“The rats are leaving the sinking ship,” remarked Eric Shinseki. Several other people simply nodded agreement.
“Suggestions?” I asked.
We had a wide range of suggestions, but they came down into the same categories as the last time we discussed this. We could let them be, or we could invade. There was a definite pro-war party, with John McCain and most of the Pentagon in that camp. Condoleezza Rice was the face of the peace camp, as were Frank and Paul O’Neill. After some wrangling, I held up a hand and called a time-out.
“Okay, I think I have heard from everybody. John, Peter, I really appreciate your thoughts on this. I believe that you are absolutely correct when you say we could go in and whip them in a matter of weeks. I also believe that world opinion would be strongly against this, as Condi and a few others argue. Regardless, we could do this now, and without working up a real sweat. My problem is, what do we do with the country next? They may hate Hussein, but they sure don’t love us. The Shiites might hate the Sunnis and the Sunnis might hate them back, and some of them hate the Iranians or Turks or Kurds or Kuwaitis or Saudis, but the one thing everybody hates is us! I can guarantee that if we go in, we will be fighting this war long after I am gone and long after John leaves the Presidency. I think we are going to just sit on this for the next week or two and see what happens. If we get an accurate location on Hussein, we can drop a nice big JDAM on him, but otherwise, let’s let them stew on this,” I said.
There were a few unhappy faces, but some thoughtful ones also. We decided to wait a week to see what would happen, and keep the 1st Armored practicing with the Turks. It was costing us a fortune, but an invasion would be even more expensive. Both Treasury and the OMB were showing this as being incredibly destructive of the budget. We were definitely going to be in a deficit situation.
The end came three days later, when the Iraqi army managed to kill Saddam all on their own. Uday was still on the scene, but nobody cared about him. Aside from his murderous tendencies, politically he was a lightweight. He wouldn’t last a week. Sunday May 7, the Iraqi Revolutionary Council announced that they were in control of the country and wished to discuss a ceasefire. The Council looked to be a bunch of second tier colonels and generals, with a civilian propped up in front for legitimacy. I ordered a ceasefire. The Kurdish War was over.
Chapter 164: Kurdish Aftermath
I called a meeting of the National Security Council for Monday morning the 8th. For the first time in months, we had an abundance of smiles around the table, and I possessed one of them. I wanted this damn mess over and done with, before it defined my Presidency like it had once defined George Bush’s.
We started with a quick briefing on whatever was new from Richard Clarke. Nothing much had come up overnight. Saddam and Qusay were now confirmed dead, and Uday was on the run, though he was spouting defiance. The Revolutionary Council was proclaiming power and at the moment had a lock on what was happening. There were some elements arguing with them, but they needed a focus point to coalesce around, and Uday Hussein was simply too much of a mad dog for them to tolerate. Without a central figure to rally around, they would be rounded up and either be put down or forced to join in.
Otherwise, it was a matter of winding this sucker down, and quickly. The Pentagon went along with my order to send the 1st Armored back to Texas. As was pointed out by several people, it would take just as long to load them up and send them home as it took to get them there, so if the Iraqis decided to get stupid in the next few weeks, we would still have overwhelming force available. I gave a wry grimace at that. It was true, though. If the Iraqi Revolutionary Council fell apart, we would be able to turn things around for a few weeks at least.
Condi Rice got the biggest jobs, and she had standing orders to draft the rest of us as needed, no questions asked! Job Number One was to conclude some form of peace treaty with the Iraqis. Technically it would be between the Iraqis and the Kurds, with an acknowledgement of the new borders, and with the rest of the Coalition signing on as Kurdish defenders. That was a big enough job right there, But Job Number Two was to formally create the Republic of Kurdistan as a new nation, and get them into the United Nations and generate a few peace treaties with some neighbors.
As part of the diplomatic offensive I was heading to the Middle East, with stops in Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kurdistan. I needed to talk to the various leaders involved, and make future plans. The critical countries were Turkey, Israel, and Kurdistan. The other three were more formalities — thank you for your recent support and what can we do to promote peace in the Middle East.
Israel was still unhappy about what happened with the Scuds. Everybody’s best guess was that they wanted Iraq’s WMD plans dead and buried, and any Scuds still around to be destroyed. Oh, and would we be so kind as to maintain a weapons embargo on them, along with all the other sanctions? Needless to say, that wasn’t going to happen. Since most of the sanctions had been against Saddam Hussein, and he wasn’t around anymore, we had about zero reason to keep the sanctions in place. I told Condi not to even try to make the argument. The country had been almost leveled and would take decades to rebuild. We wouldn’t pay for the rebuilding (I was not about to institute an Arab Marshall Plan!) but if they could get some money from the Saudis, they were welcome to try. It would be a few years before anybody knew who was going to rise to the top of the pile in the Council, and even longer before they would be strong enough to act frisky again.
Turkey was expected to be easier to deal with by a wide margin. After all, the good guys had won, and Turkey was on the side that wore the white hats. I could fly to Ankara, meet with Erdogan, visit Incirlik and Adana, make a donation to rebuild a hospital, thank their Air Force, and so forth. There was no reason we couldn’t get a nice treaty going between them and the Kurds.
Kurdistan was likely to be just as good. After all, we had just pulled their chestnuts out of the fire, and they were well aware of it. Sign a peace treaty, visit the battle sites, condemn chemical warfare, and get the Kurds and the Turks to sign a formal peace treaty. Meanwhile, maybe I could introduce the Kurdish President to the President of ExxonMobil while I was at it. They had all that lovely oil that was just waiting for a Turkish pipeline to be built. The Brits would probably do the same thing with BP. Fair’s fair. The Kurds had a lot of oil, and now it was going to be legally theirs to play with.
I told Condi to get her track shoes on, because there was a lot on her plate. She needed to line up a trip for me in a few weeks, but some of the other stuff would take as long as it took. If she needed to play shuttle diplomat, she could use whichever plane in the fleet she needed. This could be her golden moment to shine, and I would let her have as much credit as she wanted. Privately, I told her to try and show John McCain helping, since it made for good politics in the 2008 campaign. It showed his ‘foreign policy credentials’, which is something I had lacked when running for Vice President. (Somehow, being airdropped into Nicaragua and escaping back to Honduras while shooting up a drug airstrip didn’t count as foreign policy experience with the chattering classes, and owning a multimillion dollar estate in the Bahamas was not the signal we wanted to send, either.)
On the plus side, John had acquired plenty of foreign policy experience by now. During the Kurdish War, I had used him as a roving emissary to several countries in the region, and he had visited several other countries over the years as well. Foreign policy was actually one of the few areas where a President had a chance to put his own spin on things, for right or for wrong. Domestically, Presidents were often hemmed in by any number of special interests which limited their actions. Monetary policy was controlled by the semi-independent Federal Reserve, and fiscal and budgetary policy were dominated by a Congress which was all too often bought and sold on K Street.