David Hirst, Al Ahram Weekly, Nov 11-17, Inept US Policy
Iraq News, 17 Nov 1999
By Laurie MylroieThe 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 .
NB: The State Dept, in an Oct 14 letter to Sen. Jesse Helms, Chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that it would begin the
"drawdown of up to $5 million of defense articles." (see "Iraq News,
Oct 18). But it has yet to happen.
Also as Hirst concluded, quoting al-Hayat, either the Iraq problem
will be properly addressed or "the persistence of the status quo will
turn Iraq into a time-bomb that will explode without notice or
forewarning." Isn't this astonishingly like the 1930's?
Inept US policy keeps Iraq pot boiling
by David Hirst, Al-Ahram Weekly, 11 - 17 November 1999
Last week, the Iraqi National Congress(INC) held a plenary
conference in New York, to choose a new leadership and rally as broad
support as possible, among Iraqi exiles, for a concerted strategy to
bring down President Saddam Hussein. No Arab country would ever accept
to host such a conference; and it was partly because of US persuasions
that, instead of its original choice, the North Iraqi town of Halabja,
where 5,000 Kurds perished in an Iraqi gas attack in 1988, the INC met
in New York. The most prominent and dynamic segment of the Iraqi
opposition, the INC has always looked to the US for salvation, and there
could be no more apt symbolism of that than the acceptance of such a
venue.
On the face of it, the US responded with a clearer commitment to the
opposition cause than it ever has before. Under-Secretary of State
Thomas Pickering told the 300 delegates that the US stood four-square
behind "a multi-dimensional strategy" to support "free" Iraqis not only
"in the removal of the tyrant" but in "building a new, democratic Iraq".
In line with the Iraq Liberation Act which President Clinton signed a
year ago, the US released an initial $5 million of a promised $97
million for equipment and training. Besides such items as faxes, filing
cabinets and computers, four rebel leaders, including two former army
officers, are now attending a 10-day course on such things as "political
opposition skills".
There is much derision and scepticism. They come first, of course,
from Baghdad itself, which heaped scorn on "these rats and apostates
assembled by the US". From an Arab columnist, who called the Iraqi
opposition "the most ostracised" in the Arab world. From a US
Congressman, who said he "couldn't imagine Saddam being worried about
being overthrown by Iraqi exiles brandishing fax machines".
More importantly, the INC conference was boycotted by large segments
of the opposition itself, that fissiparous agglomeration of forces riven
by ethnic, confessional, factional and personal conflicts, as well as by
the divergent agendas of regional states to which they habitually turn
for sponsorship. Major organisations which had been present at the INC's
founding conference stayed away, from Ayatollah Baqer Al-Hakim's
exclusively Shi'ite, Iranian-backed "Supreme Council of the Revolution
in Iraq" to the non-sectarian Iraqi Communist party; so did respected
individuals like the leading Shi'ite cleric Bahr Al-Uloum.
Yet, despite the scepticism, one thing on which most of the
opposition do agree is that the one external agency that can play a
decisive role in helping them topple Saddam is the US. Some may be shy
about saying so too publicly, given the low esteem in which US policies
are held throughout the region; and, not surprisingly, Ahmad Chalabi,
the moving spirit behind the INC, is much criticised for so openly and
far-reachingly acting on this assumption. But even many of those who are
not so shy about it failed to show up in New York. Their reason was
either that they don't like Chalabi, and what they see as his
high-handed, manipulative methods, or--as Bahr Al-Uloum put it--"the US
isn't serious".
That the US just isn't serious, in fact, is the long-held opinion of
virtually all Saddam's adversaries, not least the one, Chalabi, who has
incurred such disapproval for trying so hard to make it serious.
With Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the US ceased its surreptitious
support of the Iraqi leader as an anti-Islamist regional "strongman" and
its indifference to such atrocities as Halabja; George Bush cast him as
"the new Hitler" instead. But, for the opposition, almost everything the
US has done against him since has been either ill-conceived and
incompetent or, worse, insincere and hypocritical. The scandalous truth,
some say, is that the US actually likes the status quo, and such
benefits -- strategic hegemony in the Gulf, lucrative arms deals -- as
accrue from it. Others, less severe, share the widely held Western view
that what, at bottom, plagues the administration is its fear of being
drawn into a Contra-style insurgency, or a large-scale, direct military
involvement in the all-too-probable event that, upon Saddam's fall,
Iraq, this most strategic of countries, collapses into chaos and civil
war, and the competing interventions of regional powers.
The opposition's mistrust stems, above all, from Bush's original
sin: his betrayal, in March 1991, of the great Shi'ite and Kurdish
uprisings which he himself had encouraged. Nothing has softened that
mistrust since. Take what, over the years, has been the US's central
concern, the elimination of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction(WMD).
Whenever Saddam took his defiance of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors to
intolerable lengths, the US launched air raids, or unleashed cruise
missiles, on some target or other; then, honour satisfied, it fell back
on the policy of "containment" -- principally economic sanctions and the
"aerial exclusion zones" in north and south -- which, it said, was
keeping Saddam safely in his "box". Yet, by the US's own admission, none
of this stopped him from pressing on with his WMD development. Crisis
followed crisis, until, late last year, with Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright insisting on UNSCOM's right to "free, unfettered,
unconditional access" to all sites, it looked as though things were
coming to a climactic showdown. And, indeed, after Saddam finally
expelled UN inspectors altogether the US and Britain mounted Operation
Desert Fox. The heaviest raid since the Gulf war, it struck not only at
suspected weapons sites but, more importantly, at institutions --
Republican Guards, Ba'ath Party, Special Security Organisation -- which
are the bulwark of Saddam's power. It certainly shook the regime for a
while but it did nothing to advance UNSCOM's purposes. On the contrary,
it is now 10 months since there has been any on-the-ground weapons
inspection of any kind. All of a sudden, that did not really seem to
matter to the US any more; officials now contended, against all previous
logic, that there was "no evidence" that he was rebuilding his
"degraded" weapons system. The US shifted its main activities elsewhere.
Since early this year the US and Britain have flown no less than 12,000
sorties in a relentless aerial campaign against Iraq air defenses. But
this has had no effect on Saddam's WMD programme, and none, one
suspects, on his grip on power.
For the opposition, these shifts and evasions merely illustrate
that, at the end of the day, the US has no policy other than its
obsessive, almost neurotic clinging to the status quo of containment and
sanctions. All else is tokenism.
Now, in what amounts to another new departure, the administration
has decided to support the INC. That, in effect, means supporting the
popular uprising, or some variant of it, of which Chalabi is the leading
exponent. His basic idea is that the opposition forces should converge
gradually from the periphery to the centre, from Kurdish north and
Shi'ite south to Saddam's natural stronghold, the Sunni heartland. They
should do so in a phased, incremental, coordinated insurgency that
encourages more and more people to join it as it goes along.
It has now become obvious, in fact, that an insurrection is the only
method of removing Saddam that has a serious chance of success. Others,
a military coup or the everlasting, ever-more morally dubious sanctions,
have patently failed; and to wait for his assassination, or some such
inherently unpredictable upheaval within the closed, incestuous universe
of the House of Saddam, is liable to mean waiting very long time.
The new US departure may look good in principle. But is it really
serious? Or is it, the doubters ask, just another pretext for inertia
and delay, for hiding behind the argument that such an enterprise
requires long and careful planning, and, above all, an opposition that
is a worthy partner for the US? "We should be under no illusion that
this will be a quick, easy or simple task", Pickering told the New York
gathering. "Scepticism abounds about your ability to act effectively as
a unified grouping." That may well be true, the opposition says, but a
main reason why is that the US itself has been so very poor a partner
for it.
"Saddam's fall is guaranteed to happen sooner or later," said
Pickering. Perhaps. But at the same time, however, the longer he hangs
on the more likely it is that one of two things will happen. Either he
will be internationally rehabilitated, because the US and Britain will
be unable to resist the growing pressures, moral, political and
commercial, for ending sanctions that are devastating the Iraqi people
but doing nothing to remove or reform the regime. Or -- as Ragheda
Dergham of the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat said last week -- "the
persistence of the status quo will turn Iraq into a time-bomb that will
explode without notice or forewarning."
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