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The hawks fall out
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Faced with the rising costs and complications of occupying Iraq, the hardline coalition around US President George W Bush that led the drive to war with Iraq appears to be suffering serious internal strains.

On the one hand, neo-conservatives, who were the most optimistic about postwar Iraq before the US-led invasion, are insisting that Washington cannot afford either to pull out or to surrender the slightest control over the occupation to the United Nations or anyone else.

To a rising chorus of calls by Democrats for Washington to invite the world body to take over at least political control of the transition to Iraqi rule in exchange for a commitment of money and peacekeepers, the neo-cons are urging the administration to send more US troops instead.

Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is dead-set against deploying yet more troops to join the 180,000 now in Iraq and Kuwait. And while he, like the neo-cons, opposes conceding any substantial political role for the UN or anyone else, his preferred option is to transfer power directly to the Iraqis as quickly as possible, even at the risk that reconstituted security forces would be insufficiently cleansed of elements of the former regime's Ba'ath Party.

"It's clear now that Rumsfeld is not interested in 'remaking Iraq'," said Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy analyst at the Washington, DC, office of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. "He wants to get the hell out of there." ...

...The divide burst into the open recently when neo-cons outside the administration, seconded by Republican Senator John McCain, launched a concerted attack, centered in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and other sympathetic media, on Rumsfeld's opposition to increasing US troops in Iraq.

"The choices are stark," wrote Standard editor William Kristol (a former top McCain adviser) and his frequent collaborator, Robert Kagan. "Either the United States does what it takes to succeed in Iraq, or we lose in Iraq."

The article, "America's responsibility", argued that it was illusory to believe that foreign troops from India, Pakistan or Turkey, which would presumably be made available under a new UN resolution, were capable of doing what was required in Iraq. Recent CPA initiatives to bring former Iraqi intelligence and police officers back into service risked "catastrophe", it added.

"If we lose [in Iraq], we will leave behind us not blue helmets but radicalism and chaos, a haven for terrorists, and a perception of American weakness and lack of resolve in the Middle East and reckless blundering around the world," they warned.

While they did not attack Rumsfeld by name, another article in the same issue did. Tom Donnelly, a defense analyst based at the hub of the neo-con network, the American Enterprise Institute, assailed the defense secretary's "mulish opposition to increasing the number of American soldiers in Iraq". He also derided the notion that "an Iraqi army or police force" would be able to secure the country's borders or "even control traffic in Baghdad" without a much larger US force for protection.

Titled "Secretary of stubbornness", the article argued that Rumsfeld's position "is a prime reason the Bush administration has had to go begging to the United Nations". ...