Staying course in Iraq to exact high cost on all fronts, panel says

By David Wood
Newhouse News Service

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Moreover, there is no apparent U.S. strategy for securing the key goals that will help move Iraq along from chaos under military occupation to stable self-government, they said.

"The risks are far higher than the president suggested," said Anthony Cordesman, a senior military strategist and one of four experts assembled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a respected centrist think tank in Washington, to discuss challenges in Iraq.

"We really do face a much more challenging struggle than we heard last night," Cordesman said, referring to Bush's Tuesday news conference. "It is not hopeless, but it needs to be based on more realism than we heard."

He said the effort will require a "massive" supplemental budget appropriation this year of $50 billion for military and security costs and $20 billion in reconstruction costs.

Even as the panel briefed reporters, U.S. troops engaged in running firefights with insurgents in Fallujah and elsewhere, and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned that no further political progress can be made without "considerable" improvement in security across Iraq.

None of the four CSIS experts could identify a clear Bush-administration strategy to resolve the key security and political issues that, a year after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein, have plunged Iraq into crisis.

High among those challenges is the planned June 30 handover of sovereignty to a temporary Iraqi government. Polls indicate that few Iraqis have confidence in the U.S.-appointed Interim Governing Council, and that no Iraqi political figures command significant national support.

The Iraqis who take over on June 30 must command enormous national respect to prevail over competing ethnic and religious factions and armed militias, said Bathsheba Crocker, who has worked in national security in both the Clinton and Bush administrations and now directs the CSIS post-conflict reconstruction project.

"We run a serious risk of disaster if we come up to June 30 and turn over sovereignty to an Iraqi government that lacks legitimacy," Crocker said. "I don't know what the plan is to avoid that."

Until the United States and its coalition partners can offer real security and hope for better living conditions, "we're going to have trouble on the political front," she said.
 
Bush said Tuesday that he has authorized troops to use "decisive" firepower if necessary against insurgents who have fought pitched battles with U.S. forces across Iraq in the past few weeks. Some 87 U.S. soldiers and Marines have been killed in combat this month.

But the backlash against the inevitable civilian casualties "may not only create more active enemies, but also broadly alienate significant additional numbers of Iraqis politically," Cordesman said.

The CSIS experts touched on these other challenges:

• Efforts to repair war damage and kick-start the economy, which have fallen behind. Only $2 billion of the $18 billion aid and reconstruction package Congress approved last fall has been committed to contracts.

• The need for immediate and strong international backing for the U.S. campaign, both from such allies as France and Germany that could provide money and troops and from moderate Arab nations that could help support a new Iraqi government. As in Vietnam, Crocker said, "we will fail if we are trying to prop up a government with no popular legitimacy."

• The loss already of the "information war," in Iraq and beyond. In the Arab media, last week's fighting in Fallujah was depicted as a slaughter of civilian innocents and heroic resistance by Islamic defenders, said Jon Alterman, director of the CSIS Middle East program. In Cordesman's view, U.S. efforts to address this problem are "hopeless." "We do not have people who know how to talk to the Arab world," he said.

• The urgent need for still more money, despite the huge sums already spent. Iraqi security forces, for instance, still need training, communications gear and vehicles. Administration officials have said they are not likely to ask Congress for more money until after the November presidential election.

That, Cordesman said, is a mistake.

"I know it's embarrassing to ask for the money between now and November," he said. But the money is needed now, he said, and "there isn't one person on Capitol Hill who doesn't know this is coming."

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