forwarded by Connie Clark

[Madelon Umlauf]

Posted on Tue, Feb. 10, 2004

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Photo by GEORGE BRIDGES, Knight
Ridder Tribune.

Pentagon eager to wash hands of Iraq mess it created

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - What a difference a year can make. If you don't believe it, ask
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

A year ago, testifying before Congress, Wolfowitz predicted that securing
postwar Iraq would be an easier job than the United States and its allies
faced in Bosnia or Afghanistan. After all, the deputy secretary said,
there's no ethnic tension in Iraq.

The immediate reaction of virtually everyone who knew even a little bit
about Iraq and its long-simmering tensions, repression, bloodshed and just
plain bad blood among Kurds and Turkomen in the north, Sunni Arabs in the
middle and Shiite Muslims in the south, was: Say what?

Not since President Ford prematurely declared Soviet-dominated Poland a free
country has a public official stuck his foot so deeply and so publicly in
his mouth.

Wolfowitz visited Iraq early this month and, at a meeting in the northern
city of Kirkuk, he got a long, painful ear pounding on the subject of
tension and fear among the country's ethnic groups.

The Sunni Arabs complained that they were being abused and mistreated by the
Kurds. The Shia made it clear that the only thing would satisfy them - the
long-oppressed majority in this nation of 25 million people - was free and
open elections, which they would, of course, win. Other Iraqis complained
that local militias, who owe no loyalty to the central government, are
intimidating and frightening people.

Central Intelligence Agency officers in Baghdad Station have reported to the
home office their own fears that Iraq is on a "glide path to civil war."

The Department of Defense, which is to say Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld, is skinning back the U.S. force in Iraq from 130,000-plus today to
105,000 by late spring, when the current round of troop rotations ends.
However many soldiers and Marines we have in Iraq, they could end up in the
crossfire of a civil war.

Rumsfeld and his key aides, meanwhile, are running for cover.

In one recent high-level meeting, Rumsfeld looked at Secretary of State
Colin Powell and said, "Jerry (Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian
in Iraq) works for you, right?"

Powell looked as if he'd been struck by lightning. Bremer and every other
U.S. official in Iraq reports directly to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld demanded and got complete authority over the military, over the
civilian authority in charge of rebuilding the country, over the
administration's $87 billion Iraq budget, over every line of every contract
let. And suddenly he forgot that Bremer works for him?

That same week, Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
were summoned to a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services
Committee to discuss how the U.S. contracting system is working in Iraq.

When Wolfowitz was asked a tough question about the controversies
surrounding the U.S. contracting efforts in Iraq, he turned to Armitage and
said: "You can answer that one, right, Rich?" Armitage answered by noting
that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense
control every American contract let in Iraq, and that the State Department
has authority over none of those contracts.

"Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want
out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1
when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S.
Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's."

The only question is whether Rumsfeld and Company can keep the lid on all
the boiling pots until they can pass the CPA and the whole nation-rebuilding
buck to the State Department.

The investigations and audits of Halliburton's and Halliburton subsidiaries'
alleged contract overcharges, with their uncomfortable proximity to Vice
President Dick Cheney, Halliburton's former chief, are just the tip of the
iceberg.

The real action, knowledgeable American officials say, is in local contracts
that are being let under authority of the ruling Iraqi Governing Council.
U.S. officials say some less savory Council members are demanding kickbacks
on some contracts in hopes of investing the ill-gotten gains in buying or
bending the selection of local and regional councils who will help choose a
new government and bolstering their own distant hopes of holding onto power.