Coup In Iraq?

by Robert Dreyfuss

"Is the Bush administration considering a coup d’etat in Iraq before the end of the year, in a desperate effort to salvage its war? It’s not outside the realm of possibility. Like JFK in 1963, who—faced with a notoriously corrupt Saigon regime and a growing Viet Cong insurgency in Vietnam—gave the green light to topple and assassinate President Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, President Bush might give a wink and a nod to the CIA, the U.S. military, and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to get rid of Iraq’s current regime. The Diem coup didn’t go well. Considering how unlikely it is that Bush has even heard of Diem, I doubt he’s learned that lesson.

Question is, what are they going to replace him with—and when? According to recent reports, the United States appears to have given Maliki a deadline: two months.

Some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq's democratically elected government might not survive.

''Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,'' said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

Time is short? Force the issue? Get tired of this? There’s only one way to read all this, namely that the Bush administration has given Maliki 60 days to fix Iraq, or else.

So what does this mean? As I see it, there are several options that desperate Bush administration officials might seize on, if they do indeed want to replace Maliki.

Third, entirely outside the constitution, there is the possibility of a military coup d’etat. Rumors of a coup have swirled in Baghdad for at least a year. Over the weekend, when Maliki announced a sudden, and unprecedented, curfew banning vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the entire capital, there were reports that an army coup d’etat had been thwarted. One Iraq expert I talked to told me that perhaps some of the Iraqi army units being moved into Baghdad as part of the current crackdown might be candidates to seize power in the Green Zone. Of course, such an action would have to be encouraged and sponsored by the U.S. command in Iraq and the CIA, which—according to Iraqi sources—has a firm hand on Iraq’s own intelligence service.

Still, how else to read the drumbeat of you’ve-got-two-months warnings? Desperate men do desperate things. If the Bush administration is truly unwilling to consider getting out of Iraq, then what are its options? I don’t expect a coup d’etat in Baghdad this month. But after the U.S. elections—say, in two months? Anything goes."