Governance After Saddam
Change for the Better this Time
by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON--In July 1958, the heyday of Arab nationalism, I was sailing around the Greek islands when our ketch was rocked by the wake of U.S. warships steaming to Lebanon to defend Beirut's pro-Western government. British troops poured into Jordan to bolster 18-year-old King Hussein. Hussein's Hashemite cousin, 23-year-old King Faisal II of Iraq, was not so lucky.

Revolutionary Iraqi officers murdered him and proclaimed a republic. "The military men ... gave more thought to the overthrow of the existing regime than to what would replace it" - writes Phebe Marr in her "Modem History of Iraq" - and "herein lay the source of most of the new regime's difficulties."

What came next were more coups, and eventually the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein.

Today, what Iraq will look like after the shooting stops depends largely on the arrangements Washington makes before the shooting starts.

Iraq can become a source of hope to frustrated Muslims across the Middle East - a free, democratic and economically modern nation, an attractive alternative to radical Islam. But only if the United States has a clear vision of what comes after Saddam.

Washington must reach an understanding on Iraq's territorial integrity with Turkey and Iran, two neighbors that can make or break a post-Saddam Iraq. Both oppose an independent Kurdistan that would incite restive Kurds in their countries. To forestall Turkish intervention, the United States must reach agreement on the prized Kirkuk oil fields, coveted by Turkey's Iraqi brethren, the Turkomen, and by Iraqi Arabs and Kurds.

Tehran must be assured that U.S. action against Baghdad is not target practice for round two against the "axis of evil." A common U.S.-Iranian policy against Saddam that included the gradual lifting of economic sanctions against Tehran would weaken the ruling mullahs whose regime the sanctions ironically perpetuate.

Washington must pressure the fractious Iraqi opposition to form a provi-sional government-in-exile ready to assume power after Saddam. Ahmed Chalabi, head of the opposition umbrella group, the Iraqi National Congress, tells me that "fears of sectarian violence and a splintered Iraq are overblown." Opposition leaders should replicate last year's Bonn conference that chose an interim Afghan government and averted a power vacuum in Kabul after the Taliban's downfall. A leading choice to head an Iraqi provisional government is Chalabi.

His Iraqi National Congress would dismantle the pillars of Saddam's power - the Ba'ath Party, the security services and the Republican Guard -and create a federal, democratic government that protects Iraq's ethnic and religious groups.

The United States and its allies will have to commit enough troops not only to win the war but to keep the peace. Stabilizing Iraq could require $16 billion and 75,000 troops in the first year alone, according to one estimate discussed at a recent Senate hearing. A new army study reports that 100,000 peacekeepers would be needed to help reconstruct the country along the German model after World War II.

Economically, the biggest hurdle to rebuilding Iraq will be the crippling $300 billion in outstanding claims that Baghdad still owes from the 1991 Gulf War. The end of UN sanctions and increased oil exports will not be enough. An international conference, like the Tokyo conference for Afghanistan, will be needed to create a reconstruction fund. The world coughed up a meager $4.5 billion for Afghanistan. Iraq will need hundreds of billions.

As U.S. troops spread out across Beirut in July 1958 and Iraqi mobs dragged the bodies of their victims through the streets of Baghdad, a New York Times editorial cautioned: "The forces at work in the Middle East are so complicated and powerful that the utmost care and diplomacy must be exercised to keep the action now being taken to the narrowest limits and the shortest time."

Forty-four years later, the forces at work in the Middle East are even more complicated. Removing Saddam will demand the same care and diplomacy. But the great task of replacing him with a stable, free and prosperous Iraq will be neither narrow nor short.

The writer is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security. The views he expresses are his own.