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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (14875)	3/18/2003 10:01:19 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

An absence of doubt By Thomas Oliphant Columnist The Boston Globe 3/18/2003 IN A REMARKABLE display of confidence, bravado, recklessness -- call it what you will -- the Bush administration is assuming, predicting, betting that the imminent invasion of Iraq is going to resemble Thomas Hobbes's grim view of life -- nasty, brutish, and short. Unlike the doubts that accompanied the start of the first war a dozen years ago, the second Bush administration to go to war with Saddam Hussein's regime has made an open display of its expectations. We should all count, officials say, on American forces being greeted in Iraq as liberators, not conquerors. We should also expect, they add, that US troops will be in Baghdad's environs within a week of the start of hostilities. The working assumption is that the Iraqi army will not fight, that the once elite Republican Guard will be rent by defections and desertions. In addition, officials say that both a lack of Iraqi will and the work of covert operations forces will prevent any disastrous destruction of Iraq's infrastructure -- above all its oil fields and pipelines. The administration's expectation now is that Turkey's new leadership will overcome the parliamentary opposition to the use of Turkish air space and bases during the war. How much the United States will end up using Turkey is yet to be determined, but officials predict more than enough of a US presence and good will between the two countries to keep the Turkish military from clashing with Kurds in northern Iraq. In briefings for reporters and congressional leaders, the administration is also predicting that as Iraq is rapidly conquered and secured, there will be ''significant quantities'' of chemical and biological weapons uncovered, more than enough to justify the long US claim that Iraq's assertion that it retained none was a lie. Officials also expect to find equally significant documentary evidence of a nuclear weapons program that could have been reactivated any time the rest of the world chose to avert its eyes again. The expectation is that all major resistance to the invasion force will be eliminated within three months without a large loss of American lives, by which time what is called ''an interim authority'' will be functioning. There has been a famous reluctance until now to discuss the cost, but officials are now talking of asking Congress next week for $70 billion to $100 billion to finance military and reconstruction activity well into next year. I wouldn't begin to evaluate the reliability of these assumptions and expectations, but the extent of them is truly remarkable. Part of the administration's confidence is clearly based on its assessment of encyclopedic intelligence information; part of it is also based on the need to attract and keep support for the war. Regardless, the extent to which President Bush has stuck his neck out is more than unusual. And there's more. As the final fig leafs of diplomatic activity were yanked away over the weekend, the administration has also begun to speak of a renewed effort to reestablish tolerable relations with the same United Nations that has so infuriated it in recent weeks. There remains genuine anger that the coalition of the unwilling, led by France and Russia, refused to countenance force as a legitimate option in the face of a dozen years of noncompliance with and defiance of UN resolutions. However, the most vocal trashers of the UN in the Bush administration and among its political allies would be advised to get their best shots in soon, because the president intends to go in a surprisingly magnanimous direction in short order. Almost unnoticed after Sunday's pep rally in the Azores was a pledge by Bush to seek new Security Council resolutions to broaden participation in (and not just financing of) Iraq's postwar reconstruction and governance. Yesterday, officials said that each phase is almost unthinkable without UN assistance. They gave several reasons for this belief that the narrow coalition fighting the war must broaden after it: the requirements of the international fights against terrorism; the realities of humanitarian and reconstruction work that will in time need a much lower US profile; and the probable need to use the UN for an eventual response to grave nuclear proliferation issues raised by the conduct of Iran and North Korea. This is the moment when ambivalence and reluctance usually became support. In this case, they should. There is nothing illegitimate about what is about to happen to Saddam Hussein, and there isn't a shred of legitimacy to anything his regime has done since he invaded Kuwait in 1990. This is the moment when the work so many have done on alternatives to avoid war or to start a war with the broadest possible coalition comes to an end. We should all respect the view that any use of force is wrong, but for those whose ambivalence led them to support every realistic hope of a different outcome, the only proper course now is support for President Bush and prayers that it will be as quick a victory as he is expecting. Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com