Calls for New Push Into Iraq Gain Power in Washington

ASHINGTON, Dec. 2 — When President Bush told Saddam Hussein last week to submit to weapons inspections or else, he bolstered the spirits of a coalition of conservatives, cold warriors and Iraqi exiles determined to persuade the administration to overthrow the Iraqi leader once and for all.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, this loose-knit group with ties to power centers in research institutes, law firms and magazine meeting rooms, and to the White House, has been steadily sounding the drums for an American military campaign against Iraq.
If this coalition once looked like it was fighting a fringe battle, its members now say their viewpoint is gaining ground. They say that the debate inside the administration is no longer over whether to go after Mr. Hussein, but how.
"It strikes me," said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, assessing the state of play inside the Bush administration "that the Saddam-is-evil-and-dangerous wing seems to be winning." He made clear he shared that wing's views.
The campaign by the outsiders had its genesis in the Persian Gulf war. It is part of a broader battle inside the Republican Party's foreign policy establishment, pitting proponents of cautious realism against champions of military activism who believe that America has the right and the obligation to project power and win wars.
"It's something that has been percolating for the past decade," said Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. "It sprang from the failure to eliminate Saddam at that time."
Inside the administration, the guiding principle is to move cautiously in the absence of consensus.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell insisted today on the CBS program "Face the Nation" that Mr. Bush had made no decisions about the next phase of the war on terrorism.
But there are differences. On one side, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing, the president's counterterrorism chief, and I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, favor a robust military strategy that would put the Iraqi opposition in power, officials say.
On the other side, Secretary Powell, his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, and retired Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the new Middle East envoy, insist on working with the allies to force Mr. Hussein to accept international inspections of his weapons sites. At the same time they would streamline punitive economic sanctions against Iraq. Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is believed to be not quite in either camp.
But the outsiders are formidable warriors. They come armed with credentials derived from years in government, an ability to articulate their message in the media and access to power. Even in the world of Washington politics, their connections are unusually strong.
The group includes a former spymaster, an array of Iraqi exiles and veterans of the last three administrations. In some cases, they are publicly expressing the views that their friends inside the administration cannot. In others, they are continuing old battles.
The outsiders work through various power centers, including the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and such opinion journals as The Weekly Standard. But much of their campaign is ad hoc.
"There is no organization, no secret handshake, and if there are any meetings or planning sessions, nobody invites me," said R. James Woolsey, a lawyer and former director of central intelligence who has rankled many senior administration officials with his point-blank assertions that Mr. Hussein is tied to a series of terrorist plots.
Mr. Woolsey portrays his role modestly, saying: "I'm just practicing law. If the press calls, I answer the phone. If someone asks me to be on CNN, I go."
Perhaps the group's most important power base is the Defense Policy Board, a bipartisan group of national security experts that meets in a room just outside the office of the secretary of defense. Its 18 members include former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger; former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown; Adm. David E. Jeremiah, the former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Vice President Dan Quayle, former Defense and Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Woolsey.
Under the chairmanship of Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and perhaps the most influential of the outsiders, the board has assumed a quasi-official status.
Mr. Woolsey was asked by the Defense Policy Board to undertake a semiofficial fact-finding mission on Iraq's potential involvement in the terror attacks.
In September, the secretary of defense's office of protocol invited Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who heads the London-based Iraqi National Congress, and Khidhir Hamza, a former director of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, to brief the policy group.
"Rumsfeld was in and out of the meetings and he offered a general statement of support for us," said Francis Brooke, the Washington adviser to the exiles who also attended the meeting. "He said, `We're with you. Don't worry.' He and Ahmed are good friends."
Neither Secretary Powell nor George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who have grave reservations about Mr. Chalabi's leadership, knew that the Iraqis were there, senior administration officials said. "It's outrageous that these guys were there," said one senior administration official. "They could end up influencing policy."
But Mr. Perle has tirelessly promoted the Iraqi National Congress as part of a strategy that would have the American military occupy southern Iraq, create a new government of Iraqi exiles and protect them until Mr. Hussein is overthrown.
He argues that Afghanistan provides a template. "The Northern Alliance could not have taken an inch of territory until we supplied them with ammunition," he said. "And no one has supplied the Iraqi opposition."
Dov Zakheim, the comptroller in the Pentagon, and Douglas Feith, an under secretary of defense, have both worked for Mr. Perle. Mr. Perle helped Mr. Woolsey get a job on the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1969. Mr. Perle and Mr. Wolfowitz are close friends and former protegé of Albert Wohlstetter, the godfather of the cold war hawks.
Indeed, Mr. Perle is so omnipresent that Mr. Rumsfeld this weekend on CNN called him "very bright, very talented," but noted: "He is not a government official. He does not speak for the president. He does not speak for me."
Another outsider is Laurie Mylroie, a writer who is the leading proponent of the theory that Mr. Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Senior officials in the C.I.A. and State Department say there is no evidence to support her theory.
Initially, the outsiders feared that Mr. Bush would confine his attention to Afghanistan. So after the Sept. 11 attacks, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard (and Vice President Quayle's chief of staff), gathered nearly four dozen signatures on a letter to Mr. Bush arguing that the campaign must include an overthrow of the leadership in Baghdad, even without specific evidence linking Iraq to the attacks.
Among the signers were conservative Republicans but also staunch pro-Israeli Democrats, like Martin Peretz, the editor of The New Republic, and former Brooklyn congressman Stephen J. Solarz.
Now, Mr. Kristol says, there's no need for letters to the president: "You can't look at Bush's face when he lays out goals about terrorism and think he does nothing about Iraq."