ASHINGTON — THE UNITED STATES did not declare war on Iraq last week, but in Washington it was sometimes hard to tell.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld announced on Monday that American and British warplanes had begun bombing major air defense sites in Iraq, a move that could prepare the way for an invasion. Then Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, pledged that Congress would vote within weeks on a resolution to authorize an attack, with its passage all but assured. On Thursday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urged Congress to give the president broad latitude to use force, saying, "The threat of war has to be there."
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But if a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein seems on track, the discussion of what happens if it succeeds is still in its early stages. For some time now, Iraq experts have wondered just what kind of government, led by whom, would the Bush administration have replace Mr. Hussein. How much of Iraq's military, the police force, the judiciary, the government bureaucracy, the economy itself must be excised to create a democratic state? And who will do the excising?
Those are questions Congress has just begun asking, and that the Bush administration has yet to answer in public, although it has begun to gather analyses from experts and from Iraqi opposition figures.
Analysts who study Iraq say they are concerned that the focus on ousting Mr. Hussein has masked the complexity of organizing the system that would replace him. "Figuring out who should go is only the beginning," said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy group. "When you talk about just getting rid of Saddam and then a miracle will occur, this is infantile and can do nothing but breed trouble."
During more than two decades of iron-fisted rule, Mr. Hussein has installed loyal members of his immediate family, his extended clan and his home region into top positions throughout the government. He has brutally purged all but the most loyal officers from senior military positions. He has enriched the entrenched leaders of his ruling Baath Party. He has created a governing universe that revolves around his sun.
If that sun is extinguished, many experts warn, its universe could implode into civil unrest, even civil war, unless a new government — probably one backed by American military might — asserts its authority immediately.
But those experts also contend that the raw material for a new government — an educated, technically competent civil bureaucracy — also exists in Iraq, and a great deal will depend on how easily and quickly it can be converted to the service of a different government at the top. Freeing it from the tentacles of Mr. Hussein's ruling Baath Party, those experts say, would be the key to keeping Iraq from fraying at the seams.
"It's definitely easier to rebuild this country than Afghanistan," said Phebe Marr, a former professor at the National Defense University who has written extensively on Iraq. "Iraq's health system, its water systems, its infrastructure, have been badly damaged. But there is still plenty left."
"First of all, they've got oil," she said. "They have a health system. They have schools. They have a bureaucracy. They have a middle class. They have educated people. They are already providing services."
The trick, the experts say, will be trying to cleanse Iraq's government, military, intelligence services and economic institutions of Mr. Hussein's like-minded loyalists without causing those institutions to collapse like a house of cards. The process will be painstaking, similar to denazification in postwar Germany, experts say, and could require years of American military occupation.
"You have to talk about the de-Baathification of Iraq," said Kanan Makiya, a professor at Brandeis University and director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard. "It's that big a project. You have to seriously restructure the army. You have to rethink entire portions of the government."
Entifadh K. Qanbar, director of the Washington office of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group, argued that while many people in the Iraqi bureaucracy committed acts of oppression, most were unwilling pawns of Mr. Hussein and his family. "Take the Ministry of Irrigation," said Mr. Qanbar, a military engineer in Iraq who came to America in 1990. "Most of their projects are focused on irrigating farms owned by Saddam's family or clan or cronies. That has to change. The head of the ministry has to go. But the engineer doing this irrigation shouldn't be removed."
Indeed, many Iraqi opposition leaders and experts contend that before an invasion begins, the United States should offer a general amnesty for the vast majority of Iraqi military and government officials. Nuremberg-like war crime trials should be reserved for a small number of senior leaders, perhaps fewer than 100, those opposition leaders contend.
"This is a country that has made its citizenry complicit in its own criminality," Professor Makiya said. "The problem is very many people have done many terrible things. And you can't hold all of those people accountable."
THOUGH they have yet to publicly outline what they are planning for a post-Hussein Iraq — and neither Congress nor the Administration has estimated what reconstruction it might cost — senior Bush administration officials say they are thinking about the problem. They express great optimism that Iraq's economic and governing institutions need not be entirely dismantled to bring about democratic change.
Most Iraqis "can be brought over rather quickly to a new form of government," Mr. Powell told Congress last week, once they see "a better day is coming."
Some leading experts are not quite so confident. Ms. Marr compares Iraq to East Germany, where large sectors of the bureaucracy had to be "re-educated" after the fall of Communism. Others say the rebuilding of Iraq should follow the model of America's military occupation of Japan after World War II.
Either way, these experts say they remain unconvinced that the Bush administration understands the difficulty of the task.
"Unfortunately, the U.S. government is not very interested in this issue," Mr. Qanbar said. "War is the easiest part."