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Chalabi didn't fade away after his defeat in 1996. Instead, he flew to Washington, where, to the outrage of the CIA and State Department, he began cultivating key Republican Senators such as Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, who forced Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act. Chalabi hoped that the legislation would open the spigot on U.S. arms and training so he could field another guerrilla force.
Last month the White House notified Congress that it was withdrawing the first $5 million from the $97 million made available by the Iraq Liberation Act. But instead of guns, the Pentagon is providing desks, faxes and computers. And for military training, the Defense Department is starting out by having four Iraqi exiles fly to a Florida Air Force base this week for 12 days of classes on the role of the military in developing democracies. The four have been told to wear casual civilian clothes. It is clear that the White House hopes that if military power can't oust Saddam, maybe these insurgents can. Others see the training in a different light. "It's lame," says Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman. "It's obviously not what Congress intended them to do with that money."
GROUNDHOG DAY
The problem with simply discarding hope for an on-the-ground insurgency is that the in-the-air war is expensive and, top commanders will sometimes admit, ineffective. Almost every day at Incirlik is Groundhog Day, as in Bill Murray's 1993 film. "You wake up, you come in, you get ready to launch the aircraft, you launch the aircraft, they come back, you recover them, you go home," says Staff Sergeant George Palo, who maintains aircraft fuel systems. "We don't have a lot of calendars around here, because the only day that counts is the day you get to go home."
Operation Northern Watch, the U.S.-led effort to keep the skies over northern Iraq clear of Iraqi warplanes, is the strangest of wars. It is not being waged according to Pentagon doctrine. It lacks a clear, attainable objective and forfeits the initiative to Saddam. And it doesn't make traditional military sense. Risking the lives of your pilots to destroy an opponent's air-defense network makes sense only when such risky missions precede an aerial invasion.
Military experts are split on the effectiveness of this kind of wait-and-bomb war. Retired General Merrill McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff during the Gulf War, believes it represents the prototypical 21st century conflict, in which a grinding, persistent battle plan trumps a short, intense war. "The bombing isn't hurting us, and it is hurting Saddam," he says. But Richard Haas, who helped run the Gulf War as a key member of the Bush Administration's national-security team, says a superpower's might evaporates as such a stalemate drags on. "When a great power acts, its military force must be seen as menacing," Haas says. "Using little bits and pieces of military force tends to be counterproductive because it becomes part of the background noise."
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