Artículo de Ian Fisher en "The International Herald Tribune" del 22-2-03

BAGHDAD With war creeping ever closer, American officials and even some of Iraq's Muslim neighbors may still place hope in the possibility that President Saddam Hussein could be persuaded to step down or even get an internal push.

But experts on Iraq say the chances that Saddam will leave, on his own or because of a coup, remain small. If he does, the outcome may be messy, unpredictable and very violent as old scores suppressed by the ruling Baath Party for more than three decades are settled. "You have to anticipate that there is a high risk" of violence, said Judith Yaphe, senior research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington.

"A lot of it will depend on how much law and order is controlled as quickly as possible by whatever follows the day after. That will be critical." In case of war, the task of imposing order would almost certainly fall to an American general, an option that would not be popular even among the millions in this proud nation who hate Saddam.

Short of that, many experts agree that it is hard to imagine what satisfying alternative can emerge within a government that has been kept in place for 24 years by Saddam's absolute power. At the top of a long list of questions is whether any new government would pass muster for the kind of "regime change" that Washington says it is determined to see.

Would a new government, unvanquished in war, be any more willing to give up forbidden weapons that the Bush administration says Iraq has? Could a democratic leader emerge in this deeply divided nation, which many Iraqis themselves believe requires a strong, even autocratic, leader to stay united?

Who, even far down the ranks beneath Saddam, is untainted by the workings of a security apparatus that by any measure is one of the most pervasive in the world? While Saddam does rely on a cadre of competent technocrats, who have made significant progress in 12 years of international isolation, there are no voices of opposition, let alone opposition parties. Every part of the government, including the security forces and the Baath officials behind it, carries out Saddam's every wish. Whatever the uncertainties, many leaders appear to have concluded that it is worth exploring means to oust Saddam from within if the alternative is all-out war.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said Saddam might be able to escape war crime charges if he finds a safe haven in another country. "I think that that would be a fair trade to avoid a war," the secretary said last month. But experts note that Saddam is a man concerned about his place in Arab history - citing the palaces, mosques and monuments rising around Baghdad as evidence - and that stepping down could be a fatal cut to his honor. In a nation where Saddam won 100 percent of the vote in the last election, many Iraqis say he should not step down in the face of an invasion of sovereign Iraq by the United States.

"I think his character is almost the same as any Iraqi's," said Abdulwahab Qassab, a political scientist at the University of Baghdad. It is also hard to find anyone, Qassab included, who will dare speculate what Iraq might look like after Saddam Hussein. But outside experts say the nightmare chain of events would be that the Baath Party would collapse quickly and completely and Iraq would tumble into civil war, with its deep divisions between the Kurds, Arabs, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims amid a power vacuum. That scenario preyed on the minds of the administration of Bush's father when it decided not to pursue the Gulf War of 1991 to the point of ridding Iraq of Saddam. If the nation holds together without Saddam, experts do not rule out a period of extreme violence as groups vie for power and position in a new Iraq. Others say that even if Saddam can be persuaded to go, he will try to leave power in the hands of one of his aides or his younger son, Qusay, 36, whose responsibilities in the nation's security organizations as well as the Baath Party have grown in recent years. A recent report by the Congressional Research Service identified Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the nation's top ruling body, the Revolutionary Command Council, and Taha Yassin Ramadan, the country's first vice president, as other possible candidates. "This is a relatively problematic scenario for Washington," said Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor of Jane's Sentinel, which analyzes the risks of conflicts around the world. "That doesn't constitute regime change. What the Americans will be looking for, if there is that kind of pushing out or coup, is to basically engage with the new regime to be sure that they would disarm." Most experts interviewed agree that it is unlikely, though not impossible, that the Bush administration would accept any new leader from Saddam's inner circle, many of whose members are relatives. In fact, American officials have said that the top 12, whom they often dub the "dirty dozen," should face war crimes trials in Iraq. The list includes Qusay Hussein and his older brother, Uday, who runs the influential newspaper Babel and other news media outlets, as well as Ibrahim and Ramadan. Some experts and diplomats say the list was deliberately kept short to encourage officials just outside the inner circle to rebel, by alerting them to the possibility that the alternative may be death in war or trial afterward.

But there have been many attempts at coups before, and all have been crushed. For his part, Saddam has never directly addressed in public the question of stepping aside. He has appeared on television often recently, rallying top army commanders and mingling with younger soldiers as he vows to resist the "evil aggression" of the United States. But there was one recent tantalizing item in the English-language Iraq Daily.

During one of Saddam's meetings with commanders, he evoked the ancient legend of King Gilgamesh. The king, Saddam was paraphrased as saying, "gave up the helm and left his senate leading the country till his coming back."