U.S. 'occupation' of Iraq could fuel more chaos
By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder News Service
IRBIL, Iraq — The actual war, for all its expected blood and sorrow, could prove to be the easy part.
Associated Press
Keeping a postwar Iraq glued together — shaping the country into a federation that can live peacefully within its borders and with its neighbors — might well be the more difficult and costly mission for the United States.
At the Tigris River in Baghdad, Iraqi children with a toy gun and missile hat prepare to perform a play to protest a U.S.-led invasion.
"We feel the Americans will do the job militarily," said a senior leader of one of Iraq's closest Arab neighbors. "They're also talking about preserving the sovereignty, integrity and unity of Iraq. The Arab countries and Iran also want this, but we're all worried that it won't happen.
"We're worried that the outcome will be civil war."
Those worries appear to be well founded. The Bush administration is setting an audacious goal: to remake a country after toppling the government and imposing military occupation. Little in history or common sense suggests that the task will be short, clean, cheap or successful. None of the recent efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo or Afghanistan offers much hope that stable, effective government takes root easily in ethnically divided lands that have no history of democratic rule.
Japan and Germany after World War II stand out as successes, yet they were different. Both nations' populations were highly literate and technically skilled, with proficient and cooperative government administrations through which U.S. forces ruled. People in both countries, disgusted by the war, embraced democracy. Even so, military occupation — fully backed by the international community — lasted seven years in Japan, a decade in Germany.
And unlike in Japan and Germany, ethnic, religious and political fault lines run all through Iraq — some of them recent, others long buried, all of them explosive.
In the wake of a war, the Bush administration intends to install a U.S. military government, perhaps for as long as two years. Department heads would be Americans while many senior and midlevel Iraqi bureaucrats would remain — the people who know how the mail gets delivered, the roads get paved and the oil gets pumped.
Administration officials have been opaque about the costs and many other details of their postwar plans for Iraq, let alone their exit strategy. Critics and doubters make references to "another Vietnam" or "America's Yugoslavia." Arab critics derisively call it occupation.
The possibilities for new bloodshed are rife, and even anti-Saddam factions who welcome U.S. intervention warn that the United States should not try to run the country.
With the common enemy of Saddam removed, rivalries among Kurdish factions in the north could easily descend into renewed fighting, something Turkey likely would encourage.
Equally worrisome, the Kurds could put aside decades of bloodletting, take control of the vast northern oil fields around Kirkuk and Mosul, and begin to form an independent Kurdistan, a move that would traumatize neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iran.
The Turkish military, which has moved tanks and troops into northern Iraq, will be tempted to invade the area to protect minority Iraqi Turkomen.
Oppressed Shiite Muslims in the south will delight in Saddam's downfall, but they may resist outside control, with an uprising orchestrated, financed and armed by Iran. Iranian-backed militias, which U.S. intelligence officials fear include some members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, have mustered along the border.
Bloodthirsty reprisals against Saddam's Baath Party loyalists are expected all over Iraq. Hard-core pockets of pro-Saddam resistance may continue to assault U.S. troops. And al-Qaida could step up activities.
Othman Mufti is a businessman in Irbil whose family owns the mostly ruined but still-majestic Citadel, a hilltop fort that is reputed to be the oldest continuously inhabited building in the world. He and other Kurdish leaders are eager to have the U.S. military depose Saddam and intrigued by the forthcoming experiment in democracy.
"If there's too much democracy in Iraq after Saddam, I think there will be lots of disorder. ...The Americans can export their democracy and import our oil, but they should not be coming here to occupy Iraq," he said.
