Iraq would become America's problem. Because we would have destroyed the political order and done physical damage in the process, conquered Iraqis would turn to the US government for emergency relief, civil order, economic reconstruction, and protection of their borders. They would be part of us.
What follows is a triage list for American occupiers: the chief problems they would face in the first days, weeks and months of an occupation.
Last-minute mayhem. The biggest concern on the first day of peace would arise from what happened in the last days of war. What would Saddam, facing defeat and perhaps death, have decided late in the war to do with the stockpiled weapons of mass destruction that were the original justification for the attack? The various Pentagon battle plans leaked to the media all assume that Iraq would use chemical weapons against American troops. (Biological weapons work too slowly, and a nuclear weapon, if Iraq had one, is not designed for battlefield use.)
The major chemical weapons in Iraqi arsenals are thought to be the nerve gas sarin and liquid methylphosphonothioic acid (VX). Both can be absorbed through the lungs, the skin, or the eyes, and can cause death from a single drop. Sarin disperses quickly, but VX is relatively non-volatile and can pose a more lasting danger. US troops would be equipped with protective suits but, as these are cumbersome and retain heat, the need to wear them has been an argument for delaying an attack until winter.
Another concern is that on his way down, Saddam would use chemical weapons, not only to attack US soldiers, but also to lash out beyond his borders-most likely against Israel. Iraq's Scud and "al-Hussein" missiles cannot reach Europe, but Israel is in range-as Iraq demonstrated during the Gulf war. Then Yitzhak Shamir's Israeli government complied with US requests that it leave all retaliation to the Americans. Nothing in Ariel Sharon's long career suggests that he could be similarly restrained.
A US occupation of Iraq, then, could begin with the rest of the middle east at war. "What's the worst nightmare at the start?" an officer who fought in the Gulf war asked rhetorically. "Saddam hits Israel, and Sharon hits some Arab city. Then you have the all-out religious war that the Islamic fundamentalists and maybe some Likudniks are itching for."
This is more a worst-case prediction than a probability, so let's assume that any regional combat could be contained and that we would get quickly to the challenges of the postwar days.
Refugees and relief. However much brighter Iraq's long-term prospects might become, in the short term many Iraqis would be desperate. Civilians would have been killed and bodies would need to be buried, wounds dressed, orphans cared for, hospitals staffed.
"You are going to start right out with a humanitarian crisis," says William Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. A retired army general, Nash was in charge of post-combat relief operations in southern Iraq after the Gulf war and later served in Bosnia and Kosovo. "In the drive to Baghdad, you are going to do a lot of damage," Nash told me. "Either you will destroy a great deal of infrastructure by trying to isolate the battlefield-or they will destroy it, trying to delay your advance." Postwar commerce and recovery in Iraq will depend, of course, on roads, railways, airfields, and bridges across the Tigris and the Euphrates-facilities that both sides in the war will have incentives to blow up. "Right away you need food, water, and shelter-these people have to survive," Nash continued. "Because you started the war, you have accepted a moral responsibility for them. And you may well have obliterated the social structure that had been providing these services."
Restoring infrastructure is not impossible, but it is expensive. Iraq would need food, tents, portable hospitals, water-purification systems, generators, and so on. Scott Feil, a retired army colonel, told a Senate hearing that costs for the first year in Iraq would be about $16 billion for post-conflict security forces and $1 billion for reconstruction.
Catching Saddam Hussein. From the US perspective, it wouldn't matter whether the war left Saddam dead, captured, or in exile. What would matter is that his whereabouts were known. The only outcome nearly as bad as leaving him in power would be having him at large, like Osama bin Laden and much of the al Qaeda leadership after 11th September.
"My nightmare scenario," McPeak told me, "is that we jump in, seize the airport, bring in the 101st Airborne and we can't find Saddam. Then we've got Osama and Saddam out there, both of them achieving heroic status in the Arab world just by surviving."
During the Gulf war, McPeak and his fellow commanders learned that Saddam was using a fleet of Winnebago-like vehicles to move around Baghdad. They tried to track the vehicles but never located Saddam himself. "My concern is that he is smarter individually than our bureaucracy is collectively," McPeak told me. "Bureaucracies tend to dumb things down. So in trying to find him, we have a chess match between a bureaucracy and Saddam Hussein."
Police control, manpower, and intelligence. When the lid comes off after a long period of repression, people may be grateful and elated. But they may also be furious and vengeful, as the post-liberation histories of Romania and Kosovo indicate. Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert, told a Senate committee in August, "If firm leadership is not in place in Baghdad... retribution, score settling, and bloodletting, especially in cities, could take place."
Some policing of conquered areas, to minimise freelance justice and the activities of warlords, is vital. What is required are enough people to do the policing; a way to understand local feuds and tensions; and a plan for creating and passing power to a local constabulary. "You have to work towards local, civilian-led police," Frederick Barton, a former USAid official, told me. "Setting up an academy is okay, but national police forces tend to be sources of future coups and corruption. I'd rather have 150 small forces around the country and take my chances on 30 being corrupt than have... one big, bad one."
In the occupation business there are some surprising rules of thumb. Whether a country is big or small, for instance, the surrender of weapons by the defeated troops seems to take about 120 days. Similarly, regardless of a country's size, maintaining order seems to take about one occupation soldier or police officer for each 500 people-plus one supervisor for each ten policemen. For Iraq's 23m people that would mean an occupation force of about 50,000. Scott Feil told a Senate committee that he thought the occupation would need 75,000 security soldiers.
In most of its military engagements since Vietnam, the US has passed many occupation duties to allied or UN forces. Ideally, the occupiers of Iraq would be other Arabs. But persuading other countries to clean up after a war they had opposed would be tough.
Providing even 25,000 occupiers on a sustained basis would not be easy for the US military. Over the past decade, the military's head count has gone down, even as its level of foreign commitment and the defence budget have gone up. All the active-duty forces together total about 1.4m people. At the time of the Gulf war, the total was over 2m. As of the beginning of September, the number of National Guard and reserves soldiers mobilised by federal call-ups was about 80,000, compared with about 5,600 just before 11th September. For America in general, the war in central Asia has been largely a spectator event-no war bonds, no petrol taxes, no mandatory public service. For the volunteer military on both active and reserve duty it has been quite real.
One way to put more soldiers in Iraq would be to re-deploy them from overseas bases. Before 11th September, 250,000 soldiers were based outside US borders, more than half of them in Germany, Japan, and Korea. There are 118,000 soldiers in Europe alone.
But in the short term, the occupation of Iraq would need people from the civil affairs wing of the military: people trained in setting up courts and police systems, restoring the infrastructure, and so on. Many are in the reserves and have already been deployed to missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, or elsewhere. "These are an odd bunch of people," James Dunnigan, editor of strategypage.com, told me. "They tend to be over-educated civilians -they like working for the government and having adventures."
One such person is Evan Brooks, who was a lieutenant colonel in the army reserves, specialising in civil affairs, until his recent retirement. In his normal life, Brooks is an attorney at Internal Revenue Service headquarters. "Between 1947 and 1983," Brooks told me, "the number of civil affairs units that were activated from the reserves could be counted on one hand. Since 1987 there has not been a single Christmas where the DC area civil affairs unit has not had people overseas."
Wherever the occupying force finds its manpower, it will face the challenge of understanding politics and rivalries in a country whose language few Americans speak. The CIA has been recruiting Arabic speakers and grilling Iraqi exiles for intelligence. The Pentagon's leadership includes one Arabic speaker: the director of the joint staff, John Abizaid, a three-star general. As a combat commander during the Gulf war, Abizaid was able to speak directly with Iraqis. Most American occupiers will lack this skill.
Forming a government. When a tyranny falls, a new, legitimate source of authority may take time to emerge. If new leaders are easy to identify, it is usually because of their family name or record of political struggle. Coraz?n Aquino illustrates the first possibility: as the widow of a political rival whom Ferdinand Marcos had ordered to be killed, she was the ideal successor to Marcos in the Philippines (despite her later troubles). Charles de Gaulle in postwar France, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Kim Dae-jung in South Korea illustrate the second.
Iraq has no such obvious sources of new leadership. From the 1500s, the Ottoman empire, based in Istanbul, controlled the territory that is now Iraq. When the empire fell, after the first world war, Britain supervised the newly-created Kingdom of Iraq, under a League of Nations mandate. The British imported a member of Syria's Hashemite royal family, who in 1921 became King Faisal I of Iraq. (A Hashemite still reigns in Jordan.) The Kingdom of Iraq lasted until 1958, when King Faisal II was killed in a coup. In 1963, the Ba'ath, or "renewal," party took power in another coup-which the US initially welcomed, hoping that the Ba'athists would be anti-communist. By the late 1970s, Saddam Hussein had risen to dominance in the party.
The former monarchy is too shallow-rooted to survive re-introduction to Iraq, and Saddam has had time to eliminate nearly all internal resistance. The Kurdish chieftains of the northern provinces are the main exception. But their impulse has been separatist: they seek autonomy from Baghdad and feud with one another. That leaves Iraqi exile groups-especially the Iraqi National Congress-as the likeliest suppliers of leaders.
The INC survives on money from the US government. Its president, US-trained businessman Ahmad Chalabi, has been described by the Washington Post as a "dedicated advocate of democracy" who has "sacrificed most of his fortune to fight Saddam." The case against Chalabi involves his fortune too: he is a high-living character, and under him the INC has been dogged by accusations of financial mismanagement. "The opposition outside Iraq is almost as divided, weak, and irrelevant as the White Russians in the 1920s," says Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
"What you will need is a man with a black moustache," a retired British spy told me. "Out of chaos someone will emerge. But it can't be Chalabi, and it probably won't be a democracy. Democracy is a strange fruit, and, cynically, to hold it together in the short term you need a strongman."
When the British supervised the former Ottoman lands in the 1920s, they liked to insinuate themselves into the local culture, like Lawrence of Arabia. "Typically, a young man would go there in his twenties, would master the local dialects, would have a local mistress before he settled down to something more respectable," Victor O'Reilly, an Irish novelist who specialises in military topics, told me. "They achieved tremendous amounts with minimal resources. They ran huge chunks of the world this way. They got deeply involved with the locals." The original Green Berets tried to use a version of this in Vietnam and, to an extent, it is still the ideal for the special forces.
But in the generation since Vietnam, the US military has gone in the opposite direction: towards a definition of its role in strictly martial terms. It is common to hear officers describe their mission as "killing people and blowing things up." The phrase is used deliberately to shock civilians, and for its absolute clarity as to what a "military response" is. The aim is to protect the military from misuse.
Strict segregation of military and political functions may be awkward in Iraq, however. In the short term, the US military would necessarily be the government of Iraq. In the absence of allies or UN support, and the absence of an obvious Iraqi successor regime, US soldiers would have to make and administer political decisions on the fly. America's two most successful occupations embraced the idea that military officials must play political roles. Douglas MacArthur, a soldier, was immersed in the detailed reconstruction of Japan's domestic order. In occupied Germany, General Lucius D Clay did something comparable, though less flamboyantly. Today's joint chiefs of staff would try to veto any suggestion for a MacArthur-like proconsul. US military leaders in the Balkans have pushed this role onto the UN. Exactly who could assume it in Iraq is not clear.
Territorial integrity. This is where the exercise of power might first be put to the test. In ancient times what is now central Iraq was the cradle of civilisation, Mesopotamia. Under the Ottoman empire, today's Iraq was not one province but three, and the divisions still affect current politics. The province of Baghdad, in the centre of the country, is the stronghold of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority. Sunnis dominated administrative positions in the Ottoman days and have controlled the army and the government ever since, although they make up only about 20 per cent of the population. The former province of Mosul, in the mountainous north, is the home of Kurdish tribes, which make up 15 to 20 per cent of the population. Through the years they have both warred against and sought common cause with other Kurdish tribes across Iraq's borders in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Mosul also has some of the country's richest oil reserves. The former province of Basra, to the southeast, borders Iran, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf. Its population is mainly Shi'ites, who are the majority in Iraq, but have little power.
The result of this patchwork is a country like Indonesia or Soviet-era Yugoslavia. Geographic, ethnic and religious forces tend to pull it apart; only an offsetting pull from a strong central government keeps it in one piece. Most people think that under the stress of regime change Iraq would be more like Indonesia after Suharto than like Yugoslavia after Tito-troubled but intact. "It is unlikely-indeed, inconceivable-that Iraq will break up into three relatively cohesive components," Phebe Marr, the Iraq expert, said. But the Kurds could seize the northern oil fields. "Turkey could intervene in the north, as it has before," Marr said. "Iran, through its proxies, could follow suit in the south. There could even be a reverse flow of refugees, as many Iraqi Shi'a exiles in Iran return home, destabilising areas in the south."
Six countries share borders with Iraq: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. None has wanted Saddam to expand Iraq's territory. But they also feel threatened by a post-Saddam breakup or implosion. "In states like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, even Saudi Arabia," says Shibley Telhami at the University of Maryland, "there is the fear that the complete demise of Iraq would play into the hands of Iran, which they see as even more of a threat." Iran is four times as large as Iraq, with nearly three times as many people. Although it is Islamic, its population and heritage are Persian, not Arab; to the Arab states, Iran is "them," not "us."
These fears matter to the US, because of oil. Chaos in the Gulf would disrupt world oil markets and therefore the world economy. Significant expansion of Iran's influence, too, would work against the goal of balancing regional power amongst Saudi Arabia, Iran, and postwar Iraq. So, as the dust of war cleared, keeping Iraq together would be America's problem.
"De-Nazification" and "loya-jirgasation." As the months pass, an occupation force should, according to former occupiers, spend less time reacting to crises and more time undertaking long-term projects such as improving schools, hospitals, and housing. Iraq's occupiers would meanwhile also have to launch their version of "de-Nazification": identifying and punishing those who were personally responsible for the old regime's brutality, without launching a Khmer Rouge-style purge of everyone associated with the former government. Depending on what happened to Saddam and his closest associates, war crime trials might begin. Even if the US had carried out the original invasion on its own, the occupiers would seek international support for these postwar measures.
In the early months, the occupiers would also begin an Iraqi version of "loya-jirgasation"-that is, supporting a convention like the one at which the Afghans selected the leadership for their transitional government. Here the occupation would face a fundamental decision about its goals. One option was described to me as the "decent interval" strategy. The US would help to set up the framework for a new governing system and then transfer authority to it as soon as possible-whether or not the new regime was ready. This is the approach the US and its allies have taken in Afghanistan: once the loya jirga had set up an interim government and Hamid Karzai was in place as president, the US was happy to act as if this were a government. The situation works only if the US decides it doesn't care about the Potemkin government's limitations-for instance, an inability to suppress warlords. In Afghanistan the US still does care, so there is tension between the pretence of Afghan sovereignty and the reality of US influence. However complicated the situation in Afghanistan is proving, things are, again, likely to be worse in Iraq.
The other main option would be something closer to US policy in occupied Japan: a slow effort to change social and cultural values, in preparation for a sustainable democracy. Japan's version of democracy departs from the standard western model in various ways, but a system even half as open and liberal as Japan's would be a huge step for Iraq. The transformation of Japan required detailed interference in the day-to-day workings of Japanese life. US occupation officials rewrote the labour laws and supervised what was taught in Japanese classrooms. American lawyers, economists, engineers, and administrators by the thousands spent years developing and executing reform plans. And occupation officials had a huge advantage they presumably would not have in Iraq: no one questioned their legitimacy.
Oil and money. Iraq could be the Saudi Arabia of the future. Partly because its output has been constrained by ten years of sanctions, and mainly because it has never embraced the international oil industry as Saudi Arabia has, it has some of the largest untapped reserves in the world. The supply-demand balance in the world's energy markets is expected to shift over the next five years. Production in most of the world is flat or declining. The role of Persian Gulf suppliers will become more important; having two large suppliers in the Gulf rather than just one will be a plus for consumers. So, in the Arab world, the US crusade against Saddam looks to be motivated less by fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction than by the wish to defend Israel and the desire for oil.
Iraq's production would have to be ramped up quickly enough to generate money to rebuild the country, but gradually enough to keep Saudi Arabia from feeling threatened and retaliating in ways that could upset the market. International oil companies, rather than an occupation authority, would do most of the work here. But the occupiers would need to think about the threat of sabotage. Many of the wells are in the Kurdish regions. At greatest risk are not the pipelines, which can be easily patched up, but the terminals at seaports and the wells themselves.
Another challenge to recovery prospects in general would be Iraq's heavy burden of debt. Iraq was directed by the UN to pay reparations for the damage it inflicted on Kuwait during the Gulf war. That and other debts have compounded to amounts the country cannot hope to repay. Estimates vary, but the range-$200 billion to $400 billion-illustrates the problem. "Leaving Iraq saddled with a massive debt and wartime-reparations bill because of Saddam is an act of cowardice," says Anthony Cordesman. "We must show the Arab and Islamic worlds that we will not profiteer from our victory. "
This would be only part of the financial reality of regime change. The overall cost of US military operations during the Gulf war came to $61 billion. Because of contributions from Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, the US wound up in the embarrassing position of having most of that cost reimbursed. That will not be the case in Iraq.
Legitimacy and unilateralism. An important premise for the American war party is that hand-wringing from Arab governments cannot be taken seriously. The Saudis may say they oppose an attack; the Jordanians may publicly warn against it; but in fact most governments in the region would be glad to have Saddam removed. As for the Europeans, they have not been responsible since the second world war for life-and-death military judgements. American war advocates say that Europe's reluctance to confront Saddam is like its reluctance to recognise the Soviet threat a generation ago. Still, support from the rest of the world can be comforting. Most Americans were moved by the outpouring of solidarity on 11th September. By the same token, foreigners' hatred can be surprisingly demoralising.
No matter how welcome as liberators they may be at first, foreign soldiers eventually wear out their welcome. It would be easier if this inescapably irritating presence were varied in nationality, under a UN flag, rather than all American. All the better if the force were Islamic and Arabic-speaking.
The face of the occupying force will matter not just in Iraq's cities but also on its borders. Whoever controls Iraq will need to station forces along its most vulnerable frontier-the long flank with Iran, where at least half a million soldiers died during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. The Iranians will certainly notice any US presence on the border.
The long run. So far we have considered the downside-which is most of what I heard in my interviews. But there was also a positive theme coming from some of the most dedicated members of the war party. Their claim, again, was that forcing regime change would not just have a negative virtue-that of removing a threat. It would also create the possibility of bringing to Iraq, and eventually the whole Arab world, stable democracy in an open-market system.
"This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world," James Woolsey, a former CIA director who is one of the most visible advocates of war, told me. In this view, the fall of the Soviet empire really did mark the end of history: the democratic-capitalist model showed its superiority over other systems and spread-through the old Soviet territory, through Latin America and Asia, nearly everywhere except through tragic Africa and the Islamic-Arab middle east. What is required is a first Arab democracy, and Iraq can be the place.
"If you only look forward, you can see how hard it would be to do," Woolsey said. "Everybody can say, 'Oh, sure, you're going to democratise the middle east.'" Indeed, that was the reaction of most of the diplomats, spies, and soldiers I spoke to-"the ruminations of insane people," a British official said.
But Woolsey continued: "If you look at what we and our allies have done with the three world wars of the 20th century-two hot, one cold-and what we've done in the interstices, we've already achieved this for two thirds of the world. Eighty-five years ago, when we went into the first world war, there were eight or ten democracies at the time. Now it's around 120-some free, some partly free. The compromises we made along the way, whether allying with Stalin or Franco or Pinochet, we have got around to fixing, and their successor regimes are democracies... Around half of the states of sub-Saharan Africa are democratic, and half of the 20-plus non-Arab Muslim states. We have all of Europe except Belarus and occasionally parts of the Balkans. If you look back at what has happened in less than a century, then getting the Arab world plus Iran moving in the same direction looks less awesome. It's not Americanising the world. It's Athenising it. It is do-able."
The transforming vision is not, to put it mildly, the consensus among those with long experience in the middle east. Woolsey and his allies might be criticised for lacking a tragic imagination about where war might lead, but at least they recognise that it will lead somewhere. If they are more optimistic in their conclusions than most of the other people I spoke to, they do see that America's involvement in Iraq would be intimate and would be long.
