War with Iraq: a cost-benefit analysis.

Cordesman, Anthony H. ; Wilson, Joseph C. ; Takeyh, Ray 等

The following is an edited transcript of the thirtieth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council The meeting was held on October 9, 2002, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., moderating.

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CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR., president, Middle East Policy Council

The premise of today's discussion is that other means of dealing with the problems presented by Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime will have failed, will never have been tried, or will have been abandoned, and there will be a war. The question then is, what's in it for us, and what problems may we be creating for ourselves as we embark on this course? I'm sorry to say that we have not had much help from politicians or pundits in this regard. There has been a stunning absence of serious debate, and even fewer facts than debating points have been brought forward.

I think the key question is, from the point of view of the United States and our broader interests, what do we gain and what do we lose by taking the course that the president so obviously wishes to take? I suspect the answers would be very different depending on whether there is or is not a U.N. endorsement of an attack on Iraq.

At this point there are only two questions that we are entirely sure we know the answers to with regard to war with Iraq. The first is, who's going to pay for the war? The answer is, we are. This is not the Gulf War, to be fought on other people's money. It is not a joint enterprise with the Arabs or with the allies. We cannot expect full or even partial reimbursement from the Gulf Arabs, the Germans, the Japanese, as was the case in 1990 and '91. How much will the war cost? Only God knows. That will depend on many of the factors we are discussing.

The second question we know the answer to is, will Saddam attack the United States? The answer is, if we attack him, he certainly will attack us. If we don't attack him, we don't know whether he will or will not attack us. There is a difference of opinion about this. If we leave him alone, perhaps he will attack us and perhaps he won't. But we do know that if we attack him and he feels he has nothing to lose, he will use every weapon in his arsenal against the United States and our forces.

Beyond that, there are a lot of questions that are hanging out there in the minds of people throughout the country but not much raised here in Washington. Is regime change an antidote or an effective cure for the problem of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? In other words, would a different Iraqi regime see Iraq's need for a deterrent against attack by Israel, Iran, Turkey and the United States any differently than this regime has seen it? The answer isn't self-evident, although we do have the example of regime change in South Africa, which led the South African government to give up nuclear weapons. So those who assert that any Iraqi regime would do the same as Saddam should reconsider that position.

Is democracy possible in Iraq, or does thugdom inevitably succeed thugdom in Baghdad? Would a democratic Iraq see any less need for weapons of mass destruction than a democratically elected government in Israel, given that it faces many of the same security challenges as the Israelis do?

What level of effort at nation building, and for how long, would be required to democratize Iraq or to persuade Iraqis that they should endorse and support U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially those with regard to Palestine and Israel? In this regard, if the United States makes the war and leaves the mess to be cleaned up by others, as has been our preferred approach in Afghanistan--if Americans cook the dinner and ask our allies to do the dishes--are they going to play that role in a war that they have not been sympathetic with? If not, what are the implications for Iraq and the region of a reconstruction effort that depends primarily on American efforts?

How will Iraqis react to an invasion by Americans declaring our intention to liberate them from what everyone must agree is a very vile government? Will they welcome us as in Afghanistan, or will they oppose us as they opposed an Iranian effort to overthrow that regime a dozen years ago?

How will Iran react? This is a question that deserves a great deal more discussion than it has had. In 1990 and '91, we were finally able to put carriers into the Gulf because we were confident on the basis of Iranian behavior and signals that Iran would not frustrate our efforts to make war on Baghdad and to liberate Kuwait. Do we have such assurances in the current context? What is the Iranian position likely to be? And, specifically, what impact would a war on Saddam in the name of eliminating weapons of mass destruction have on Iranian programs to develop such weapons? Would it cause them to abandon them or to accelerate their efforts to possess them?

These are questions that I have not heard asked in public, and they need answers. What will the Israeli reaction be? We've already been told by the Israeli government that if it is attacked it will counterattack, but that is shorthand for a much more complicated situation.

What will the reaction of the Arabs be to an attack on another Arab country? How will the Iraqi reaction shape reactions in the Arab world, and what will the reaction of Arabs be to the perceived collusion of their governments in an endeavor that they almost universally oppose? Will governments in the region, faced with a choice between their own people and their strong opposition to war with Iraq and the imperative of maintaining good relations with the United States, hide behind a U.N. resolution to say to their own people, we had no choice? Will this political cover be effective for them, and what are the implications?

How long will a war with Iraq take? If it is not quick but long and dirty, how much can we count on our allies and friends in the region in terms of their willingness to tolerate our staging troops, munitions and aircraft throughout their territory? This raises a broader question: How would a U.S. war on Iraq from bases in countries that oppose such a war affect our relations in the long term? How would it affect our prospects for maintaining bases on the soil of allies Germany and Japan, for example, and for being able to freely use those bases to do things that those governments oppose?

What will the war with Iraq do, in short, to our broader pattern of alliances and our ability to project power from forward bases in Europe and Asia? Where will a war that's forced on our friends leave us with those friends after it's over, and what implications would a war have for the OPEC oil process and the like? Can we count on Saudi Arabia to bail us out from a spike in prices this time by ramping up production for that purpose, forgoing profits in the process, as they did in 1991, or this time will there be a different outcome? What sort of international or regional order are we really aiming to create? What will our relationship be with the United Nations when all this is over?

ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN, Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Perhaps the most important question is still, do we need to fight this war? The answer, I think, has to be given very tentatively. The arguments for and against are relatively well-balanced. Personally, and with great reluctance, I would say that we probably do have to fight this war. I have watched what has gone on in Iraq too long. I think that what has been uncovered about its weapons of mass destruction, and what is laid out in the British white paper and the new CIA white paper on these programs, documents a far more active process of proliferation than people seem to realize.

I have read a great deal of commentary describing the British white paper as repeating the past. If you have no background in intelligence or the analysis of these issues, you may get that impression. You may particularly get that impression if you rely on press articles and don't bother to read it. But strategic illiteracy is not analysis. That paper documents a great deal of content that has not been released before. It also necessarily omits a great deal of additional content about supply, facilities and activities, not only for intelligence reasons but because they have to be protected as potential targets.

To understand the risks involved, we also need to go back to 1988. The biological weapons that UNSCOM found in 1995 were not being stockpiled to deal with theory. Had the war gone on late into 1988 or 1989, it is virtually certain that Iraq would have launched a massive biological campaign against Iran that would have had to be targeted at population centers. What they were developing was never suited in weaponry or structure for use against opposing military forces.

Since 1991, there has been an unremitting process of proliferation, concealment, cheat and retreat. It is possible that if the Clinton administration had been firmer, an organization like the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) or UNSCOM could have succeeded, and containment alone might now be safe. But I do not see the evidence that that is possible today. What I do see is a hostile power that has two priorities: the role and survival of Saddam Hussein, and leverage and power through the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

But having a cause for war is not enough to go to war, and I would ask eight questions of my own and briefly try to answer them. These questions are pragmatic and narrowly focused. I have never felt that we can ever approach a real-world decision in the context of the world we would like to have. We have to deal with the world we already have.

The first question is, have we made a convincing public case for war; have we convinced people that we need to do this? I think the answer quite clearly is no, and this is a serious problem. We never had a meaningful effort at public diplomacy to deal with Iraq and the Gulf during the Clinton administration. It issued two shallow little white papers on containment, oil for food, and the actions of the Iraq regime in eight years. They were written for a Beltway audience. Other than that, the State Department produced little more than an intellectual vacuum. There was no organized, real public diplomacy, no support of the ambassadors. At the same time, the Clinton administration frittered away containment with pointless minor military adventures, ending in nothing--like Desert Fox. We are here partly because we had a vacuum of leadership by a prior president.

We are far too late in trying to convince the world that proliferation is a serious threat. The British white paper, the CIA white paper, which were in some form of draft for at least six months and should have been released early enough to shape world opinion, were not. Instead, the Bush administration has placed a chronic over-reliance on vague arguments and statements by senior officials, but nobody is quite clear in the Bush administration on how to provide the evidence, and we have had a great deal of blustering.

The fact is, we are dealing not with an imminent threat but with a proximate one. It is a reality that if we have not made the case, we can at least try UNMOVIC, but it is awfully late to have UNMOVIC. And if we do this, it will be on the understanding that at the first barrier to any activity in disarmament, whether or not it is publicly recognized by UNMOVIC, that will be a declaration of war.

The second question is, have we dealt properly with the problems and tensions of the second intifada in preparing for war. Clearly not, and now we cannot. It is too late for any sudden, dramatic progress, and the Israeli-Palestinian fighting will go on probably for years regardless of American action and leadership. We could never have timed a war on Iraq to follow the end of the second intifada, but we have badly misshaped this battlefield in terms of Arab and world perceptions, and the resulting Arab hostility to the United States. The president has sometimes set the right goals, but he has then done things like referring to Sharon as a man of peace. The U.S. Congress passes a resolution on Jerusalem for domestic political purposes precisely at the moment it does the most damage to our cause overseas. From day to day, it is almost impossible for the world to see whether the United States is committed to the peace process. And it is this issue, not Islamic extremism, which alienates the Arab world and the Muslim world.

Third, have we prepared the Congress and the American people? The Congress, clearly; the American people, no. The American people do not yet have a clear picture of what a war really means, what it would take, and the potential risks involved. It is confused, not committed.

Fourth, have we really created the military climate we need to act? Probably yes, and I have great faith in people like Tommy Franks and the American military. But there is no room here for risk taking and adventures. We need decisive force, and not over-reliance on special forces or on air power to the exclusion of the right amounts of land power. We don't need innovative new concepts from people in the Defense Policy Council, well-meaning civilians, military retreads or, for that matter, civilian analysts. The key to success will be the use of sudden decisive force as quickly as possible. That reduces the political damage, minimizes real-world collateral damage, and reduces the risk of the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Fifth, have we consulted our allies in the United Nations as much as possible? Clearly not. We are reacting to pressure now, not leading.

Sixth, do we have a critical minimum of allies to actually conduct the operation? Yes, barely, we do. Not because these allies love us, not because they care about our national goals, not because anyone in the region pays the slightest attention to promises of democratization, but simply because we're the world's dominant superpower. Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Turkey will probably support us. Saudi Arabia will tolerate us and has already said at the ministerial and cabinet level that it will increase oil production to compensate for the loss of Iraq's oil. But we have not, as Chas. has pointed out, dealt with Iran, and we have not defined the role we want Israel to play.

Seventh, are we prepared for the worst case in weapons of mass destruction? No; we can't be; we don't have the resources. But we are strengthening things like missile defense, passive defense. We are trying to create a pattern of deterrence. It is virtually certain that our air war is sized for the immediate attack on Iraqi WMD facilities virtually from the initial moment of war.

It is also probable that Iraq's military resources in terms of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, and the necessary delivery systems, are too limited to produce large catastrophic casualties. That said, can you eliminate the risk that they have such abilities? That some kind of proxy or terrorist or covert attack might work or that you might trigger a process of Israeli retaliation, which would not be controllable? No. These remain real-world risks. The reason that I am willing to say we should accept them is largely that the risks will be greater a year from now, two years from now or three years from now. Deferring this war and this confrontation solves nothing; it simply relies on hope.

Finally, do we have a clear nation-building and conflict-termination plan? This to me is the most critical issue from an American viewpoint. We will not be judged by how we go to war. We will not be judged by how we fight this war. We will be judged by what happens after this war and by the way we deal with Iraq in the region once the war is over. The president as yet has provided absolutely no leadership on this issue. The most that he has done is make reference to words like democratization, which has become a four-letter word in the region, a synonym for imperialism, for seizing control of oil, for going on from Iraq to other countries and for dictating the political future of the region. It has become a symbol for alienation of the states we need most, a case where neo-con fantasy has been transformed into neo-crazy.

Frankly, if we go on without more leadership from President Bush as to our goals for the post-Saddam period, if we do not say that we do this to allow the Iraqis to create their own government--that we go in as partners, not as occupiers, that whatever happens here we will not dictate the future or control of Iraq's oil--if we do not deal with debt reparations and contracts, if it is not clear that there is a moral and ethical goal to this war that serves Iraq's needs and not our own, and if we are not prepared to act on that from the day we go in, in terms of peacemaking, humanitarian relief and other activities, all of the other issues relating to whether we should go to war are moot. Our military victory will be a grand strategic defeat.

AMB. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Tony. That was both eloquent and powerful. I'd like to raise a question for later discussion that perhaps the next speaker might wish to address.

Is Saddam so stupid and autistic that he hasn't noticed that for several years the United States has been declaring our intention to come and get him--especially this president? And if he has noticed, do you think it's out of the realm of possibility that he has prepositioned retaliation against the United States here in the United States? Inspectors can find and eliminate nuclear programs because they're bulky, consume a lot of power and the like, and maybe they can do the same with chemical programs, but biological programs can be cooked up in the basement of relatively small houses. So I just wonder again, as we look at the possible benefits--and Tony has made an eloquent case that, great as the risks are, the benefits are substantial, and waiting increases the risks--do we have a risk that we might experience an attack on our own homeland by unconventional means from this regime as it goes down?

Joe Wilson served twice as ambassador in Africa and was the senior National Security Council advisor on Africa, but that's not why he's here. He's here because he served as charge d'affaires in Baghdad during the whole period of Desert Shield and was the last American executive branch official to meet with Saddam Hussein. He succeeded in obtaining the release of hundreds of American and other hostages from the Iraqi regime and therefore has a kind of firsthand familiarity with it that not very many people have.

JOSEPH C. WILSON, former U.S. charge d'affaires, Baghdad; strategic advisor, Rock Creek Corporation

I want to build on something Tony said: that Saddam's regime has two principal priorities. One is the survival and power of Saddam Hussein, and the other is the leveraging of that power to gain hegemony within the region. This has long been an ambition of Saddam Hussein, one that is fueled largely by his own character, his own finely defined sense of Iraqi history--Saladin, the great Kurdish conqueror, came from his hometown of Tikrit, for example--and by Baath party philosophy of one greater Arab nation. Why not Saddam as the leader?

It seems to me that we have one principal priority that we want to combat Saddam on: the utilization of his power as leverage for hegemony in the region.

At the end of the Gulf War, we left Saddam in place, not as the major-league asshole that he had been to us in the run-up to the Gulf War, but as a minor-league potentate whose military had been absolutely smashed and who posed a limited threat within the region in the short and even medium term.

It is unfair to say that the implementation of a number of the U.N. resolutions and particularly the resolution related to weapons of mass destruction was ineffective. For six years, inspectors found literally tons of chemicals and biological precursors and were pretty effective, if not finding everything, at keeping Saddam's programs on the run. This is probably the best we could ever hope to do, even in another disarmament or regime-change scenario.

I share Tony's conclusion that we really do need to do something against the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I would concede to this administration the possibility that one of these days these weapons might move from the tight control of the Iraqi regime into the hands of organized terrorist groups who would, in fact, want to act against U.S. interests either abroad or in our homeland.

I discount to a certain extent the assertions that the links between Al Qaeda and Saddam's government are operational in nature. It seems to me likely that Saddam's intelligence services had links or contacts with Al Qaeda. That would be prudent. Most intelligence services that didn't have their hands tied behind their backs would welcome the opportunity to have contact with enemies of their enemies so as to know what was being planned.

It does not stand to reason, however, that the links would have been such as to be operational, particularly with respect to September 11, as was the first of the assertions made by the neo-conservative crazies, as Dr. Cordesman likes to call them. After all, on September 10 the Iraqis had won pretty much everything. Saddam was pumping as much oil and getting as much revenue as he ever needed. The Iraqis were being welcomed back into the Arab world. Trade was growing, sanctions had been revised to the so-called smart sanctions. There was absolutely nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by involvement in September 11. So the real problem then is, how do you deal with the weapons of mass destruction?

At the time of the Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker met with Tariq Aziz on January 9, 1991, and said, "Look, we're going to expel you from Kuwait. If you will leave, you can leave peacefully and you can keep your army intact. If you don't leave peacefully we're going to expel you militarily, and we will succeed in doing that. The choice is yours. Should you, however, decide that you're going to use weapons of mass destruction against American troops, we will destroy your regime." Implicit in that threat was that we would use nuclear weapons to combat the chemical weapons that Saddam might use. In his book, Baker said that the Bush administration had already decided not to use nuclear weapons in the event of a chemical weapon attack on us. That's, I'm sure, true. Nonetheless, that particular threat is still pretty much on the table.

Saddam did a lot of terrible things during the Gulf War. He lobbed scuds into Israel and Saudi Arabia, he burned the Kuwaiti oil fields on his way out, but he did not use chemical weapons against American troops. The threat worked. I conclude from this that there is, in fact, a deterrent value in trading Saddam's life, diminished as it may be, against his use of weapons of mass destruction, I think, is worth considering. At the end of the day, one of the things we want to avoid, in the region or in the United States, is a counterattack against our interests, our troops or our homeland involving the chemical or biological weapons that he clearly has in his power.

Our military action should be directed at supporting a disarmament policy through a new U.N. resolution. Alternatively, as some have suggested, it seems to me not unreasonable for us to assert that we already have sufficient authority under existing U.N. Security Council resolutions to enforce disarmament in a more robust fashion.

I would then make it clear to Saddam: We are going to disarm you, either peacefully through a U.N. supervised inspection regime or by force. Should you attempt to use weapons of mass destruction against our troops or attack any of your neighbors, then we will see that as an attack against the United States and we will respond by destroying your regime. The decision for Saddam is not whether he will lose his weapons of mass destruction, because he will--but whether he will use his weapons of mass destruction if he knows he will lose everything. This plays to what Tony suggests is his first and highest priority: survival in power, albeit diminished.

I fear greatly that a regime-change approach essentially means a ground invasion into Iraq, which I am quite sure that our military forces are fully capable of executing and executing well. A pacification, an occupation and rebuilding exercise in Iraq, is far more problematic, given the makeup of Iraqi society and its own history. This is not going to be Grenada, as Caspar Weinberger testified, and it is not going to be a revolution as in Portugal, with Iraqi citizens cheering wildly from the rooftops and putting flowers in the guns of the Sunni soldiers who are still around.

The likely outcome will be a very, very nasty affair. There will be revenge killings against the Sunnis, against the Tikritis, against the Baathis. There will be Shiia grabs for power in the south and probably Baghdad. There will be Kurdish grabs for, at a minimum, Kirkuk as well as likely a rekindling of their historic ambition for an independent Kurdistan, which opens a whole other can of worms. In the middle of this will be an American occupation force.

I submit that an aggressive, robust disarmament strategy will, in fact, set the stage for what should be an Iraqi action of replacing Saddam themselves. We would then be able to assist the international community--in a more benign environment in which we are not the occupiers--in a nation-rebuilding exercise.

AMB. FREEMAN: You raise a couple of questions implicitly that we'll want to kick around in the discussion session. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are a senior Iraqi military officer confronted with demands from the United States to surrender rather than continue to support the regime. Doesn't the cost-benefit analysis look to you pretty clear? If you fail to resist the American invasion and Saddam is able to hang on long enough to work his will, you know that your wife will be raped and murdered, along with your mother, your children, etc. But if you're captured by the United States, the worst that could happen is you get a vacation in Guantanamo. I'd like to hear in terms of your understanding of Iraqi psychology, whether the choice evaluated in that manner nonetheless leads to the desired outcome, which is surrender.

Second, both Joe and Tony referred explicitly to the need for a war-termination strategy. Obviously Saddam is there because we didn't have a war-termination strategy in 1991. A question that, as I said at the outset, has been very inadequately addressed is the reaction of Iran, that other point in the "axis of evil," to the proposed assault on Iraq, both in terms of Iranian policy, Iranian calculations, Iranian reactions to an American military operation in Iraq and Iranian reactions to what happens after an American military victory, hopefully a speedy one?

RAY TAKEYH, fellow in international security studies, Yale University

My mandate is a narrow one, dealing with the specific issue of the ramifications of this presumptive war on Iran's international policy and its possible relations with the United States. For Iran, as apparently for the Bush administration, Iraq is an existential threat. Despite the fact that the first Gulf war ended many years ago between Iran and Iraq, the hostile legacy remains, has festered and has developed its own sort of a history. The border between the two states remains unsettled. Both parties tend to finance proxy wars against one another. At the same time, relations have failed to warm up to a significant degree. The memories of the eight-year war are bitter for Iran. Its population was terrorized and its territory occupied. Iran, of course, is one state that was subject to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, from which approximately 20,000 or so Iranians perished.

So Saddam Hussein--his weapons of mass destruction and the attention of the Iraqi regime toward regional assertion of his predominance if not preeminence--has been a perennial threat for the Iranian leadership, demonstrating on the surface a degree of coincidence of strategic perspective between the United States and Iran.

Why is that strategic coincidence not yielding any degree of alliance or at least some sort of tacit cooperation? It should be remembered that, while Iran may stand to benefit from the American war against Iraq, it also faces a series of problems, quandaries, opportunities and challenges not that dissimilar to the set of concerns that Iran had during the Afghan campaign. Iran welcomed the demise of the Taliban, with which it had a very tense relationship, but at the same time, it experienced anguish about the projection of American power where it had not been before. Today the United States has forces in Central Asia and, of course, Afghanistan.

Iran hopes for a similar thing with Iraq, a quick American military strike such as contributed to the demise of the Taliban. Then the Americans go home and the regional states can craft some sort of framework for post-war relations. In Afghanistan, of course, we know that didn't happen. American forces have continued to linger. Therefore, you see a bewildering and paradoxical Iranian policy. Iran contributed to the war effort, but once it became apparent that American forces were not about to leave Afghanistan, it began to consolidate its alliances and even embark on policies that could constitute a destabilization of the Afghan regime. A similar bewildering mixture of pragmatism and competition with the United States may illustrate Iran's approach to the Iraqi campaign.

What are the advantages for Iran? First of all, an American invasion and installation of a post-Saddam regime will inevitably mean that Iraq will at least for a period of time adhere to its international proliferation agreements, which for Iran will remove an existential threat. Second, if you look at the long span of Iraqi history, there are two specific foreign-policy orientations. One that can be more easily identified with the Sunni minority has always been predicated on transnational ideologies--Arabism, Baathism and so on--that have called for Iraq to become the prominent, if not the preeminent power in the Middle East.

But there's a second Iraqi foreign-policy orientation that is identified rather easily with the Shiia and Kurdish majorities, which calls for Iraqi foreign policy to be predicated not so much on grand ideological postulations but on national-interest calculations, mandating a better relationship with Iraq's non-Arab neighbors, Iran and Turkey. So if the United States succeeds in putting together a power in Iraq that is inclusive and unitary, then ultimately the Kurdish and Shia populations may have a greater say in Iraq's foreign policy and conceivably a more stable relationship with Iran. This does not necessarily suggest an alliance between Iran and Iraq but certainly a better set of relationships than Iran has had with the current Iraqi government or, I would suggest, with any Sunni successors to the Saddam regime.

Given all these advantages, why is Iran not more forthcoming with the United States? Part of this has to do with the unresolved relationship with the United States. At a time when the Bush administration is beginning to talk about regime change, a doctrine of preemption and so on, there is a limited incentive for the United States and Iran to cooperate with each other. This casts a long and ominous shadow over the prospective American war on Iran's periphery.

So what will Iran do? I think there are two possibilities that may follow from the outbreak of the war. The perennially faction-ridden Iranian government has yet to offer a coherent response, but I think we begin to see two if not three sets of responses emerging. The first is the most extreme, and it tends to be identified with the hard-line elements within the Iranian right--people such as Ayatollah Yazdi, Velayati and so on. They suggest that war with the United States is inevitable. So what Iran has to do is have not only active belligerence toward the United States but a tacit relationship with the targeted regimes. We saw similar calls during the Afghan campaign with the Taliban of Afghanistan and Saddam of Iraq. The rationale behind this particular approach, assuming that there is one, is the hope that the U.S. invasion would slow down in the targeted regime, therefore exempting Iran from being targeted by the United States. This is an extreme view and has largely been dismissed by Iranian political elites, including most persistently and recently by the Iranian defense minister.

The second approach that is beginning to crystallize can be identified with both reformists and pragmatists--and they're two different categories--most directly with one of Iran's most pragmatic and corrupt politicians, Ayatollah Rafsanjani. It suggests that perhaps Iran can use this occasion to have some sort of a relationship with the United States. If any Iranian cooperation is going to be forthcoming--sharing of intelligence and so forth--it has to yield tangible benefits in terms of Iran's having a role in post-war deliberations and perhaps even dealing with the bilateral issues of concern between the United States and Iran--such as sanctions and so on.

I would suggest that whatever audience this view may have in Tehran, it has a limited and diminishing one in the United States. I don't believe that the Bush administration is looking at the Iraqi campaign as a potential avenue for warming up relations with Iran at a time when the president is talking about regime change and the preemptive doctrine, which are two very different concepts, as any freshman political-science student will tell you. But the president tends to conflate them. So its unlikely that this war, as with the last one on Iran's periphery, will lead to a better relationship between the two antagonists.

I think Iran will do in the end what it did during the Afghan campaign: hope that if there is going to be an American invasion, it's going to be a multilateral one. Iran, like most countries in the region, is looking at the United Nations and the multilateral framework as a means of restricting and regulating the projection of American power. If the war is conducted through the United Nations, at least it will offer Iran a platform, given the absence of a relationship with the United States, to have some say in the post-war deliberations. Therefore, I think Iran will remain on the sidelines and hope that the international community will impose a certain degree of constraint on American power.

I would end by suggesting that the long-term beneficiary of the Iraq campaign may in fact be Iran, given that it would remove the WMD calculus from strategic planning. It would potentially remove a Sunni-dominated regime, giving Iran a greater degree of influence in Iraq. However, Iran is unlikely to become a material player in bringing about regime change in Iraq and is unlikely to be a significant player in adjusting the post-war demarcations of the Iraqi space, given its poor relationship with the United States and limited incentives on both sides to improve those relations.

GEOFFREY KEMP, director of regional strategic programs, the Nixon Center

I'd like to deal with the broader issues of where this war could go and what the benefits and costs are likely to be internationally. There are four ways this war could go. On the one hand, we might have U.N. support and endorsement by the U.N. Security Council for the use of force. The second case involves no U.N. support and the United States going it alone, possibly with the support of Tony Blair, possibly not. Then each of these two conditions has to be measured against a quick victory (similar to Afghanistan) with very few casualties and quick termination of the regime. The other case involves a protracted conflict. In this case the war does not go so well; we get bogged down, and there is a murky conclusion. We'll have victory in the end, but it might take a long time. Depending upon which case you pick--and there are obviously variants of these four models--you can make some optimistic, best-case predictions. On the other hand, you can be extremely gloomy and talk about a worst-case scenario.

Let's go through these four alternatives. First, with the support of the United Nations, we have a quick victory. What is likely to happen under those circumstances? The four issues the United States has to worry about once Saddam Hussein has gone are how to assure the security of Iraq, how to establish effective governance in Iraq, how to establish a legal regime that all key parties will adhere to, and how to rebuild the social infrastructure and develop the economy.

I would argue that if the victory is quick and has international support, it will ease the transition from the Saddam regime to a new regime with relative safety. Of course, there are going to be recriminations, and we should look at history in this regard. When the allied forces were greeted with cheers and flowers in August 1944 during the liberation of Paris, 9,000 French were being killed in extrajudiciary executions on the streets of Paris and other cities--a violent bloodletting. To think that's not going to happen even under the best circumstances in Iraq is wishful thinking. We have to be prepared even under the best cases for some nasty violence. There are a lot of scores to settle.

Secondly, if the war has been endorsed by the international community, presumably there will be much greater support to help the United States and whoever else is involved with us to set up a new government that will have respectability. It will make the issue of economic recovery easier. There will presumably have been minimal damage to civilian infrastructure because the war will be over so fast. Developing Iraq's energy assets will require a lot of international investment, but in this environment it could happen fairly quickly. Iraq is potentially extremely rich, having the world's second-largest proven oil reserves and large amounts of gas that have not yet been developed.

This case could be seen--and I'm certain the administration would put that spin on it--as a great victory for the United Nations and multilateralism. After all, this is what the president said when he went to the United Nations: "You've got to prove you can do it." Well, under these circumstances we may have done it. And my guess is that under this best-case scenario there would be pressure on regimes in Iran and Syria and those elements of the Palestinian community that still engage in terrorism and dream of the violent overthrow of Israel to stop their egregious behavior. The so-called low-hanging fruit will become more vulnerable. Under these circumstances Iran would become more cooperative on many issues, including possibly the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The second case, where we have the support of the United Nations but the conflict does not go so well, things are more complicated. Here we're talking higher casualties, both military and civilian, and tough decisions about military escalation if the war gets bogged down. We're talking about the potential disruption of Iraqi society and the possibility of refugee flows either to the north or to the east. The Iranians are already building refugee camps in the west of their country anticipating that this might happen. We know what happened in '91 concerning the Kurds in the north.

A protracted conflict clearly has implications for the oil markets, depending upon how much destruction there is. Depressed oil markets can lead to spikes in prices at a time when our economy is precarious. There would be mounting criticism of Bush and the gung-ho, cakewalk advocates in the Pentagon--the civilians in the Pentagon, I might add, who believed this could all be done in a matter of hours. Nevertheless, I think under these circumstances we would muddle through. Issues we'd need to discuss are, would the Israelis become involved in the protracted case? Would weapons of mass destruction be used by Saddam? How would that affect the broader war on terrorism and our own responses?

Let me quickly get to those cases where we have no U.N. support--first, we're going it alone but doing it quickly. That's what, of course, some people have been advocating. Keep the United Nations out; forget about the allies--they only get in the way; nice to have Blair but not necessary; we'll do it alone and prove that we really are the top dog. It will be triumphalism for the unilateralists. It will be used by the neo-con, Christian-evangelical coalition, which is powerful and important, to make even tougher demands on the neighborhood, particularly Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority, and ultimately maybe Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Under these circumstances, reluctantly there will be international acknowledgement that this went very well and that the world has to accept the fact that the United States is truly a superpower. But under these circumstances, the legitimacy of the operation will be questioned, most particularly in the region. Any idea of a unilateral U.S. regime change--imposing a new government on an Arab country--will sit very badly, not just in the Muslim world but in many other areas as well. The Europeans will not be happy. People will be waiting for something to go wrong.

Let me then come to the worst case, an obvious one: we have no support and the war goes badly. Having just come back from a fairly protracted trip to Europe, my judgment is that if we ignore the United Nations and the war goes badly, there will be--I hate to say it--a lot of glee around the world that we had it coming to us; we were warned. People like those on this panel all said, "Look, we've got to get support." The Europeans pleaded with us to get support. And there will be fear in the region, because under these circumstances, the possibility of chaos and escalation are high. The possibility of Israel's getting involved grows under these circumstances. The financial costs to this country will be great. Our markets will go south. And I believe that under these circumstances, the Bush presidency will be on the line.

I have no idea which of these scenarios will play out, but I agree with my colleagues here, that there has been an overtly deliberate emphasis on the easy case, the best case, and far less analysis of the worst case. In the real world, of course, it's likely to be somewhere in between.

Q&A

Q: To what extent would the lack of international support impede the success of the war effort? And what are the odds of the Iraqi army fairly quickly caving in?

DR. CORDESMAN: U.N. support, to me, is far less critical than whether we have the support of the allies in the region for basing and operations. If this goes well, there will be an awful lot of people rushing in to try to deal with the peacemaking, and we may be surprised at how much international support we suddenly acquire. A lot depends not simply on how the war goes, but how the aftermath goes and how the end result is perceived in the region. The present attitudes of the Security Council and the General Assembly are not really what is at issue.

With respect to the Iraqi army, people kept predicting its collapse throughout the Iran-Iraq War. Units were occasionally defeated or were poor-quality units. However, the weakest Iraqi units in the Iran-Iraq War were the units recruited out of Baath loyalists. No largely Shiite or Kurdish units experienced a major defection during the course of eight years of war.

In Kuwait, we saw the Republican Guards retreat in good order, with the exception of one unit, which then fought an intense combat engagement after the cease-fire. The other units did a very good job of maintaining cohesion and got well north of Basra. Most of the heavy regular army units also retreated well under orders. They were never confronted with combat, so we don't know what they would have done, but they didn't disintegrate, and they didn't participate in the riots or uprisings with the exception of some elements of a few brigades. You did see Iraqi units filled with low-grade conscripts collapse early in the Gulf War, but such low-grade conscripts were used throughout the Iran-Iraq War and in the Gulf War as the equivalent of military speed bumps. The Iraqi army was always willing to take high casualties in such forces, and that's why many of them were Kurdish and Shiite.

It is possible that Iraqi forces will collapse quickly in this war. A lot will depend on how they perceive the course of the air attack, how serious we are, how successful we are in targeting. It is also possible, however, you'll get serious pockets of resistance, particularly around Baghdad and loyalist areas. But all this is purely speculative. Anybody who claims to be able to predict the outcome of this war on the basis of past examples simply has no basis for doing it.

AMB. FREEMAN: Let me just buttress that point with the observation that the Iraqi ground forces at the time--February 23, 1991--had been subjected to round-the-clock bombing at the rate of one bomb per minute for 37 days, which does something to you. In the absence of that kind of saturation-bombing campaign--under the quick and successful optimum case that we're discussing--we have even less grounds for anticipating the behavior of the Iraqi armed forces.

AMB. WILSON: On the first question of U.N. support, it strikes me as increasingly likely that we will get U.N. support for some piece of what we anticipate doing. It's not likely that you're going to get U.N. Security Council support for a regime-change option. But at the end of the day, this is a challenge to the United Nations as well, and there are those in the United Nations who will not want to have the United States go it alone. As was said earlier, there are a fair number of countries that see the United Nations as an opportunity to restrain or modify the way the United States might act.

On the odds of the army caving in, there are those who have argued that thousands, as in the Gulf War, will capitulate as soon as they see Italian photographers. But, even if the army does decide not to overtly fight against an American invasion, this war is not going to be over when we get to Baghdad. In fact, the war will have just begun. The pacification and occupation and rebuilding of Iraq is going to be a much more time-consuming and difficult task, and it will be conducted in an environment that is not benign. We will see, in the bloodletting that occurs afterwards, that among those who are most at risk will be those who are tied to the old regime, including its military and security apparatuses. So, even if they are not prepared to fight for Saddam, when the guns are turned on them, or when the Shia and the Kurds come after them, they're going to fight for their own lives, the lives of their clans, the lives of their tribes, the lives of the Sunni. In the middle of all this will be inserted 50,000 or 250,000 American occupation troops trying to adjudicate what could be the blowup of a country that has always been very difficult to hold together.

AMB. FREEMAN: On the issue of U.N. resolutions, this question is linked to the issue of logistical support by friends in the region. For example, Saudi Arabia has said that it would support a U.N. resolution by offering use of its bases and air space for an attack on Iraq [rescinded November 3]. Turkey has said the same. Neither has said that they would offer such support or use of their air space in the event of no U.N. resolution. You can imagine the difficulty of funneling an attack through Kuwait or maintaining temporary bases inside Iraq without the use of these air spaces. Therefore, the U.N. resolution and the political cover that it provides to allies and friends is a rather crucial issue.

Q: Tony, I was struck by your conclusion that we really did need to go to war. Everybody talks about WMD, but most military people are not that tremendously concerned about chemical weapons--given the bulk of them, they're not very good terrorist weapons. And my understanding is that a lot of nuclear capability has been dismantled and probably hasn't been rebuilt. That leaves us with the bioweapon capability. I would argue that you can't have it both ways. You can't talk about going to war in order to eradicate BW, on the one hand, and then suggest that anybody can make it in their basement, on the other. In fact, I know of no country that this nation has recently put on its enemies' list that doesn't supposedly have a BW capability of some kind. What are we really worried about? Why is it so crucial that we need to go to war right now?

The second issue is more political. What happens within the rest of the Arab world? We're not exactly popular today, but even assuming we have a successful invasion of Iraq, does that make things worse? Does it cause a cataclysmic kind of event that actually ends up making things better?

DR. CORDESMAN: We face a future in which low-level biological attacks by groups or individuals or nations cannot be deterred or prevented. It doesn't matter whether it's Iraq or someone in the right-wing militias or somebody in a place we've never heard of with a cause we do not know about. That is one of the reasons why, regarding homeland defense, we are looking at programs that may be able to address some of these issues and risks in the future. But they will at best give us radical improvements in our defensive capabilities over a period of five to 15 years. There is no capability to defend against imminent threat.

But we're not talking about small, isolated attacks that only have to affect a few people, and biological weapons that achieve very high lethality against large numbers of people are very difficult to manufacture. To get the kind of lethality that many of the books and papers warn about requires advanced technology. What makes Iraq different here is that Iraq has a massive weaponization program. UNSCOM did not destroy that program. By the time it uncovered it in 1995-96, most of the key elements were already missing. These elements included things like sprayers, three quarters of the growth material, most of the weapons, most of the actual devices to be used. Over 70 percent of the weapons casings and designs are still missing, and that's using UNSCOM figures, not some recent U.S. release.

If Iraq can go from the kind of crude weapons that might kill a couple of hundred Americans to dry-storable micro-powders to easily disseminated agents, it can bypass the nuclear dimension entirely. The resulting biological warheads will be at least as lethal as theater nuclear weapons. I think that, from the evidence, they aren't ready to do this yet. They probably need a year to three years before they'll have these lethalities.

Let me just briefly address the issue of Iraqi unity. I have been visiting Iraq since 1973, though for obvious reasons, not since 1991. It is a deeply divided country, but there are a lot of elements that could also hold it together. A lot will depend not so much on the internal divisions in Iraq, but whether we are prepared for a nationwide peacemaking effort, and whether we have given the Iraqis a clear vision of the future. A clear vision of the future is not relying on something like the Iraqi National Council. It is whether there is a clear economic program, a clear program for nation building, whether they're convinced we're going to be there as partners rather than occupiers. That, to me, is the real issue here, not simply a matter of how you structure the political healing or ties between the various factions.

DR. KEMP: One thing that none of us talked about was the environment in the region if and when this war takes place. The administration has to be very concerned about a serious escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in parallel with a war in Iraq. The president of Afghanistan is one bullet away from plunging that country into chaos. The India-Pakistan issue is not resolved. Pakistani terrorism against India could well put the Indians into a preemptive mode. All sorts of other horrible things could be going on at the same time that we go to war with Iraq, and this is particularly serious in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There have been in the last six weeks two cases where the Israelis were lucky in aborting potential mega-terrorist attacks in Israel that could have killed hundreds of civilians, which translates into thousands by American terms. Even Shimon Peres was on record as saying that if this had happened, it would have changed politics as we know it. There are some very scary scenarios about escalation on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

There is also a very serious question about what Hezbollah is up to in South Lebanon with a vast quantity of weaponry that Iraq, Iran and others might be anxious for them to use to start a second front to make life much more complicated for us. We know the one thing the president does not want is to have the Arab-Israel conflict on the front pages and on TV at the same time we are bombing Baghdad.

My guess is that most of the regimes in the Arab world will survive. The one regime that I worry about under these circumstances is Jordan's. My sense is that the Saudis are capable of surviving, as indeed are the Egyptians and the Syrians in the short run, but if things go in the direction of the best-case analysis, this could accelerate the growing pressures in the Arab world for reform, which very beneficially now are coming from the Arabs themselves. It's encouraging that in the last months, certainly since the president's speech in June, the Palestinian elite has become much more active in pressing for reform of the Palestinian Authority, and had it not been for this recent incursion of Sharon's that made Arafat an icon again, his days truly looked numbered. That would be good for progress in that arena. So there are some positive trends coming from the Arab societies that know they must have reform, irrespective of what's going on in Iraq, and that could be built upon if things go well rather than badly.

DR. TAKEYH: There are two specific Iraqs emerging in the debate. The first is a country that merits immediate American military intervention. Then when there's a discussion regarding the costs and burdens of the war, there's a low-bailing of the estimates, given the fact that Iraqi weapons programs and so forth have eroded for the past decade. This is at least an implicit acknowledgement of the efficacy of the sanctions and containment policy. The president would have to pick one of these narratives or at least somehow reconcile them. I think there are compelling arguments for military intervention and regime change in Iraq. There are less compelling arguments for immediate military intervention and regime change in Iraq.

How this is going to be embraced by the region depends on what happens in Iraq internally. If the administration manages somehow to create an inclusive democratic polity, then that's going to be embraced, at least by the populace, in a reasonably positive light. So far there have been no specific plans. The United States succeeded in the Japanese occupation because the Japanese viewed it as an agency for assertion of their regional power. So presumably the Japanese case is not applicable to the Iraqi case, which is a society largely fragmented along ethnic and confessional lines. So how this is going to be embraced depends on how serious American commitment is to Iraqi reconstruction and how successful it is.

AMB. WILSON: On September 10 of last year, regime change was the accepted American policy towards Iraq. It was a noble policy objective, just as was the policy objective of successive administrations to support regime change in Libya and Cuba. It has also been the policy objective of this administration to support regime change in California. On September 12, with the emergence right after the World Trade Center crash and the appearance on television of the neo-cons--the right-wing nuts--it became a rationale for a military invasion. The argument on September 12 was rather simple. September 11 was a bad event; Saddam is a bad man. Therefore, we should go and kill Saddam. We have been working from that premise ever since.

It was very difficult to pin September 11 on Saddam Hussein, so the president essentially found himself backed into a corner. They've been scrambling for an argument to justify an invasion of Iraq ever since, and weapons of mass destruction or the enhanced enforcement of the U.N. resolutions related to weapons of mass destruction provides the rationale for doing it at this time. The problem is separating out disarmament from regime change. The president has been more nuanced recently, though when he appears at fundraisers, he still tends to blur the distinction between the two.

When we did the Gulf War and the run-up to the Gulf War, the deepest concern in the Arab world was that the United States and the West were embarked upon a strategy to take out an Arab regime just because we didn't like it. That was their worst nightmare, that they were going to suffer yet another in a succession of humiliations at the hands of foreign invaders. When we did not do that, when we stopped at the Kuwait border and then withdrew, our credibility was extraordinarily high because those worst nightmares were not realized. I suspect right now that in the Arab world, those nightmares are back.

Also at the time of the Gulf War, as in the run-up, in the Arab street there were a lot of Palestinian and other Arab kids being born who were named Scud Hussein. There weren't a lot being named George Bush. If we proceed with something akin to the worst-case scenario, a lot of kids in the Arab world will end up being disaffected, being brainwashed into thinking this war is in fact an Iraqi defense of the Arab world against a modern Judeo-Christian crusade, and you will have an entire new generation of terrorists who will kill and die with Saddam Hussein's name on their lips.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think that's not an impossible scenario, and I'm grateful to you, Joe, for stating it so starkly.

Two dimensions of this in the immediate term need to be considered. The first is that, particularly among those Arabs who would be called upon to facilitate the U.S. attack--Arabs in the Gulf--opposition to a proposed American attack on Iraq among the public, including elites, is nearly 100 percent. The dilemma for governments in the region is that they, on the one hand, have an imperative of retaining good relations with the United States for foreign-policy and national-security and regime-survival reasons. On the other hand, they face publics that are fundamentally opposed to U.S. policy. I leave it to you to speculate about the implications for a regime that ignores its own public opinion in favor of the opinion of a foreign ally.

The second point is that the neo-conservatives are fairly open in saying, today Iraq; tomorrow, you name it--Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Libya. All of them are on the Krauthammer list to be hammered. This, at a minimum, is not a very persuasive argument, if you're a supporter of the Saudi regime or the other regimes in the Gulf, for signing on to the American crusade, jihad, struggle against Saddam.

When the United States carried out an occupation and reform of Germany and Japan, it had two major advantages. Both those countries had democratic traditions. In the case of Germany, the Weimar Republic, which had preceded the Nazi regime, was very much alive in people's minds. In the case of Japan, in the 1920s there had been a parliamentary democracy. The United States was able to revive these traditions. In the case of Iraq, perhaps the modern regime was cobbled together by the British, as it is often said, but there has been a strong central government in that region for 5,000 years. The last time the area enjoyed the role of law was under Hammurabi, which was a while back.

A second distinction is that, when Germany and Japan were reformed, it was done with broad regional support in Europe and international support generally of the entire venture. I don't believe that any Arab government or any Arab intellectuals have so far signed on to the idea of the United States dictating the future contours of the regime in Iraq. The question of whether Iraq can be democratized and reformed by conquest does not have an obvious answer.

AMB. WILSON: May I just say one other thing about the neo-conservative piece of this? I was struck on Friday night when Jerry Falwell appeared on "Crossfire." He made three points: the prophet Muhammed was a terrorist; there are no Palestinian territories; and the Israeli patrimony is Judea and Samaria. Keep in mind that this is what he is now saying as part of this evangelical, neo-conservative alliance, and what that portends for the region, if in fact that is a vision of this crowd and not just Jerry Falwell misspeaking.

DR. KEMP: The "60 Minutes" program on Sunday was even more terrifying, by the way, because they talked to others who believe the doomsday scenario, that increasing violence is going to hasten the Second Coming.

Q: Who is supplying Saddam Hussein with the means to produce these weapons of mass destruction? Are they all homegrown? Why aren't we policing this thing better? The second question is, I read an interesting comment by a senior official of the Department of Commerce in Warsaw, who said the war in Iraq would be beneficial for the world's economy. We'll control the oil; the price of oil will drop from $30 to $18. How tree is this, our control of oil?

DR. CORDESMAN: A number of suppliers have smuggled things in over the last 10 years. Precursor chemicals have come in through India. It's very difficult to stop every bulk shipment of liquids. You have some 21 purchasing agencies and cover fronts that Iraq maintains globally trying to buy things. Iraq is always trying to manipulate the oil-for-food program and include dual-use items for which Iraq has no domestic need. Either that, or Iraq does things like use mythical outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease as the excuse. And the imports get through.

That pattern of cheating and lying is very consistent. It means that you have a number of European suppliers with key technologies when you can use third countries or third parties. You can bribe people to get key technology flows in. In 1991, there was a real technology base. UNSCOM destroyed dedicated facilities. UNSCOM did not destroy dual-use items, which in theory were reassigned to other functions but which can now be shifted back.

AMB. FIREMAN: It did not administer frontal lobotomies to scientists.

DR. CORDESMAN: No. In the nuclear case, Iraq can rapidly create nuclear devices if it can get weapons-grade material from a source like the former Soviet Union because you couldn't destroy the basic technology for high-explosive lens design or neutron initiators. We found they had two workable implosion designs after the war, and the people involved are largely still there.

We may not be aggressive enough in shutting off access to missing components. We have a policy under which we do not identify suppliers, except in the case of some Chinese and Russian firms, but it's rare. The mason is that we can shut the supply off better using a friendly government than we can by publicly embarrassing the supplier. But this is a constant straggle, and they only have to win occasionally to move forward.

On the oil issue, there are people who earn a great living in Washington predicting oil prices, just as some of us do predicting the outcomes of wars. Let's get real. We have no idea what the oil market is going to be. We don't know how quickly Iraq can come back online. We don't know what level of surplus production will exist. We don't know how OPEC will respond. About the only thing we do know is that, if Saybolt is even approximately right, it is going to take a matter of years, not months, to get major increases in Iraq's present production capacity, simply because expansion and renovation need to go at that rate. Trying to shape world oil prices on the basis of a war in Iraq is sort of like trying to sculpt an iceberg with the Titanic. Regardless of what the captain wants to do, it isn't going to happen.

AMB. FREEMAN: No Iraqi regime that served the interests of North American consumers of energy at the expense of Iraq's national interest and the welfare of the Iraqi people would have any hope of legitimacy at all. Therefore, whatever government is in Baghdad will want to maximize the long-term profit to Iraq of Iraq's energy resources or it will be, by definition, illegitimate.

AMB. WILSON: Most governments act in their own national interests, and any successor government to Saddam's can be expected to do exactly the same thing. They will probably find it difficult to act on oil policy in a way that alienates not just their own population but also their neighbors, and they will also act to maximize their oil revenues. So it's not likely over the medium to long term that they will serve as tools of an American effort to maintain a stable oil price.

DR. KEMP: This raises a very interesting question about the degree to which, in order to maximize Iraq's revenues and development of its oil resources in the post-Saddam era, they need to have a strong central government to deal with this one huge asset. That tends to run counter to a lot of the voices you're hearing now in the Iraqi opposition that essentially say some loose federation is the only way to hold Iraq together because you have these competing factions. There's a certain inconsistency between how you maximize the economic development of Iraq while taking into account the need for a loose federal system.

Q: My question is in regard to Turkey and Iran. Their worry about the American attack on Iraq is the creation of a Kurdish democratic state of some kind. Prime Minister Ecevit said that the next incursion by the Turkish into Iraq would be not just 50 miles or so, but all the way to Mosul and Kirkuk, about 200 kilometers into the northern part of Iraq. They fear that the unified state that President Bush is talking about is going to be in the guise of federalism, which they think is the first stage in the creation of a Kurdish democratic republic. Then you will have a long-term war in the region. Iran, Syria, Turkey and of course even Iraq itself do not want to lose a part of their territory.

Iran has not clarified its position as regards what the United States might do in Iraq. I think they are thinking that since they are a religious state, they cannot come out and say that they support the American attack on Iraq no matter what, even though they have a lot of differences with Iraq and would really like Saddam to go. I think they would have no problem with a quick resolution. But they seem to be indicating that they oppose use of the airspace by the U.S. Air Force.

DR. KEMP: This is a very important point. To oversimplify it, the two major Kurdish groups of the North, the PUK and the KDP, are united in that, if they are to be part of a loose federation, they would like to control the oil resources around Kirkuk, which is outside their control at the moment. Unfortunately, the majority of the population of Kirkuk are Turkomans. For Turkey, this is a red line, in that the Turks are very explicit that they will not permit the Kurds to control Kirkuk. So whether or not the United States has negotiated an agreement between the Kurds and the Turks on this issue before the war is a very important question. If it has not been resolved, then it does open up exactly the scenario that you, I think quite ably, laid out. This problem isn't going to go away when Saddam has gone. There are a lot of problems with Iraq and its neighborhood that are not related to the Saddam Hussein regime: access to the Shatt al-Arab, the whole Kurdish question and the relationship with Iran. These questions will be there even if you have a democratic, united Iraq.

DR. TAKEYH: I think national interests will become more significant and religious issues will be subordinate to that. But I think there is a consensus within Iran that Iran missed an opportunity during the Afghan campaign for having perhaps a better relationship with the United States. I think Iran will do just what you said: try to stay out and offer some sort of cooperation. But I don't think there is that much incentive on the U.S. side to become engaged with Iran over these issues. If you talk to some Iranian officials, there's nostalgia for the Clinton years. No one was talking about preemptive war.

There is a lot of concern in Iran that they're going to be a target. The president has already made his regime-change speech--that he's hoping it will be facilitated by the Iranians themselves. I do think there is a possibility of a greater degree of Iranian constructive cooperation if the United States were prone toward diplomacy with Tehran. I don't see much incentive on the Washington side.

AMB. WILSON: My understanding, in my discussion with Kurds when I was out there, was that Kirkuk was truly a Kurdish city that they were driven out of and that it was repopulated by Arabs. It is, in fact, an objective of the Kurdish groups to regain control of Kirkuk and the oilfields in that area. One of the problems the Kurds are going to have is maintaining a cohesive and coherent identity, given the differences between the three main factions--the PUK, the KDP and the Sourchi clan, which has periodically been tied closely to Saddam Hussein.

The other thing that needs to be taken into account is that there has been a vision on the table of international relations for 70 or 80 years of an independent Kurdistan. That is what also implicates not just Turkey but also Iran and Syria, which have significant Kurdish enclaves that might also seek to have autonomy or independence. That is something that also very much concerns some of the neighbors.

DR. CORDESMAN: About the only aspect of post-war policy that the president has clearly articulated is preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq. The obvious reason for this is Turkey, as well as Arab sensitivities, and the fact that trying to create any kind of separate Kurdish entity is seen as a potential disaster. I would be very careful. Kirkuk, and the place where the oilfields are physically located, is not really Kurdish. It's a very mixed area, and there's a lot of intermarriage. The Kurds that are in a lot of these areas were not part of the Barzani or Talibani movement. You have a very divided Kurdish group, and the fact they can come together for the odd week doesn't mean that they have any real unity, except out of opportunism, and even that doesn't work very well.

The other problem I think we need to remember when we talk about the oil fields and seizing the oil fields and all of the rest, is where Iraq's oil deposits really are. You also need to remember that, unlike Iran, Iraq does not have a unified structure in terms of a national oil company. It's split into two north and south operations. There is central management of the fields, however, and more exports will begin to flow to the west or the south the moment they can get out of dependence on Turkey.

However, little is going to happen, if Saybolt is approximately correct, for at least a year, other than rebuilding capacity to the levels at which Iraq was already exporting. It's also going to take three to five years to bring on major new oil production at the level of several million more barrels per day. Just to remind people who think this war is going to rapidly and predictably cut world oil prices, OPEC, the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Agency all already estimate that Iraq will be producing with massive new capacity by 2005 if the world is still to have moderate oil prices.

Q: There are a lot of reasons that people advocate for going to war with Iraq, but when the administration defends its policy approach it's primarily in terms of the potential danger Iraq poses to the United States through the use of weapons of mass destruction here, not against the American forces there. The purpose of my question is to get Anthony Cordesman to address this more thoroughly than we have heard thus far. In the context of a war, is it likely that Iraq has pre-positioned one or another form of weapons in the United States, maybe in Washington DC, that would be used? How do you evaluate that?

Secondly, if there is no war and Iraq hasn't been working on doing that over the last several years, given how close we will have come to a war, when does that become, from an Iraqi deterrence point of view, exactly what it would try to do in the coming future so that one day it could announce, in fact, that it does have that capability?

Third, independent of these considerations, do you believe, with respect to nuclear, that there is some serious likelihood that Iraq, not through its own enrichment programs but through the attainment of smuggled uranium or plutonium, could actually have a nuclear capability within several years? With respect to biological weapons, you seem to be saying that in something like one to three years Iraq could have a capability that would allow it to leapfrog a nuclear option. Did this include the issue of an ability to deliver them as opposed to just having those weapons?

Finally, Iraq may have all sorts of capabilities, but the question is, if we're talking about the United States, are we really talking about a situation in which the war has to be fought now or later on less advantageous terms, which essentially means that the terms will work? Or is there some reason to believe in fact that deterrence could work, at least long enough for change to take place--if Saddam dies, for example. It's not a question of 50 years of Cold War. It's a regime whose adventurousness is enormously affected by the personality of this one guy. If he weren't there, the whole issue would recede into the background.

DR. CORDESMAN: I think the Bush administration has tried to tie too much of what it is doing in Iraq to the war on terrorism. The CIA document that became available on the Web a couple of days ago and the British assessment do not track with this aspect of the president's speech. If the president has a case for dealing with terrorism or domestic issues, it is, to date, based on vague statements like those of Secretary Rumsfeld that there is irrefutable evidence. This is as far as he has defined the problem. If a real terrorist connection exists, this would be important to know. I think, though, that the case is different in terms of weapons of mass destruction. If you look in detail at the literature, I don't agree with you. The president has gone on to make a case for the threat to the region, to our allies in the region, and in terms of regional stability, both in his speech and in the papers issued by the government.

On the issue of the pre-positioning of weapons, the problem with this argument is several-fold. First, it means Iraq has to be very confident that its intelligence operations are clever and subtle. But I have never been impressed by the cleverness and subtlety of Iraqi intelligence. Moreover, if we ever found evidence of such pre-positioning, it would give us global carte blanche to do virtually anything in attacking Iraq that we wanted. The threat of such risks also isn't a valid argument against going to war. The situation won't get better. If you don't deal with the Iraqi threat now, whether they've pre-positioned or not, presumably they can make the threat more sophisticated over time.

There is an undeniable risk here, however, in the case of biological weapons. That risk seems acceptable. In the real world, biological weapons require you to have extremely sophisticated material. It has to be something you can disseminate in almost perfect micropowder form, which has no static clustering and can survive against temperature and ultraviolet rays. You have to be able to disseminate it in very high densities. We don't believe Iraq has that capability now. It is certain to, over time, if it continues its present efforts. We had these agents by the early 1960s, the Russians had them. People can produce them, and at some point Iraq will get them. They may be there now, which I sincerely doubt. Iraq will get them at some point in the future unless it is truly disarmed, because all of the things UNSCOM could not find directly relate to this kind of weaponization. Once it gets such weapons, delivery can use anything from a missile warhead to a short-range rocket and from a covert device to a bomb.

Let's be clear about such terrorism. The body count matters. There is a real difference between five and 50,000 people. On the nuclear side, the question about how quickly you can do it, if you really have enriched material--anybody can make a large gun device in a matter of months. They have all the technology to do that. In fact they had the designs, and we verified them.

Taking fissile material and putting it into an implosion device is very difficult. It's not clear they have the high-explosive lens-manufacturing capability, but a year is a reasonable sort of time frame. Two years is more credible. If it is a Russian theater nuclear weapon, it is no secret that the devices designed to activate the weapon are very primitive compared to ours and use exactly the same codes and mechanisms in all of the weapons. You can therefore arm a Russian weapon, if you have more than one and you have skilled physicists and engineers, in a matter of days--if any of these should somehow become available. These are all worst-case scenarios, and they now are not very likely. But those are the possibilities. The CIA estimate said five years. It didn't talk about one or two years for nuclear enrichment as the case for actually getting to the fissile devices.

Let me make one last point about deterrence. If I thought you could safely deter Saddam, I would obviously not favor military action. If we can somehow make UNMOVIC work--and we don't have the time to discuss all of the weaknesses in the UNMOVIC approach--then I would be in favor of disarmament. But what you have to always ask is not simply, what are the negative sides of going to war, but what will the risks be in three or five years if we don't act? Will Saddam devolve to Qusay, to Uday or to what? If you see Saddam in power and you're an Iranian, what do you do? If you are in Israel looking at this situation of unconstrained proliferation, what do you do? If you are in Saudi Arabia, and you have an obsolete Chinese missile system with conventional warheads, what do you do? And how does Pakistan play in the game?

DR. KEMP: Let me reinforce a couple of these points, because I do think we should not lose sight of the fact that this is a serious issue--that Saddam Hussein will get nuclear weapons at some point in the future if he is not stopped, whether it is done quickly through enrichment material coming in from outside or domestically. I think the one thing the Bush administration is absolutely right on is that from 1998, when UNSCOM left, there was no serious effort by the Clinton administration or anyone else in the international community to face up to this problem. The sanctions regime was collapsing, and, aside from the British, nobody was talking about this problem in a serious way. It has to be dealt with.

What is ironic is that the most likely source for Saddam's early supplies of enrichment material is the former Soviet Union. Before 9/11, the Bush administration was being very negligent on this score. It was in fact scaling back some of the programs that had been initiated before to help the Russians control their so-called "loose nuke" stockpiles. Now, fortunately, that has been reversed. I would argue that getting security over the enrichment material in the former Soviet Union is as critical an issue as the actual Iraqi program itself. Thankfully I think we're now focused on that.

AMB. WILSON: I think that Tony is absolutely right--that if they had pre-positioned weapons of mass destruction it would be a very dangerous tactic. I think what we need to worry about more is the potential for their using every weapon in their arsenal and attempting to draw Israel into this broader war, in the event that any military action we take against them is perceived by them as going after Saddam's head.

As for deterrence, I would like to see us move towards taking the smart military action for the fight reasons rather than doing something dumb. I worry that we will get bogged down when we don't necessarily need to, and that we will get involved in something much more akin to our experience in Lebanon and turn the potential for victory into defeat. I will give this administration some credit for having mustered the political will to revisit the question of enforcement of the appropriate resolutions, of UNSC 687, on weapons of mass destruction.

Anything that we contemplate militarily needs to be done in the context of 687. And I would argue that the problem with regime change as a rationale for military action is that it guarantees that Saddam will do everything we don't want him to do. Disarmament or robust military support for a U.N. inspections regime is something that throws the onus of decision making back onto Saddam. He can then decide whether he wishes to use weapons of mass destruction to defend against our efforts, in which case he then understands that it's his head that's at stake.

AMB. FREEMAN: One of the reasons I believe that there has not been a successful effort to depose Saddam inside Iraq, despite the many people who have reason to hate him, is that it is far from clear what benefits Iraq would derive from regime change. There is no guarantee that the goal posts would not be moved. There is no clear statement of policy with regard to what would happen on sanctions, inspections, intrusions on sovereignty, or all of the other issues that trouble Iraqi patriots as well as ordinary, less-committed Iraqis. So the need to have a clear statement of war aims that can be accepted by the kinds of Iraqis we want to work with in the future is not a trivial point.

DR. CORDESMAN: One thing that bothers me about this is the failure to fully examine the consequences of some of these options. There are two key options here. One is, UNMOVIC declares failure. We have a pretty good idea of what happens then. The other is, UNMOVIC declares success. What is success? We're going to disarm the technology? How? We're going to find all of the mobile laboratories? We're going to find all of the dispersed assets? How? Most of what we're talking about has been reengineered to be a dual-use facility. That represents more than two-thirds of the facilities that we know about. So you presumably have no excuse to disarm those at all.

Everybody refers to how successful UNSCOM was--and it was--but let me just remind you of what UNSCOM actually came up with. We're still missing some 360 tons of bulk chemical material, 1.5 tons designed only for VX. You've got 3,000 tons of missing precursor chemicals, 300 of which are for VX. You've got over 25,000 liters of missing growth material. And you've got over 30,000 assemblies for chemical and biological weapons that we haven't been able to find or confirm the destruction of. A lot of that material is probably not active or capable, but these are things we knew that they had in 1991. We're going to find all of that and really track it down? There is a problem here in just physical, credible terms that we'd better think about a lot harder than we seem to have to date.

Q: A few days ago Colin Powell appeared before the International Relations Committee, and he was asked a question by Brad Sherman: "If we give you a blank check, what name are you going to put on that blank check, Perle or Powell, before you take it to the bank?" Who do you think will win the president's ear on this? Secondly, Saddam Hussein, on January 2, 1991, according to an Iraqi-American, a friend of his who was visiting him and telling him he should get out of Kuwait, said, "I guess I have two options: diplomatic defeat or a military defeat, and the military defeat is probably better." Someone I told this story to the other day said, "And the president is sitting in the White House saying, I guess I have two options: a diplomatic defeat by going through the United Nations and the inspections and the waiting--or a military victory."

Thirdly, because I personally believe the road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem and the Palestinian question much more than has been said, even here, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) gave an interview to Haaretz in which he said, "Israel needn't worry because we are going to install a dictator in Baghdad--our dictator. And then we will take on some of the other problems that Israel has." Syria, he specifically mentioned.

DR. TAKEYH: The neo-conservative orientation, just as a point of view, is quite consistent with American internationalism going back to Wilson, in the sense that the United States always had a vision of a global society that was democratic in its polity and free in its commerce. Any states that deviated from that vision often were in conflict with the United States, whether Bismarck's Germany, Stalin's Russia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I'm not a neo-conservative, but many of my friends are, so I think of neo-conservatives as Wilsonians with a sort of peculiar attachment to Israel.

AMB. FREEMAN: Armed evangelists. (Laughter.)

DR. TAKEYH: Anybody who thinks that Wilson was not an armed evangelist should talk to the Mexicans, the Nicaraguans and the Haitians. It is important to not just dismiss the neo-conservative argument, but to place it in the landscape of American history.

AMB. WILSON: It seems to me that every time this administration finds itself in great difficulty as a consequence of actions either beyond its control or decisions it has mistakenly made, it turns to Colin Powell to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. To wit, multilateralism and disarmament gained a lot of currency at the expense of unilateralism and Saddam's head as a rationale for doing anything.

We will really know whose name is on the check only when we get to the point where we were in 1991: do you go on to Baghdad from Basra, or do you accept the terms of a cease-fire? In 2002, it will be, do you accept the constraints that have been imposed on you by whatever U.N. resolution may be passed, or do you just ignore them and go on to Baghdad?

It was clear to me in December 1990 and January 1991, the last days of the run-up to the Gulf War, when we were looking at the visits of Tariq Aziz to Washington and Baker to Baghdad and ended up with the two of them meeting in Geneva, that Saddam had made the calculation that he would sacrifice his troops on the field of battle and emerge claiming political and diplomatic victory. He has survived a couple of American presidents, a French president, a couple of British prime ministers, and until September 11, 2001, his regime was being welcomed back into the Arab League, the sanctions had been streamlined in a way that he might have been able to take additional advantage of, he was pumping as much oil as he wanted. There is some merit in his assessment that absorbing defeat on the field of battle ultimately was a diplomatic victory for him.

As to the Lantos comment, there are four trains of thought out there: one, this really is to fight terrorism and the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; two, it's all about the oil; three, it's "finish Daddy's business"; and four, it's all about making the Arab world a more peaceful place for Israel.

DR. CORDESMAN: There are some very sophisticated and thoughtful neo-conservatives. When I refer to neo-conservatives crossing the line into neo-crazy, I am referring to what I hope is a relatively small margin of them. Ironically, Woodrow Wilson does fit the profile of such a neo-conservative in that he was the American president who formally segregated the U.S. Post Office and prevented African-Americans from being hired in it. But he is not a suitable neo-conservative, in that he was also one of the most conspicuously antisemitic presidents in the history of the United States. Romanticizing Wilson isn't something I would do on the basis of his real history.

One comment about military defeat. I think we have implied that the United Nations gives a no-go. I think Geoff Kemp made the more important point. What we will at best get is a sort of U.N. resolution sufficiently vague--as we did in the case of Kosovo--so you can act under the guidance of that, claiming it is permitted under Article VII. You're not going to get a clear mandate one way or the other. Probably we will be left--whether it's one resolution or two--with something sufficiently vague so it neither endorses our position nor directly contradicts it so we don't have that grim choice between the U.N. or military victory.

Finally, I cannot believe that Congressman Lantos said that. If he did, I hope we make him ambassador to Baghdad after this war, because the chances of any dictator surviving in Baghdad for six months, with or without U.S. forces, is to me negligible. But we aren't going to solve all of the problems in the Middle East, even in the Gulf, regardless of what we choose to do in Iraq. It would be amazing if we weren't still in the middle of the second intifada a year after whatever we do in Iraq is over--with all of the tensions, all of the price tags, all of the resentments of the United States.

DR. KEMP: I can't resist the question about whose name goes on the check. My prediction is that the president, being acutely sensitive politically, will turn to Karl Rove and ask exactly the same question. And Karl Rove will say, "Put both of their names on the check."

AMB. FREEMAN: I take it there's agreement in the panel that within the ranks of the brilliant and well-pedigreed neo-cons there is a tiny band of mental defectives who have put the president into an impossible situation in which he has to choose between political humiliation and a very risky war.

Q: Monday night the president, in his assertion that we were committed to rebuilding Iraq as a stable democracy, cited Afghanistan as a model of success, that what we had done there we would apply to Iraq. Senator Lieberman, in a speech just after that, drew the opposite conclusion: that we had not done nearly enough in Afghanistan and that it would be a grievous mistake if we repeated that policy in Iraq. Comments?

DR. CORDESMAN: A lot of people here have been in Afghanistan, and we are still torn between hope and reality. The problem is, there's almost nothing in Afghanistan to reconstruct. It was better under the king, but it was never a real country, and we are finding out the hard way that sending in troops and a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of aid doesn't transform a society.

In Iraq you have a very large number of educated people, a high technocratic level, major economic resources, a reasonably good infrastructure, a lot of people who have intermarried and crossed ethnic and religious lines, and I think that there is real hope if you do go in. But the lessons that you would draw from past peacemaking are, if you're going to try to secure Iraq at all, get a peacemaking presence in as soon as possible. Establish order in all of the areas before people consolidate power and while the sheer shock of what you've done is still important.

Another lesson is the need to create a climate for partnership. Do not go in as an occupier. Convince people that if they move with you, there is a real future and that it is their future and their goals you are meeting. Solve the humanitarian problems thoroughly and immediately, not in token terms. Don't wait on promises of aid and support from the international community or the United Nations. They're never kept. If you're going to do anything, you're going to have to spend the money and get the assets in right away. Be prepared to stay as long as it takes, so that people can evolve a stable regime and government and make necessary adjustments in the economy--no longer, but that long, and not simply in the capital but in the country. Those are the lessons. If we're prepared to act on them, however, we have not heard a word so far from the White House.

AMB. WILSON: If you take the lessons that Tony articulated, which are essentially along the lines of what we did in Bosnia and Haiti, and project them onto the map of Iraq, it is a large and daunting task. Those who mentioned the 56 years in Germany and Japan ought to take a look at the Marshall Plan for some guidance as to what it's going to take, not just in Iraq, but also to create political incentives within the region for this new, flowering democracy that Mr. Wolfowitz likes to talk about.

On Afghanistan, the state of progress has been woefully underreported in the last several months, leaving the administration an open field to say whatever they care to.

AMB. FREEMAN: I'd like to close this discussion by picking up on one point that Tony made on which I think there has been a total vacuum of leadership from the United States. This is odd because the one thing on which the international community does seem to be agreed is that the regime in Baghdad is dreadful and that the world would be a much better place if a different regime were there. Whether they agree that the way to accomplish this is with the use of force by the United States or not, they agree on that point. Yet we seem to be proposing, once again, that we cook the dinner and everybody else wash the dishes. I don't see any volunteers among our allies for that cleanup role in this adventure. Yet I believe a bit of attention to the problem now could create the possibility of a coalition that might begin to meet Tony's very sensible criteria for addressing the problem.