Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Making the World Safe for Arab Democracy

"I felt they made a mistake by not finishing the job."--Al Gore, recently criticizing the results of the Gulf War after cautioning against invasion of Iraq.

The United States is at war and so far it is winning. The next battle or " Phase II " of the War on Terrorism, as numerous major leaks to the New York Times indicate, will likely be a full-scale invasion of Iraq. Short of running campaign commercials on the topic, the Bush administration could not more clearly signal its determination to rid the world of the threat of Saddam Hussein acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons. Most informed observers accept that some form of American attack on Iraq is virtually inevitable even if they oppose the policy of"regime change". If the United States invades Iraq, then Mr. Bush needs to throw aside conventional State Department thinking and go for broke. It will not be enough for Mr. Bush to smash the Iraqi army on the battlefield as his father did in 1991; this time around America must also win the peace and that means planning an endgame with as much care as the military campaign. Radical options for a post-Saddam Iraq must be considered beforehand because as Iraq goes, so will the War on Terrorism.

American and Allied forces won the Gulf War by one of the most lopsided margins in the history of warfare, exceeding even the results of the Spanish-American War or Japan's crushing victory over the Russian navy at Port Arthur. American military forces lost 293 soldiers and airman versus Iraq's 100,000 who perished as Allied air sorties annihilated entire Iraqi divisions. Considering the magnitude of the Allied victory the cease-fire demands placed on Saddam by the first Bush administration was striking in their timidity. Iraq was not occupied, Saddam and his Baathist regime were left intact, and the Kurds were not permitted independence, no Nuremberg-style tribunals were held to punish the architects of war, rapine and pillage. Saddam even escaped having to personally sign surrender terms, itself a remarkable concession to a dictator who the first President Bush compared to Adolf Hitler prior to Desert Storm.

Far from facing a Carthaginian peace, Iraq was required only to turn over all weapons of mass destruction, adhere to limited " no-fly " zones, repatriate POW's and compensate Kuwait. Iraq never fully complied with any of the cease-fire provisions or related UN resolutions. To quote Mr. Gore, who himself was a key player in an administration that repeatedly blinked as Saddam evaded sanctions, shot SAM rockets at American pilots, ejected UN weapons inspectors and supported terrorism, the " job was left unfinished " by the elder President Bush. Once UN weapons inspectors were routed in November 1998, Saddam resumed his biological, chemical, nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs unhindered. Almost five years later, it is highly probable that Iraq has rebuilt a substantial arsenal of biochemical WMD. With several tons of uranium on hand, Iraq could produce scores of " dirty" bombs today or build 1 to 4 crude atomic weapons in the near future.

Brent Scowcroft and the senior George Bush have argued retrospectively that the decision not to march on Bagdahd was the correct one. They cited"incalculable human and political costs," Arab and Turkish opposition to a break-up of Iraq and the chore of being " forced to occupy Bagdahd and in effect, rule Iraq " . There was also an overwhelming concern for abstract legalism on the part of the first Bush administration. In deciding how to interpret their UN mandate, the establishment of a new precedent in international law for handling aggression for the post-Cold war world rated more highly with Bush and Scowcroft than practical military considerations or even achieving a total strategic victory against Iraq . It was this cautious, calculated decision on the part of Mr. Bush to opt for accepting the limited, gain of reversing Iraq's aggression against Kuwait and it rested on the hopeful assumption that in defeat, Saddam's days were numbered.

Numerous interests were in favor of returning to as close to status quo ante as possible in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Conservative gulf monarchies wanted Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran and preferred Saddam as a neighbor to a more liberal regime that might inspire their own people to demand reforms. Both the Soviet and Chinese leaderships, traumatized by televised images of the devastating power of cutting edge American military technology, were somewhat mollified by Bush's personal-touch style and his conservative interpretation of his UN mandate. State Department officials, led by James Baker had advocated accepting a last-minute compromise settlement instead of sticking to the January 14th deadline; and JCS Chairman Colin Powell along with nearly half of the Congress had preferred relying on sanctions alone to drive Iraq's army from Kuwait. Few voices at the time demanded a march on Baghdad.

Unfortunately, the long-range consequences of leaving Saddam in power have been uniformly negative to U.S. national security. While he is a mediocre military leader and diplomat, Saddam Hussein excels at running a paranoid and brutal police state modeled on Stalinist lines. The likelihood of his overthrow by indigenous rivals or political factions are virtually nil and was never more than wishful thinking on the part of U.S. policy makers. Potential successors to Saddam, other than his own equally unsavory sons, simply no longer exist in Iraq and the population has been terrorized into fatalistic passivity. Absent American intervention, Saddam will rule for decades.

" Containment "of Iraq, the default Clinton policy that was effectively continued by George W. Bush until 9-11, failed miserably to either disarm Iraq or moderate Saddam's behavior. During " Containment " Saddam slaughtered Iraqi Shiites, made inroads back into Kurdistan, starved Iraqi children in order to use Oil for Food funds to continue his WMD programs, attempted to assassinate a former U.S. president and periodically attacked U.S. warplanes. Saddam's involvement in terrorism, particularly with al Qaida, indicates that his regime remained at war with the United States long after the cease-fire was accepted. Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism includes sending a high-level Intelligence delegation to meet with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, the arming and direction of Ansar al-Islam, granting cash awards to encourage Palestinian suicide-bombers, contact with the 9-11 ringleader Mohammed Atta in Prague and possibly responsibility for the first WTC bombing carried out by suspected Iraqi intelligence agent Ramzi Youssef. If this is an example of Saddam contained it begs the question of what he could accomplish free of restraints. Recent British intelligence reports on Iraq's biological weapons program indicates that the fear of administration officials, that Saddam intends to arm Middle East terrorist groups with WMD, is no mere bluff.

When the U.S. in all likelihood invades Iraq to force a " regime change " the same international and institutional interests which now pressure President Bush to overlook Yasser Arafat's terrorist campaign will push for similar"see-no-evil" non-changes in post-Saddam Iraq - sort of a Baathism with a smiling face as an acceptable regime. Mr. Bush should ignore such special pleading and traditional quick fixes of grabbing a congenial general as the next strongman and ask some fundamental questions: What type of government for Iraq should come after Saddam? Should Iraq even continue to exist as a nation-state at all?

The last question might seem odd in light of the fact that Iraq's territorial integrity was a prime concern handcuffing the first Bush administration after the Gulf War. " We did not assist the insurrections [the Kurds and Shiites] militarily, primarily out of a fear of hastening the fragmentation of Iraq and plunging the region into a new cycle of instability." explained James Baker If Iraq could only be prevented from disintegrating through the rule of a homicidal dictator bent upon conquest of his neighbors and acquisition of nuclear weapons; perhaps it is time to learn to live with a little cyclical instability. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who argued about the possibilities of " worse " alternatives to Saddam in his Senate Foreign Relations testimony needs to identify what threats exceed that of an anti-American state marshalling all of its resources in order to give Islamist terrorists weapons of mass destruction. This non-argument by Berger is little more than a psychological and political preference for tolerating known evils and certain future peril over the costs today of solving the problem.

Iraq fundamentally is an artificially constructed, totalitarian state that favors a Sunni Arab minority at the expense of Arab Shiites, Kurds and Assyrian Christians. In order to create a throne for the children of the Sherif of Mecca, a British client, Winston Churchill haphazardly slammed together Arabic Mesopotamia and mountainous Kurdistan at the 1919 Cairo conference. Since WWII, Iraq has been held together by the military until Saddam's dreaded secret police supplanted the political primacy of the armed forces.

The Turks object strenuously to partitioning Iraq because an independent Kurdistan would incite their own restive Kurdish minority. As a key NATO ally, Turkey's national interests are being weighed heavily by the administration but Ankara should not have a veto on this issue. If Iraq's " fragmentation " would advance the downfall of Saddam's regime or save the lives of US personnel then Kurdish independence should be seriously considered as an option, not wielded as an argument against invasion. The world adjusted quite well to the absence of a civilized democracy like Czechoslovakia and weathered the incomparably more dangerous collapse of the Soviet Union. Assuming the partition of Iraq would bring down the geopolitical heavens is somewhat unrealistic.

Whether Iraq is left intact or is replaced by several states, its people deserve a democratic form of government that respects the political and human rights of it's citizens - in short, a western-style, liberal market democracy. While Saddam's record of reckless aggression and illegal WMD programs provide ample justification for pre-emptive U.S. military intervention, spreading democratic norms will burnish the cause morally and strategically advance the war on terrorism. The Bush administration, given the President's pronouncement on a future Palestinian state as a democracy untainted by terror, is ideologically inclined toward such a goal. A democratic - and therefore Shiite dominated - Iraq, freed of the need to fund Saddam's enormous military and secret police forces, would be an increasingly prosperous model both encouraging democratic reformers across the Arab world and destabilizing to the neighboring terror-states Iran and Syria.

Democracy would not come to Iraq on the cheap. Unless U.S. leaders want to create a " Weimar Arabia " in the wake of Saddam, American troops cannot simply bug out minutes after a State Department official hands a paper constitution to a convenient Iraqi general. Occupation, and in the short term " American rule " of Iraq would be needed for a period of years in order to get the democratic project off the ground though administrative functions could be gradually turned over to the UN, as in the case of East Timor. Unfortunately, much of the most capable bureaucratic intelligentsia in Iraq is part of either the Baath or the Mukhabarat apparatus and collectively they would represent a threat to a nascent democracy. The model for Iraq should be postwar Germany with its deNazification courts and Allied tribunals for war criminals, not Yeltsin's Russia where ex-KGB and Party apparatchiks formed terrifying Mafia gangs and thoroughly looted the country into poverty.

If America invades Iraq it must not subsequently fail to establish respect for the human rights of Iraq's people who have grown numb suffering in Saddam's iron grip. President Bush, if he decides to " finish the job " must make certain that American action will constitute, to quote Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, " another act of liberation. "