Teetering on the Brink

One year after President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States appears to be teetering on the brink of strategic defeat in its Mesopotamian adventure.

Even as Bush Friday reiterated his ambition of bringing "freedom and democracy" to Iraq and the Middle East, a series of recent policy reversals -- capped by Friday's announcement that a former Baathist general will take charge of an all-Iraqi security force in Fallujah -- suggests that an increasingly desperate Washington will settle for far less.

Indeed, over the past two weeks, the administration appears to have almost entirely jettisoned the neoconservative vision of an ardently pro-U.S. Iraq led by Iraqi National Congress (INC) chief Ahmed Chalabi, opened wide to U.S. and western capital, and eager to serve as a convenient base for destabilizing Syria, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia if it gets out of line.

The defeat of the neo-conservatives, whose influence has been exercised primarily through the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has been made abundantly clear by the mandate the administration has given UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to essentially handpick the leadership of the new Iraqi government that will gain ''limited sovereignty," as one State Department official put it this week, after June 30.

The fact that the UN has been given such an important role severely undercuts the maximalist objectives of the neo-cons and other right-wing unilateralists whose main aim in going to war in Iraq was to demonstrate that Washington did not need the world body to ''legitimate'' its role as the ultimate guarantor of global security.

Brahimi's apparent decision to exclude Chalabi, for whom he is said to have the greatest contempt, drew strong protests from the INC leader's neocon supporters in the Pentagon and outside the administration who were then further infuriated by Brahimi's statements last week to the current Israeli policies, fervently backed by the neocons, were ''poison'' for the entire region. Bush's refusal to back away from the Algerian diplomat confirmed that the balance of power within the administration, at least on Iraq, has shifted decisively toward the realists.

Finally, the decision not only to forgo a major attack on insurgents in Fallujah, but to also withdraw Marines to positions outside the city and recognize a new, Baathist-led force to guarantee security there, defied the hawks' increasingly shrill insistence that a failure to crush the uprising and capture or kill those responsible for the deaths of four U.S. private-security contractors in early April would mark a strategic defeat for the occupation.

The deal, which clearly caught the Pentagon civilians off-guard, appeared to have been negotiated by commanders on the ground and approved by the National Security Council staff in the White House -- one more indication that neocons have fallen from grace.

But it also indicated a larger policy already announced by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer a week ago -- that, in the words of Iraq specialist Juan Cole at the University of Michigan, ''the United States has embarked on a policy of re-Baathification, rehabilitating thousands of ex-Baathists and putting them to work." This policy reversal, too, has been strongly opposed by Chalabi, who had been in charge of the de-Baathification program, and his allies in Washington.

But, while the administration no longer appears to be heeding the neo-cons on Iraq policy, the big question is whether these policy reversals will save the U.S. occupation and Washington's minimum goals of putting in place (with Brahimi's help) a broadly representative government that can both ensure stability and accede to the indefinite presence of several discreetly situated U.S. military bases.