Think Again: Attacking Iraq

As the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan winds down, should Iraq become "phase two" in the war against global terrorism? Iraq hawks warn that Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of mass destruction and his fanatic hatred of the United States make him a paramount threat. Others counsel for continued diplomacy and the return of U.N. weapons inspectors, arguing that an attack on Iraq would destabilize the Arab world. To support their cases, both sides deploy cherished assumptions about everything from Saddam Hussein's sanity to the explosive volatility of the "Arab Street." But a skeptical look at the sound bites suggests that the greatest risk of attacking Iraq may not be a vengeful Saddam or a destabilized Middle East but the unraveling of the global coalition against terrorism.

BY MARK STRAUSS | MARCH 1, 2002

"The United States Should Have Gotten Rid of Saddam Hussein During the Gulf War"

Twenty-twenty hindsight. One of the few things that proponents and opponents of a new campaign against Iraq seem to agree on is that the first Bush administration should have solved the problem of Saddam when it had the chance. They're right. Certainly, everyone would be better off today if the U.S. military had marched into Baghdad. But the Bush administration's decision to stand down in February 1991 made excellent sense at the time. All those armchair generals who declare they would have taken out Saddam forget that the Gulf War coalition included Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, who never would have openly joined a U.S.-led invasion to topple an Arab regime. Witness the growing Saudi reservations about hosting a U.S. military presence even in peacetime. And since Western intelligence analysts believed that Saddam's humiliating defeat would shortly prompt a coup among dissatisfied military officers, sitting back and waiting for matters to take care of themselves seemed like the smart thing to do.

The Bush administration's real mistakes were made after the Gulf War. First, as part of the cease-fire agreement negotiated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the United States agreed to let the Iraqi regime use its own helicopters to fly its leaders around the country. This agreement instead allowed the Iraqi military to use gunships to suppress subsequent Shiite and Kurdish uprisings. Second, the White House failed to support those uprisings because it feared that the breakup of Iraq could destabilize the entire region.

"If Saddam Is Overthrown, Iraq Will Break Apart"

Not likely. Like many countries in the Middle East, Iraq's contemporary borders were pieced together by victorious European powers from provinces of the dismantled Ottoman empire following the First World War: Mosul (the Kurdish northern province), Baghdad (the Sunni central province), and Basra (the Shiite southern province, which accounts for the majority of Iraq's population). Hence the endless warnings that -- absent a strong central government in Baghdad -- the country could splinter into three separate fragments.

Yet as far as "artificial states" go, Iraq has proved remarkably durable, holding together despite decades of revolutions, coups d'etat, international sanctions, economic devastation, and war. Those who fear that the Iraqi Shiites would break away at the first opportunity and cozy up with their coreligionists in Iran conveniently forget that those same Shiites, who account for many of the rank and file of the Iraqi military, had no qualms about fighting Iranians during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. (Nor, for that matter, has Iran ever made any territorial claim on Iraq's Shiite south.) And although reintegrating the Kurdish north will be difficult after 11 years of autonomy, Kurdish opposition groups have publicly eschewed secessionist ambitions, preferring instead to be part of a democratic federation.

Saddam Hussein is not like Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who unified Yugoslavia. Iraq as we know it existed decades before the rise of Saddam, and the country would likely survive his downfall. That's good news, since the only thing worse than a unified Iraq with an arsenal of mass destruction would be a Leba-nonized Iraq where rival factions would fight one another, possibly with chemical or biological weapons.

 

Mark Strauss is senior editor at FOREIGN POLICY.