Tracking Number: 238552
Title: "Congress, Analysts Weigh Military, Other Options in Iraq." Analysts Thomas McNaugher of the Brookings Institution, retired US Marine Corps Lt Gen Bernard Trainor and
Geoffrey Kemp of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the US should press through the UN for a unified policy to contain Iraq and that military force will be necessary to force Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein into compliance. (920811)
Author: HOLMES, NORMA (USIA STAFF WRITER)
Date: 19920811
Text:
*NEA205
08/11/92 *
CONGRESS, ANALYSTS WEIGH MILITARY, OTHER OPTIONS IN IRAQ (Urge military, political, economic steps) (1190) By Norma Holmes USIA Staff Writer Washington -- The United States, through the United Nations, should press for a unified military, political and economic strategy to contain Iraq, six noted Middle East analysts told the U.S. Congress.
In a House Armed Services committee hearing August 11, three analysts -- retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor; Thomas L. McNaugher, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Geoffrey Kemp, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- said it is now clear that military force will be necessary to compel Saddam Hussein to honor his commitments to the international community.
"The behavior of Saddam Hussein makes it imperative that the United States prepare for the use of force to punish Iraq for not complying with the U.N. Security Council resolutions," Kemp said.
Kemp added, however, that three conditions are "absolutely necessary" before the use of force is undertaken. The United States:
-- must act with the specific authority of the U.N.; -- in conducting military operations, must join at least one European and one Arab ally, preferably the United Kingdom, France and Saudi Arabia; and
-- must prepare a highly circumscribed set of military targets, coupled with a willingness to use air power repeatedly, over a period of weeks to weaken Saddam Hussein's security apparatus.
Kemp warned that if the international community fails to act decisively in the face of systematic violations of the U.N. agreements, the credibility of the U.S. and the United Nations in the Middle East and elsewhere is weakened.
In responding to questions, Kemp said he believes the use of force to contain Iraq will be necessary "as long as Saddam Hussein is in Baghdad."
Turning to specific initiatives, Kemp said a "decapitating strategy" which targets Saddam Hussein and his surrounding military establishment is the preferable way to signal to the Iraqi people that they can expect nothing but pain and suffering while he is around."
But he said the critical question is what sort of regime will replace Saddam Hussein. "If Saddam Hussein is replaced by a military junta," we are back were we started," Kemp warned.
McNaugher, who was a member of the ground forces during Operation Desert Storm, said he has felt since the summer of 1991, when the U.N. Commission on Iraq started having confrontations, that it was "just a matter of time."
McNaugher said U.N. Resolution 687 is a sufficient basis for any military move by the international community.
Trainor also said military action against Iraq is "inevitable." He said the U.N. embargo of Iraq "is leaking like a sieve." If the international community continues its present course, Trainor said, in 5 or 10 years, "we will see Saddam Hussein still in power.... We will face an Iraq primarily like the one we faced two years ago...with a massive war machine, following his policy of cheat and retreat."
Trainor said he foresees the standoff with the Iraqi regime over U.N. inspections "coming to a head again" in the near future.
"We will either back down again, or stand fast," he said. Discounting the feasibility of ground action against dug-in conventional forces, Trainor said "the option tends to be air forces."
While air power did not achieve the political objective of removing Saddam Hussein in the past war, he said, a "comprehensive campaign of selective air strikes"...over (several) days "would put him (Saddam Hussein) back were he was in 1991."
In two days of hearings, other former diplomats and scholars also stressed that an international military capability is an essential component of a comprehensive, political and economic restraint of Iraq.
Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy, Laurie Mylroie, of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Patrick Clawson, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, explored non-military options with the congressional panel August 10 and urged the United States to press for a United Nations resolution defining genocide and crimes against humanity applicable to all regions of the world.
Murphy stressed that "new evidence continues to surface documenting the brutal nature of Saddam's regime."
He said Iraq as a case study would stimulate the international community to create a tribunal to try international criminals, undergird the global commitment to keep pressures on Iraq and "further delegitimize" the regime.
Murphy also stressed that any successful political or economic strategy must also have a military component. The former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia said U.S. policy since the 1980's has held that there should be no one dominant power in the Gulf. "Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would feel more comfortable with a permanently weakened -- but not dismembered -- Iraq," Murphy said. In response to questions on that point, Murphy said he "knew of no government amenable to the breakup of Iraq."
Mylroie said Iraq today is the most powerful nation in the Gulf. Part of the problem lies with United Nations Resolution 687, which seeks to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but "does not deal with massive conventional forces," which, she said, Saddam Hussein is rapidly rebuilding.
Stressing that "Saddam Hussein today is Iraq's biggest threat to its territorial integrity," Mylroie, who has just returned from Iraq, said Saddam Hussein is "in flagrant violation of key U.N. resolutions on Iraq."
The present situation indicates the resolutions are "impossible to enforce with Saddam in power," Mylroie said. She likened the Iraqi dictator to Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Pol Pot in Camabodia.
Mylroie called for: -- the immediate grounding of all Iraqi military aircraft, "particularly in the South,"
-- indicting Saddam for war crimes and crimes against humanity, -- international military forces to oversee the pumping, refining and sale of Iraqi oil in northern Iraq and in the southern Ramallah oil fields to aid Iraqi civilians, repay war debts and fund the Kurdish administration in the North.
Clawson emphasized that compelling Baghdad's compliance with the ~U. N. resolutions, "much less accomplishing other U.S. goals with regards to Iraq, will require a sustained multi-front campaign." He urged immediate steps through the United Nations to tighten sanctions on Iraq by curtailing:
-- exports of $400-600 million of oil (60-100,000 barrels) moving daily to Jordan, Turkey and Syria, as reported in Petroleum Weekly;
-- the sale of gold worth $1,000-7,000 million annually; -- exports of dates of "about $80 million a year" since sanctions started; and
-- exports of food aid valued at $100 million from Libya since April, 1991. Clawson also called for the direct sale and export of Iraqi oil in the Rumaila oil fields overlapping the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border and allied control of exports valued at $10,000 million annually.
"The most dangerous aspect of the situation in Iraq today is that Saddam evidently thinks that time is on his side...(that) the sanctions are eroding, (that) the allies engage in 'threat and forget,' and Arab and Third World opinion is losing interest in the U.N. inspections regime," Clawson warned.
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File Identification: 08/11/92, NE-205; 08/12/92, NA-303
Product Name: Wireless File
Product Code: WF
Languages: Arabic
Keywords: HOUSE ARMED
SERVICES CMTE; CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY; TRAINOR, BERNARD; MCNAUGHER, THOMAS; KEMP, GEOFFREY; IRAQ-US RELATIONS; HUSSEIN, SADDAM; UNITED NATIONS-US RELATIONS; PERSIAN GULF WAR; TREATIES & AGREEMENTS; MURPHY, RICHARD
Thematic Codes: 1NE; 2FP; 1UN
Target Areas: NE
PDQ Text Link: 238552
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