Iraq News by Laurie Mylroie
The central focus of Iraq News is the tension between the considerable, proscribed WMD capabilities that Iraq is holding on to and its increasing stridency that it has complied with UNSCR 687 and it is time to lift sanctions. If you wish to receive Iraq News by email, a service which includes full-text of news reports not archived here, send your request to Laurie Mylroie .
The 11th anniversary of Halabja will be marked in London and Washington:
In London, the INDICT Campaign is holding two events to remember the
victims of Halabja.
--11:00 AM, Saturday, 13 March: Meet in Trafalgar Square to hear a
survivor speak, observe one minute silence, and release 500 black
balloons
--7:00 PM, Wednesday, 17 March: Meeting in the Grand Committee Room,
House of Commons (use St. Stevens entrance). Ann Clwyd MP and others
will speak about the efforts to bring Saddam and his regime to justice.
All are welcome at both events. Contact: INDICT (0171) 840 0190
In Washington, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and the Human
Rights Alliance will hold a briefing, Tuesday, March 16 3:00--5:00 PM
Room: 2360 Rayburn House Office Building (New Jersey & Independence Aves
-Capitol South Metro) As WKI explained, the event will feature a
discussion with Dr. Christine Gosden, a British geneticist who has
visited and treated the victims of the Halabja attack and is
spearheading an international effort to answer their cry for help.
Ambassador Peter Galbraith, Members of Congress, representatives of the
Department of State, NGOs and Kurdish political leaders have also been
invited to speak.
R. James Woolsey
Testimony before House Armed Services Committee
U.S. Policy Toward Iraq
March 10, 1999
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, it is an honor to be asked
to testify before you on this important subject. Over a year ago I
testified before Congress that I believed it was urgent to move toward a
strategy --an overt, not a covert one-- to replace the Ba'ath regime in
Iraq. Not just Saddam, the regime. I did not, and do not, urge the
deployment of American ground troops to bring this about, but rather a
concerted effort over time that would include the following elements:
--maintain the existing no-fly zones in the North and South for all
Iraqi aircraft, including helicopters, and expand the zones'
restrictions to create "no drive" zones for Iraqi military vehicles;
-- recognize an Iraqi government-in-exile, probably centered in the
first instance on the Iraqi National Congress, and arm it with light
weapons, including anti-armor;
-- when areas in the North and South of Iraq can be adequately protected
from Iraqi ground force encroachments by a combination of indigenous
(including defecting) forces and our use of air power, permit those
areas to be free of the trade restrictions imposed on Iraq, for example,
let such regions pump and sell oil;
-- bring charges against Saddam in international tribunals and do
everything possible to hinder his use of offshore assets;
-- broadcast into Iraq in the style and manner of Radio Free Europe;
-- utilize any opportunities to conduct air strikes, such as Saddam's
current efforts to attack our aircraft maintaining the no-fly zones, to
damage as severely as possible the instruments whereby Saddam maintains
power: the Special Republican Guard, the Special Security Organization,
Iraqi Intelligence, etc.
Over the last year we have instead done something quite different,
rather reversing Teddy Roosevelt's dictum about speaking softly and
carrying a big stick. On several occasions, beginning in the autumn of
1997, we have made bold threats to try to encourage Saddam to cooperate
with UNSCOM or otherwise live up to his obligations under the Security
Council resolutions, and then backed down --most dramatically last
October.
Finally, in December we did conduct several days of apparently rather
effective air strikes against targets in Iraq and recently we have also
expanded the way we retaliate for Saddam's actions violating the no-fly
zones, by executing retaliatory strikes against air defense targets
separated in distance and time from the Iraqi air defense units that
have engaged our aircraft.
But confusion has been introduced by the fact that the President's
belatedly-stated policy of working to replace the Iraqi regime does not
seem to be supported either by his military commander in the field,
General Zinni, or by his new appointee to the National Security Council
staff, Mr. Pollack, who is apparently to be in charge of the Iraqi
account. Perhaps the Administration needs, in order to stay focused, to
post a sign on the wall of the White House Situation Room: "It's the
Regime, Stupid." The concerns of General Zinni, Mr. Pollack, and others
about the probable failure of an effort to replace the Iraqi regime seem
to be rooted in four views.
First, they seem to want to dash any optimism that there will likely
be a quick and easy replacement of Saddam's regime by a coherent and
fully democratic opposition. Point taken. No one should expect any of
this to be quick or easy, simply that it is a better policy than the
alternatives.
Second, they emphasize the fissiparous character of the Iraqi
opposition. Point taken again, but David Wurmser in his recently-
published Tyranny's Ally demonstrates clearly I believe, to any
objective observer, that a major share of that divisiveness can be laid
to American actions in 1995 and thereafter.
Third, they seem to me to underemphasize the practical importance of
the Iraqi opposition's being able to hoist the standard of democracy as
a rallying point, either because they undervalue the role of belief and
ideology in conflict or because they despair of a movement toward
democracy in this part of the world.
I would only say that I once undervalued such factors myself, having
been principally a student of throw-weight, Circular Errors Probable,
and other such matters for a number of years in the strategic nuclear
business.
But I learned in November of 1989 and thereafter, while on a
diplomatic assignment in Europe, how important it had been for us to
raise the standard of democracy during the Cold War. Our role as a
symbol of democracy is a powerful tool, if we will but use it. For
example, both Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel have said that Radio Free
Europe was the most important thing the United States did during the
Cold War.
Getting to know members of Solidarity and the Czech Civic Forum ten
years ago in Europe confirmed in my mind the practical importance of
taking a clear stand for democratic values. Yes, culture and experience
with democracy are both different in the Mid-East than they are in the
West, but Asian democracies were also rare to non-existent until after
World War 11. Now we have India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the
Philippines, Mongolia. And until rather recently Latin America was a
dark forest of dictatorships, relieved by only a few flowering
democracies such as Costa Rica; now change across the entire continent
has left Fidel Castro virtually alone as the remaining dictator.
Democracy is not a hot-house plant that can grow only in fifth century
B.C. Athens or eighteenth century Virginia.
Where are those experts who told us yesterday that democracy was
incompatible with Asian culture or with Latin American culture? Telling
us today that democracy won't work in the Middle East? When we stand
for a people's right to govern themselves and to defeat tyranny, we add
a lot of arrows to our quiver.
Stalin once asked cynically "how many divisions does the Pope have?"
John Paul II showed Stalin's heirs that he had quite a few in the
struggle over Eastern Europe in the 1980's. If a more military reference
is needed, skeptics might look up what Napoleon said about the relative
importance of the moral and the physical in war.
Finally, those who do not support moving to replace the Ba'athist
regime with democracy stress that if the regime were overthrown, Iraq
might come apart - with Iraqi Kurds joining others from Turkey, Iran,
and Syria to try to establish a Kurdish state, and with Iraqi Shia
either failing under the sway of Iran or encouraging revolt among the
Shia of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf. Those whose judgment I
value the most in these matters suggest that the Iraqi Kurds would
highly prize local autonomy with regard to language and education,
within some sort of federal structure, but that they will likely prove
willing to work within the structure of an Iraqi state. A little of the
same approach that Spain has used with regard to its Basque minority
would go a long way toward accommodating the Kurds in a post-Ba'athist
Iraq or in democratic Turkey. Spain has granted a great deal of autonomy
with respect to Basque culture and language and has thereby been able to
split the majority of the Basque people away from the violent ETA. The
capture of Ocalan by Turkey gives it the opportunity to do the same. If
Turkey, our democratic ally, and a post-Ba'athist Iraq can both be
persuaded to adopt a Spanish-type model to deal with their Kurdish
regions, it is not our problem to save either Syria or Iran from the
consequences of their oppression of their Kurdish minorities.
Concerning the role of the Shia, both Iraqi and Iranian Shia have
been unfairly tarred by the behavior of a powerful but small, and
declining, faction within their division of Islam: those who support
Khamenei and the rest of the Iranian wilayat al-faqih, often translated
"rule of the jurisprudential", i.e. the theocratic and dictatorial
portion of the Iranian government under first Khomeini and now Khamenei.
As Judith Miller makes clear in her fine book on Islamic extremism, God
Has Ninety-Nine Names, the wilayat is a Marked departure from Shia
tradition. There are many courageous Shia clerics even in Iran who
speak for the mainstream view of the proper relationship between the
Shia clergy and the state, a relationship like that of the clergy in
most other religions, and who urge the clerics who are involved with the
wilayat to "come home to Qom," i.e. Iran's holy city, and to reassume
Shia clerics' traditional role of serving as moral guides outside the
government, not theocratic managers of terror. It is a major mistake to
blame Islam, or Shia Islam, for the state of affairs in Iran today. The
problem is rather that a few men, in the government and among Iranian
clerics, have chosen terror to be a major tool of the Iranian State.
Just as it would be unfair to tar the entire Catholic Church of the time
with the outrages of the fifteenth century Spanish Inquisition under
Tomas de Torquemada and some of his fellow Dominicans (whose close
partnership with Ferdinand and Isabella has some parallel to the
collaboration today between the hard-liners in the Iranian government
and a portion of Iran's clerics), so it would be most unfair to blame
the majority of Iran's Shia clerics for the outrages of those who have
brought about and who implement the policy of terror. As Iran's last
presidential election and very recent local elections have also shown,
it would also be a major mistake to exaggerate the current popularity of
the wilayat in Iran, although it does still control the elements of
state power.
David Wurmser briefly but expertly surveys the history of Shi'ism in
Iraq in Tyranny's Ally. He outlines why the Iraqi Shia are far more a
threat to Iran's wilayat than they are to Saudi Arabia. This was
demonstrated in the spring of 1991, when the Iraqi Shia revolted, Saudi
Arabia urged us to assist them (as then-Under Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz has recently set forth), and Iran abandoned them. We, sadly,
took a path parallel to Iran, with, to this point, eight years of tragic
consequences. Wurmser concludes, I believe correctly, that a "free Iraqi
Shi'ite community would be a nightmare to the theocratic Islamic
Republic of Iran." I do not pretend that these issues are free from
doubt, and I know there are also experts who support General Zinni's and
Mr. Pollack's views. But it is far from the case that the only clear-
eyed, intellectually sound approach is to spurn the effort to establish
democracy in Iraq and to instead fiddle around with doomed coup attempts
by other Ba'athists or merely to contain Saddam and thereby give him
time to perfect his weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
In my judgment the far sounder approach under current circumstances is
to declare solidly for democracy in Iraq and to give it all support
short of actual invasion by American ground forces. We should also, I
believe, take steps to reduce our, and the rest of the world's,
long-term dependence on Mid-East oil. But that may be a subject for
another day.
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