Iraq Plan's Defect: No Defectors
LA Times Front Page:
latimes.com
The U.S. has failed to pry Iraqi leaders away from Saddam Hussein. The miscalculated effort could prolong the war, some officials say.
WASHINGTON -- A highly publicized U.S. campaign to persuade senior Iraqi military and civilian leaders to surrender has failed to produce any significant defections, and U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that those closest to President Saddam Hussein are unlikely to give up.
The effort now appears to be one of several miscalculations in a high-stakes U.S. strategy to use bombing, secret contacts and inducements -- including cash payments -- to key Iraqi leaders to quickly overthrow Hussein.
"We underestimated their capacity to put up resistance," said a Bush administration official who requested anonymity. "We underestimated the role of nationalism. And we overestimated the appeal of liberation."
"I think the inner circle are in it for the long haul," the intelligence official said Thursday
The U.S. effort to encourage defections, run jointly by the Pentagon and the CIA, has been scaled back sharply since last weekend. "The negotiations went nowhere," said a former senior CIA official. "All of them have proved futile."
A CIA spokesman said that reaching out to Iraqi officials to put them under suspicion indicates "an active imagination," but he declined to comment further. Nor would he comment on whether Hussein or his aides might have used the contacts to mislead U.S. officials.
In the Afghanistan war, the CIA disbursed millions of dollars in cash to buy information or loyalty from local warlords. Intelligence officials declined to say what they have offered to Iraqi leaders, but they made it clear that they are prepared to cut deals.
Nathaniel Kern, an Arabist who has visited Iraq repeatedly and knows a number of Iraqi officials, said a plan that relies on Iraqi defectors using cell phones to call Iraqi officials to negotiate surrender is absurd.
"Over the years, any Iraqi officials I've been in contact with call me on the phone only when they're outside of Iraq," said Kern, who heads a Washington-based consulting firm. "They won't go into questions of substance in e-mail. They say, 'Merry Christmas,' and if [I] come back and say, 'Happy New Year, how's life in Baghdad?' -- no reply."
In recent weeks, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials repeatedly publicized their effort to reach out to Iraqi leaders through calls and e-mail, as well as with speeches by President Bush, the airdrop of more than 25 million leaflets and round-the-clock, Arabic-language radio broadcasts on five frequencies.
Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said face-to-face meetings "continue to a certain degree" but appear less likely to produce major defections or surrenders with each passing day.
He also questioned the Pentagon's leaflet drops over Iraq.
"We're still committing substantial numbers of flights to leaflets," Rockefeller said. "I'm beginning to ask the question why, because it doesn't seem to be working."
It's unclear how many of the approximately 4,500 Iraqis now in allied custody surrendered because of the U.S. appeals and how many were captured in battle. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, more than 80,000 Iraqi troops surrendered or were captured in the U.S.-led coalition's 100-hour ground assault.
Current and former intelligence officials criticize the Pentagon for overly optimistic assessments and predictions of how Iraqis would respond to a U.S. invasion.
"It was a fantasy," said Yaphe, who teaches at the National Defense University in Washington. "They had a strategic vision that we would face no opposition, that everyone would surrender, that Iraqis would throw rose petals and rice, and people would welcome us as conquering liberators. Clearly those judgments were not based on reality."
A current intelligence official offered a similar assessment.
"The intelligence community was not overly optimistic at all," said the official, who is involved in discussions on Iraq.
But the official said many in the analytical community were convinced that administration hawks had little interest in hearing pessimistic assessments. Some were also concerned that CIA Director George J. Tenet and others appeared more focused on helping the White House make the case for war than on calling attention to potential problems.
Rockefeller faulted the Bush administration for counting on the intense bombing that followed the first night's airstrike to provide the leverage to get Iraqi leaders to switch sides.
"There was such faith in 'shock and awe' it led to the conclusion it had to be a terribly short war," he said. "I think we're in for a much longer haul than we expected."
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Amazing
Or perhaps not so amazing to some of us
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