IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS, the Bush administration has publicly signaled that a tougher Iraq policy may be on the horizon. For example, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on November 8: "There is plenty of reason to watch Iraq, there is plenty of reason to make very clear to the Iraqis that the United States does not intend to let the Iraqis threaten their own people, threaten their neighbors, or threaten our interests by acquiring weapons of mass destruction."
But behind the scenes, the building blocks may also be falling into place for a more aggressive approach on Iraq. In the last month, the State Department and the National Security Council have quietly increased their contact with a variety of exiled Iraqi military commanders and encouraged them to work together to form a loose network.
The purpose of such a network varies depending on who is talking. State Department officials insist this is purely a political movement, similar in mission to the Iraqi National Congress. The exiled Iraqi generals say the group could serve as a viable catalyst for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, some administration hawks worry that the entire proposition is an effort to undermine the Iraqi National Congress's driving force, Ahmad Chalabi.
"The State Department is not in the business of developing a military network in exile," one Foggy Bottom official said in an interview last Thursday. "I'm not saying we're not encouraging it, but we are not in the business of doing military work."
This official stresses there is "no military option" at this point.
But don't tell that to the Iraqi generals. General Fawzi al-Shamari, a former Iraqi commander who rose to the rank of general during the Iran-Iraq war, says the opposition network he envisions could provide U.S. war planners with "all kinds of information about the makeup of the army." Not only does the general, who defected to the United States in 1986, promise information on troops, potential targets, and general conditions in the military he once helped lead; he says he has networks of potential defectors inside the ruling Baath party, the intelligence services, and the Republican Guard.
General Najib al-Salhi, a former chief of staff for Iraq's first mechanized division in the fifth corps, explained the criteria his organization is employing for the network. "Officers have to have a record of working against Saddam," he said. He stressed he would only be interested in high-ranking officers who have a track record of cooperating with the opposition.
Al-Salhi himself claims to have worked in secret against Saddam from 1979 until he left Iraq in 1995, soon after the Iraqi secret police sent him a videotape of a family member being raped. In an interview last week, he spoke in some detail about plans to launch an offensive in the south and the north simultaneously, relying in large part on disloyal officers he has known since he graduated from the Iraqi Military College.
Al-Salhi and al-Shamari both attended a workshop on November 1 and 2 in Washington at the Middle East Institute, the Arab-leaning think tank led by Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. The session was titled "The future of the Iraqi Armed Forces after Saddam Hussein," and included about a dozen high-ranking former Iraqi military figures, including General Faris Hussein, a former Baath party military adviser who now lives in Saudi Arabia, and former Lt. Colonel Adil Jubori, also from Saudi Arabia. All told, four expatriates from Iraqi Kurdistan, another three from the Middle East, and two from Western Europe attended the private meetings. Also in attendance was Kenneth Pollack, the former National Security Council Iraq expert for President Clinton, and Michael Eisenstadt, who is now a consultant for U.S. Central Command in Florida, the theater of operations that includes Afghanistan and Iraq.
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