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Ehud Ya'ari: Shortcut to Saddam

The attack on Saddam Hussein, even if it comes late, will surely come. My conviction is based on two main hunches. First, President Bush has no way of retreating from his commitment to a confrontation. And second, toppling Saddam is an attainable goal.

This is why I have allowed myself recently to slip into browse-only mode when it comes to the piles of press articles explaining why the United States would be better off dropping the whole idea, offering wildly exaggerated assessments of the number of troops that will be required for such an action, or analyzing the complications of the morning after.

Another working assumption: The next war in Iraq will be very different from the previous one, more than 10 years ago. We won�t see a touched-up replay of the slow, massive troop build-up in the arena, then the long, softening up period of bombing raids followed by an assault by large armored formations. This time, I would guess, the plan is built on a dramatic opening move, and not on a coup de gr�ce at the end of the show.

A third working assumption which is critical for monitoring this front: Don�t expect any public prior understandings between the United States and the other actors. In my assessment, no agreement will be reached in advance with the multiple, rival factions that make up the Iraqi opposition-in-exile over the division of the war spoils. There is no chance, pre-attack, of being able to put together a binding document on the future leadership of a kind of semi-federal administration, for example, or of reaching a prior settlement on the status of the oil rich Kirkuk and Mosul districts in the north which sit outside the Kurdish enclave protected by the no-fly zone, and which are the subject of rival claims by the Kurds, the Turkmens (with the support of Ankara) and, of course, the Arab majority.

The same is true about the hopes of establishing a pre-invasion government-in-exile on the basis of a wide coalition. It seems to me that even the most talented mediators that Washington could dispatch on this mission would not be able to lay to rest the competition and mutual suspicion between the Iraqi National Congress, the National Accord, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the host of retired generals now presenting themselves as potential leaders at conferences that resemble race-horse auctions.

Nor will there be prior agreement with the neighboring states. Turkey and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria won�t join together with Americans in a common plan for maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq under a new regime. They will all be trying to bite off chunks of influence within Iraq, or at least to grab the crumbs that fall off the table.

So the United States will probably have to act on the supposition that the necessary understandings with all the actors, inside and outside Iraq, will only be reached in the course of the fighting. There will be no pre-planned "coalition," nor even a pre-arranged alternative administration to succeed Saddam. The whole process will have to be treated as a "rolling operation."

This time around, the Americans have a chance of starting off inside Iraq: by landing limited numbers of troops in the Kurdish north, in the western desert or even on the edges of the Shi�ite south. Air cover will be provided from bases in Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait and from aircraft carriers in order to curb an offensive by the Republican Guard divisions. Airborne engineering units will work on the three or four airfields in the Kurdish region, and the two in western Iraq, to allow the U.S. Air Force to operate out of Iraqi territory. From the moment that the American military has a foothold inside Iraq, it will be possible to talk at a different level both with the opposition movements and elements within Saddam�s army, and with the neighboring capitals.

Such a scenario -- on condition that it is backed up with good intelligence -- is the best prescription for a short, focused war, whose outcome will be decided at the outset.

The next war in Iraq will be very different from the one more than 10 years ago. This time, I would guess, the plan is built on a dramatic opening move, and not on a coup de gr�ce at the end of the show.