This lovely city, with its stirring panorama of pure white monuments, symbolizes all the higher aspirations of the American story. It’s all the stranger, then, that a gray film of conspiracy has crept over this picture as the countdown to an invasion of Iraq begins.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, after months of being sidelined by the zealots at the Pentagon and in the vice president’s office, personally crafted and won the astonishing 15-to-0 vote on Nov. 8 in the UN Security Council. The relative moderation of the secretary’s policy is being hailed as a victory for caution and rationality in truly conservative circles here.
But critics of the intention to invade Iraq in order to reconfigure the entire Middle East should not relax too much. In fact, if anything, the conspiracies are only growing.
We now know the lineup of dates: The UN weapons inspectors must be in Iraq by Nov. 15, Iraq must declare all weapons and programs by Dec. 8, UN weapons inspections must begin by Dec. 23, and the report to the Security Council is due by Feb. 21. But oddly for America, many forces contend.
The voices for caution over a war with Iraq are gaining in volume. Typical of these is Anthony Cordesman, the accomplished military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who warned at a recent meeting there that “thinking we can change the Middle East is like trying to sculpt an iceberg–the iceberg tends to win.”
He went further, warning that, in case of an American invasion, which he now thinks is almost inevitable, “we will be treated not as the liberator but the enemy–this is not going to be a pleasant process.”
Yet on the other hand, contrarian voices are calling for more radical and far-reaching attacks. One of these, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on Nov. 5 in an interview with the Times of London called upon the international community to immediately target Iran–“the day after”–when action against Iraq is successful.
These words were backed up by a comprehensive article by Aluf Benn, the respected diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which he traced the pre-emptive strike policy of the Bush administration to Israel’s long-held policy of pre-emption against its Arab neigh-bors.
“An American victory over Saddam Hussein would alter the regional environment and position the United States, Israel’s main ally, as the chief arbiter in the Middle East,” he wrote in a piece reprinted in The Washington Post.
In the last few months, even the Pentagon’s civilian war zealots, along with the Dick Cheney war party, have lent their power to the idea of an American military occupation of Iraq in place of their original idea of a government-in-exile of the Iraqi opposition. To hear them talk about it, you would think that every Iraqi man and woman (except perhaps Hussein’s own retinue) would love to have a colonial-style American military occupation.
But the real reason for their change in emphasis is that the Iraqi exile leadership has turned out to be just as impossible as its critics always said it was.
Virtually all the groups within the Iraqi National Congress–exactly those that the Bush administration until now trusted to lead the new, wondrously “democratic” Iraq–are feuding so intensely from their aeries in the European capitals that they cannot even agree on a date to meet this fall. In addition, a much-heralded “information-gathering” and intelligence operation within Iraq, which the INC was to embark upon on behalf of the United States, has completely stalled, if not failed.
The only real surprise here: So soon?
At least now, some of the relevant questions are being asked and the incredible foolhardiness of the administration is being laid bare.
But as the questions become more urgent and this administration moves toward war, we see levels of conspiratorial planning and thinking virtually unique to the America we have historically known.
Damascus on the Potomac? Casablanca in the District? Baghdad in the Beltway?
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