Bush Iraq Timetable on Track?

George W. Bush pulled a cute one on both his foreign and domestic critics when he turned power to the interim Iraq government two days early, probably saving many lives from the attacks terrorists had planned to coincide with the transfer ceremonies. He not only met his self-imposed transition deadline but sent the country and the world a message that his timetable for Iraq disengagement was serious, only the first in his planned transition schedule.

Prime Minister Ayad Allaway, President Ghazi Yawar and his ethnically balanced deputy presidents, and the 31 ministers had already created the executive government and then moved to make its own record, including bringing Saddam Hussein to trial. Next month a National Conference of 1,000 delegates is scheduled to select a 100 person National Council to act as a semi-legislative advisory body to the hydra-headed executive. Besides the critical matters of establishing a degree of order and administering the nation, the most important long-term task is to prepare for elections to create a new constitution. Political parties will have to be created or upgraded to contest for delegates in perhaps 30,000 poling stations. A party-list system will be used where the seats will be distributed to the parties in proportion to the nationwide vote. Elections are planned to take place no later than January 31, 2005.

Following the election, a National Assembly of 275 members will become the new legislature and pass all laws. It will first elect a Presidency Council consisting of a president and two deputies, which will have the authority to veto all laws, appoint judges of the supreme court and nominate ministers to be confirmed by the Assembly, as well as produce a constitution by August 15, 2005. A national referendum will be held by October 15 to ratify the constitution. If ratified, elections for the permanent government would be held by December 15 and the new government would take power on December 31, 2005. In his last news conference, President Bush said he planned to remove U.S. combat forces soon thereafter.

Obviously, there are many steps along the way where the plan could be disrupted, for Iraq has had a violent history. By far the worst possibility for the president's plan would be for the interim government to ask American forces to leave before the U.S. elections this November, as Ruel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute suggests is possible. With President Bush more or less equal in the polls to challenger John F. Kerry already, such a move would be devastating. The fact that departed American administrator L. Paul Bremer took care in the selection of the interim government, however, suggests that this is unlikely. Yet, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani does have the moral authority to demand exit if he thinks it is in his interests. With the president's popular approval rating for how he is performing his job as president and how he is handling Iraq low by historical standards, even less severe shocks could be disorienting. No president in modern times has won reelection with an approval rating under 50 percent and Mr. Bush is below that level in every published poll today.

Sen. Kerry has even made moves to the right to appeal to conservatives dissatisfied with how Iraq has been handled. At the end of May, Kerry sounded positively right wing in an interview with the Washington Post, challenging Bush's "Woodrow Wilson-sounding" hope to make the Mideast and the world democratic. Yes, he said, democracy was important but not as important as supporting allies in the war on terror like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China, none of which were democratic or had much likelihood of becoming so anytime soon. This sort of realism used to be the staple of a conservative foreign policy, including George Bush's when he was running for president in 2000. Yet, Bush was also being criticized by neoconservatives such as The Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal for not being Wilsonian enough. The Journal even defended a Justice Department memo justifying torture, which it called mere "stress positions" that were not torture. Fortunately, President Bush ignored them and disavowed the memo and the torture.

Even the more centrist-conservative National Review, after being the greatest booster on the center-right for "The War," wavered from its earlier support in a recent editorial: "No one said it would be easy, but neither did anyone say it would be this hard, in this particular way. Certainly none of us who supported the war did," it recanted. Founder William F. Buckley Jr. now says, "With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

ConservativeBattleline.com has been consistent from the beginning, warning about the dangers of trying to force together a nation that was really three nations, including citing the elder George H.W. Bush that Iraq could not be engineered into a Western democracy. We had warned, after visiting Iraq, that Ayatollah Sustani would not allow the Kurds autonomy in an Iraqi federal system. All of the Wilsonian allusions to "democracy" only whetted his instincts for his Shia majority to rule the whole nation according to its singular image of Islam. The U.S. has been forced already to eliminate references to federalism and the interim constitution in the United Nations resolution legitimizing the transfer of authority so that the ayatollah would not provoke a veto, which moved Kurd leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalai Talabani to threaten to secede from Iraq. They are quiet for the moment but Sustani remains opposed to granting Kurds (or Sunnis) a veto or autonomy as they demand as their bottom-line requirement for continued allegiance to a unified Iraq. It is difficult to see any way to resolve this short of civil war.

What continues to be essential for the United States is to minimize casualties and to conserve American power. The only way to accomplish this today is to follow the president's plan for withdrawal. So far at least, Sen. Kerry has no plan at all. President Bush's withdrawal schedule is the only means for departure before the U.S. is embroiled in a three-way military conflict. Yet, just before the July 4th recess, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress that the U.S. would remain in Iraq in force well after the December 31, 2005 deadline that the president himself had promised (except for garrison troops for strategic purposes) would be the signal for American disengagement. Is the president or the deputy correct? The president needs to get hold of the people of his own administration and clarify its Wilsonian and realist tendencies so that all are singing from the same score or there might be some unpleasant music for us all to face come November.

Donald Devine, Editor.