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The Secret Plan for Iraq
Posted, 11:40 p.m., April 6, 2004; updated 9:42 p.m., April 7, 2004
On Sunday morning's ABC News "This Week" program, Sen. Richard Lugar, the Republican Senate Foreign Relations chairman, revealed that to date, he had not yet been briefed on the plan for a transition to Iraqi rule on June 30. The senator, who questions the likelihood that Iraq will be ready for self-rule in little more than two-and-one-half months, said he not yet been briefed by the Bush administration on who will take over as the American ambassador to Iraq at that time, who will be among the staff of a planned 3,000-member embassy that is planned for Baghdad after the transition takes place, or how the embassy will be protected.
It isn't even clear, yet, who will be in charge when American administrator Paul Bremer's hitch is up at the end of June. "Specifically," Lugar said to the New York Times, "to whom will sovereignty be given?"
For the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman to be left in the dark at this late stage on national security issues of such paramount importance is positively astonishing. This takes the Bush White House's fetish for secrecy to new extremes.
Sen. Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations committee, echoed those thoughts, saying this morning on CNN that he knows there is no plan for that transition. He thinks that unless the U.S. commits to three years of training Iraqi forces, Iraq is destined for a civil war. Indeed, it would seem that were it not for the U.S. presence in Iraq to push Sunnis and Shi'ites together in odd bedfellowship, they would be fighting each other now.
Meanwhile, both Biden and Arizona Sen. John McCain are saying that the U.S. is going to have to commit more soldiers to the Iraqi conflict in order to stop the unrest that now, finally, seems to be wrenching not just the Sunni Triangle, but much of the nation.
Yesterday, Shi'ites, followers of the radical young cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, rose up and attacked U.S forces in a number of cities - sort of a scaled down version of the Tet Offensive. Today at least a dozen solders, mostly Marines, were killed in a raid on Ramadi. An estimated 32 U.S. soldiers have died in fighting since Sunday. Many more Iraqis are dead, including some 40 killed in a U.S. assault on a mosque, from which shots were being fired at American soldiers.
It no longer really matters what you may want to say about the justifications for war, the buildup to war, or any of the historic foibles that put us in the deserts of Iraq. I put myself in the camp that says the war may well have been wrongheaded to begin with, and that it distracted national war efforts away from the actual war on terrorism. I feel confident that the war was begun too soon, without exhausting the diplomacy, while worrying too much about the meteorology of March 2003 and not enough about the follow-through to the invasion. But it doesn't matter anymore. The fact is we are there now, and there we must stay until we secure a nation that is now in chaos. A nation that we broke while trying to fix it.
The Bush Administration insists it will stand by its June 30 transition date, that it will definitely hand over power to the Iraqis at that point. That looks increasingly like a bad idea, and if it is carried out, it will be very difficult to justify on any grounds than election-year expediency.
In essence, we have turned Iraq into the 51st state. We'd better learn to love it. Because we're going to get to know it very well over a period of years.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
