Military

DATE=5/1/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=BRUCE JENTLESON

NUMBER=3-162

BYLINE=TOM CROSBY

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

/// EDITORS: THIS INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE IN DALET UNDER SOD/ENGLISH NEWS NOW INTERVIEWS IN THE FOLDER FOR TODAY OR YESTERDAY ///

VOA INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE JENTLESON

BY VOA'S TOM CROSBY - APRIL 30, 2002

HOST: The administration...meantime...is said to be weighing...what to do about a nation it considers an author of terrorism. Published reports in the New York Times and Boston Globe newspapers over the weekend suggested the United States is considering various options for toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The reports say President Bush has yet to endorse any of the options under consideration. But they suggest the President is being urged to initiate some sort of action next year.

Bruce Jentleson served in the State Department's policy planning staff during the Clinton administration and dealt with issues such as Middle East arms control. He also wrote the book "With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, Saddam 1982 to 1990." He tells VOA News Now's Tom Crosby the Bush administration has long been considering means of ousting President Saddam but there had been differences within the President's inner circle of advisors long before the September 11th terrorist attacks in the U-S about whether or how to do it:

MR. JENTLESON: What we're seeing now is a more intense effort to deal with this issue, but it did not start on September 11th.

MR. CROSBY: Why, as we say, telegraph it -- that is to say, let people know that we're considering doing something next year?

MR. JENTLESON: There are two parts to his strategy right now. One is, if you're going to do it, you need to plan for it, you need to develop strategy, you need to develop options, you need to work the diplomacy. Hopefully, you need to think through all aspects of it, including what you do after the fact. But secondly is, to the extent that you are trying to use this as a threat and to send a message in a coercive way, one of the tacit goals also could be to try to affect Saddam Hussein's policies and behavior by convincing him that we will invade unless he changes, and therefore getting him to change key policies, like for example on the question of inspections and weapons of mass destruction. So there actually can be an argument for making the threat explicitly and openly as a way of trying to achieve at least some of the objectives without actually having to carry them out.

MR. CROSBY: Is there a possibility in your mind, too, that this might be aimed at getting some dissident factions within Iraq a little bit more upset and more active?

MR. JENTLESON: Well, to be honest with you, I think that dissident factions in Iraq have been burned by the United States too many times in the past to take this as a reason to go risk their lives. If you go back all the way to the 1970's, when the Nixon administration, and Henry Kissinger, provided some support for the Kurds and then withdrew that support as the balance of power politics between Iran and Iraq, and us and the Soviet Union, changed in the region.

If you go back to the late 1980's, when chemical weapons were used by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds, and many in the United States called for economic sanctions and the Reagan administration refused to deliver.

If you go back to right after the Gulf War, when the messages were sent, not just to the Kurds but to the Shiites, to rise up against Saddam, and then we decided not to proceed.

And if you go back to, say, 1995-96 and the Clinton administration, basically working a covert operation, also primarily with the Kurds but other dissidents, and then we abandoned that.

So I think there is a significant and appropriate skepticism there about getting too far out in front on the basis of some sense that the United States might do something.

MR. CROSBY: Is there also a sense that Iraq's neighbors, most notably Turkey, might be a little reluctant to be a party to any of this?

MR. JENTLESON: We have heard a lot of reluctance from throughout the region, from many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and many others. And the argument often is made in the administration that that is their public position but privately they really want us to do it, and the only thing that they care about is ensuring that we'll see it through to success. I'm less convinced of that, especially in the current context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging to the extent that it is. I think there is genuine reluctance in the region, concerns about not just the question of can we overthrow Saddam Hussein but many different permutations of what might follow, and that that's causing a lot of concern among neighboring countries.

MR. CROSBY: Is it necessary? Do you think we ought to be going after Iraq at this point?

MR. JENTLESON: I have no illusions about Saddam Hussein. As you know, I wrote a book on U.S. relations with Iraq in the period leading up to the Gulf War. And even in the constellation of brutal dictators, Saddam genuinely has a special place. If the question is, has he been developing weapons of mass destruction in the years that the inspectors haven't been there, my view is I have no doubt that he has been.

But the real issue to me is not the desirability of getting rid of him, but do-ability. And there I think my greatest concern is, like my concern about the war on terrorism, where all of our emphasis has been on winning the war and too little on winning the peace that needs to follow. That's my concern about Iraq as well. Are we sufficiently thinking through the post-Saddam scenarios, not just which individual we should turn to? But we are having problems in Afghanistan with nation-building, frankly, and peacekeeping. And in Iraq, that could be much more serious.

HOST: Former State Department official Bruce Jentleson speaking from his office at Duke University in North Carolina with VOA News Now's Tom Crosby.

NEB