"Regime change" -- and then what?

Bush and his supporters speak earnestly about "democratizing Iraq." Many experts aren't nearly as optimistic.

By Michelle Goldberg

Oct. 10, 2002 | Entifadh Qambar is one of the very few people in Washington who sound positively bullish about the prospects of converting Iraq into a democracy.

"Iraq had a democratic system for 40 years, from the '20s to late '50s," says Qambar, the director of the Washington office of the dissident-run Iraqi National Congress. "It was not a completely perfect democratic system, but it was comparable to the Western world. What holds Iraq together is ancient history. There's no ethnic or religious animosity among Iraqis." After toppling Saddam, Qambar says, "there's no need to occupy Iraq. Iraq is already a nation with a functioning system."

Never mind that Iraq was a monarchy from 1921 to 1958 and that divisions between Iraq's Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Kurds, Assyrians, Chaldean Christians and Turkomans are well-documented. Qambar can afford to spin in the face of history: The neoconservatives who dominate the Department of Defense have designated INC's leader, Ahmad Chalabi, as Saddam's likely successor and the United States' point guard in its attempt to turn Iraq into a democracy.

It's a scenario that critics on both the left and the right (in Bush's very own State Department, to be precise) find extremely implausible. As a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says, "The increasingly popular idea in Washington that the United States, by toppling Saddam Hussein, can rapidly democratize Iraq and unleash a democratic tsunami in the Middle East is a dangerous fantasy."

And yet it is the only postwar scenario receiving public consideration by the White House, and that's raising serious concerns among Middle East experts about what good, ultimately, a war with Iraq will bring to the region.

The primary American argument for invading Iraq is one of prevention: removing Saddam from power before he can develop and use weapons of mass destruction. "In the short term, anything is better than what you've got there right now," says Kenneth Allard, former special assistant to the Army's chief of staff from 1987 to 1991 and an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There's a very specific military objective here that requires some small amount of focus. Everything else is subordinate to that --humanitarian issues, how you bring the people together."

But in selling the public on a war with Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters have promoted it as an act of liberation. "The first and greatest benefit will come to the Iraqi men, women and children," Bush said in his speech Monday. "The oppression of Kurds, of Assyrians, Turkomans, Shia, Sunnis and others will be lifted."

In a speech at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center the same night, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the leading Democratic hawk on Iraq, said, "To me, post-Saddam Iraq is not a burden to be shunned but an opportunity to be relished. It can become a signal to the world, particularly the Islamic world, of our nation's best intentions." In an interview with the Financial Times in September, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice framed the upcoming war in terms of America's commitment to the "democratization or the march of freedom in the Muslim world."

Judging by the public remarks of influential neoconservative defense intellectuals, the operative theory in the Pentagon assumes that such democratization will be easy, starting with a simple and direct military overthrow. In an interview with liberal journalist David Corn, Richard Perle, the prominent hawk who chairs the advisory Defense Policy Board, estimated it will take a mere 40,000 troops. On the pro-war left, Kenneth M. Pollack, a former Iraq analyst at the CIA under Clinton, claims in his new book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" that "it would probably be closer to 300,000 (and might even exceed that number)."

The neocon theory also assumes that the Arab masses will welcome the "liberation" of their neighbor. Speaking along with Chalabi at conference at the American Enterprise Institute on Oct. 3, Perle said, "When it becomes clear that the end result of military action against the regime of Saddam Hussein will produce the opportunity, ... the Arab world or most of it, and certainly most of the Muslim world, will consider that their honor and dignity has been restored by removing from among them a regime that they have every reason to despise along with the rest of us."

Next page: To some, a whiff of "total fantasy"