Closing in on Iraq's Saddam Hussein

If the United States and its new allies are successful in eliminating the Osama bin Laden network from Afghanistan, and if a government comes to power in Kabul that can bring some stability and humanity to the region, it would signal that we are serious about confronting those states that support terrorism. At that point, our ability to confront the remaining terrorist threats in the Middle East may be enhanced, though not assured. Whatever happens, the Bush administration will soon have to outline its policy toward Iraq.


The Saddam Hussein regime cannot be rehabilitated. It poses a growing danger to the Middle East and the United States. Therefore, the goal of regime replacement should remain a fundamental tenet of U.S. policy. The danger increases the longer Saddam Hussein has access to large amounts of hard currency, which enables him to continue to fund his security services and his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.


The Clinton administration used limited force several times against the regime, climaxing with Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. The result was the permanent eviction of UNSCOM, the U.N. arms monitoring unit tasked with ridding Iraq of WMD. Enforcement of no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq continues, with frequent U.S. and U.K. air strikes against Iraq anti-air facilities, but the real debate concerns the wisdom of a more massive military operation to try to change the regime in Baghdad. In considering such an option, we must recognize we will have few regional allies. Anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is intense and pervasive; its causes are complex and are to be found in more issues than the Arab- Israeli conflict. It's true that the Palestinian Intifada has magnified the problem, but even if an Israeli-Palestinian agreement existed, hatred toward America would still be present. Much of the anti-Americanism in the Arab world reflects the anger and rage of discontented populations against their own regimes.


Some have argued that anti-Americanism is one thing, but that if the United States shows new resolve and is prepared to do whatever it takes to end the regime in Baghdad, key Arab governments will support us, albeit reluctantly, since their interests ultimately lie with the West. But this proposition would need to be carefully tested before taking precipitous action. Certainly the hostility shown to the United States by citizens of one of our closest Arab friends, Egypt, could be a sober portent.


Few governments, including Arab governments, approve of the Saddam Hussein regime. However, they express concern that a new American military offensive that did not guarantee the final and definitive removal of Saddam Hussein and his cohorts and the parallel emergence of a stable, unified Iraq would create more problems than it would solve. Thus, if force is to be considered, the strategic objective must include a coherent policy for a post-Saddam Iraq. Removing Saddam alone might have some short-term benefits, but there are downsides. First, if only Saddam and his immediate entourage are ousted, the Baathist regime will remain in power and Saddam's likely successor (unless it is one of his sons) would likely be greeted with such relief by the international community that Iraq could soon get out from under the punitive sanctions that have limited Saddam's strategic ambitions. Yet there is no guarantee that any Saddam successor that comes from within the regime will be any less anti-American than Saddam or that he will disband Iraq's WMD programs or abandon the wish to rebuild Iraq's military conventional forces. Iraq has suffered great humiliation in the past 10 years; the desire for redemption and revenge is not restricted to Saddam Hussein.


The military choices facing the United States in the event of a decision to use major force are formidable. A strategic air offensive without the use of ground forces has well-known limitations. A ground offensive analogous to Desert Storm would take months to put in place, assuming we had access rights in the region. A more indirect strategy of subversion and guerilla warfare has no guarantee of success.


Aside from military operations, what else can we do to undermine the Iraqi regime? First, we should not abandon efforts to deny Saddam Hussein access to hard currency and arms. The existing sanctions regime which has been in place for over a decade is unraveling, and up until September 11 regional support for Saddam Hussein was growing. The revised sanctions policy-so-called "smart sanctions"-proposed by the administration deserves support. It focuses on four key issues:

preserving the U.N. "escrow" account and other measures directed against the regime's financial assets to prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining additional revenues from increased commerce between Iraq and the outside world;
giving Iraqis more freedom to purchase civilian goods, thereby shifting responsibility to the regime for continued civilian suffering;
continuing an embargo on all conventional weapons transfers to Iraq; and
refining the list of prescribed dual-use technologies that can assist Saddam Hussein's efforts to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction.

These are realistic goals for which there is considerable international support. It can be argued that, with greater Russian cooperation on a number of issues, President Vladimir Putin may now be prepared to go along with the U.S. proposal to tighten the sanctions on Saddam Hussein. China and France have offered support for new sanctions that could set the stage for reducing Saddam's access to foreign currency.


At the same time, we will have to provide more aid to Jordan and to convince Turkey and Iran that their interests are served by working with a new U.N. Security Council resolution. If new sanctions were implemented, it would be difficult to ensure that goods and services that now are free to move to Iraq indeed reached the Iraqi people and were not pilfered by Saddam and his cohorts. Yet under these circumstances it would be less easy to criticize the sanctions as being against the Iraqi people. Saddam would be clearly accountable for their suffering, not the United Nations.


The issue of enhanced support for Iraqi opposition forces outside Iraq arouses great controversy, both within the U.S. government and among our allies. Many military analysts do not expect that Iraqi opposition forces could anytime soon provide the basis for a military challenge to Saddam Hussein. However, Iraqi opposition groups could and should be encouraged to remain active in the political arena and the propaganda war against Saddam's regime. Incremental support for the opposition can be pursued, with additional support contingent upon progress in political delegitimization efforts and opposition successes in the field. We should make efforts to broaden the appeal of the opposition among the various Iraqi clans, both Sunni and Shiite, though we do need to find more specific groups we can effectively work with. Lethal assistance could be considered, based on future political progress. Under present circumstances, it would take a major political investment by the United States to make support for opposition groups more credible in the region.


A parallel effort must be made in the intelligence arena to seek ways to infiltrate and undermine the Saddam Hussein regime from without and from within. Deception and dirty tricks should be refined and implemented. No one doubts the difficulties of these types of operations, but clearly the most likely danger to Saddam himself is an uprising within his own Sunni organizations. Given the intensity of his security, this is a long shot, but one that should be pursued.


Saddam Hussein is likely to behave egregiously at some point in the future. The United States, therefore, needs to make sure that regional allies understand American redlines and that we understand the limits of their support for future U.S. military action. Redlines remain an important element of our policy. Three redlines are most likely to continue to receive active Arab and Turkish support, as distinct from acquiescence:

Iraqi military threats or attacks on allied forces,
Iraqi threats or attacks on neighboring states and
Iraqi acquisition and deployment of weapons of mass destruction or their use, including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Redlines less likely to solicit active support include Iraqi aggression against the Northern Kurdish enclave and Iraq's military support for Palestinians against Israel. There remains considerable room for ambiguity on these issues. For instance, most regional powers accept the U.S. and U.K. right to defend aircraft patrolling in the no-fly zone by attacking Iraq's anti-air capability. However, they are unlikely to support major retaliatory action against other Iraqi military and civilian targets.


The United States must be more assertive and aggressive in its public diplomacy. It should outline its hopes for Iraq and its people and state that they will be well treated and respected once the Saddam Hussein regime has gone. The United States has been losing the propaganda war, and it should be a priority to retain the high ground on the matter of who is most responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi people. The United States should lead international efforts to indict leading regime figures, limit their foreign travel and freeze their external bank accounts. Those who wish to profit from supporting the present regime should be placed in the position of having to defend it in light of its track record.


Our most effective short-run strategy toward Iraq should be to keep Baghdad guessing as to what we are going to do. There is circumstantial evidence that since September 11 the governments cozying up to Saddam and the dozens of companies seeking lucrative business deals have had second thoughts, not wanting to be seen acting against American interests or to be caught in the crossfire of military confrontation. If countries such as Turkey reassess their present favorable relations with Iraq, others might follow if they believe the United States is serious about an eventual regime change. This could reverse the favorable momentum Saddam has been exploiting for the past year and could make it more difficult for Baghdad to reassert its presence in the region.


In the days ahead, the United States will have to walk a fine line between developing a more robust diplomacy while seeking regional support in preparing for a military response at some time in the future.