Back to Baghdad: Rethinking Iraq Policy

Kuwait's elaborate celebrations of the 10th anniversary of its liberation in the Gulf War have been somewhat overshadowed by a renewed outcry in the Arab world over US and British policy towards Iraq in the wake of the February 16 bombings of radar sites north of the 33rd parallel. US Secretary of State Colin Powell's first visit to the region in his new role, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair's first visit to President George W. Bush, both seemed likely to be dominated by discussion of options on Iraq.

The bombings of the radar sites, though described as "routine" by some at the time they occurred, provoked criticism throughout the Arab world despite the fact that the relatively limited casualties announced by Baghdad were well below those of some other bombing attacks within the no-fly zones. As noted in the lead article of this issue, even Saudi Arabia has criticized the bombings, though some of the raids were probably flown from the Kingdom.

The fact that the raids provoked new criticism from former allies in the coalition against Iraq is not new; the fact that they came at a time when even the one staunch ally (other than Kuwait) remaining, Britain, is showing signs of wanting to change sanctions may be important. A new Administration is an invitation to change policies that have become shopworn or ineffective, and even though many in the second Bush Administration are the same people who created the sanctions regime in 1990, the intervening decade has seen enough change in the region that some new approach may be more appropriate.

This Dossier looks at what some of the options may be.

In the ten years since Desert Storm, much has changed in the Middle East. Kuwait has been rebuilt. The Oslo Accords were signed, and the Oslo process ran what now seems to have been its course. Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan and held direct talks with Syria. Veteran leaders in Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Bahrain passed from the scene, and a son replaced his father in Qatar. Talk of the United States as the "sole remaining superpower", of a "new world order", seems somewhat outmoded in an era when American power seems overextended in many parts of the world.

There is a new intifada, different from the one which raged in 1987-93 by the existence of the Palestinian Authority. But Saddam Hussein, who won cheers by firing his Scuds at Israel in 1991, is once again seeking to identify himself with Palestinian issues and thus win the support of the Arab street. Anti-Americanism is growing once again.

There are continuities as well. The US is still the only superpower, though not always able to exercise the influence of one. Saddam Hussein is still in Baghdad, and there is another George Bush in the White House. Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others who played a role in those days are back.

But it is a different world. As Jon Alterman of the US Institute of Peace is fond of pointing out, when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Saudi press was totally silent for 48 hours, not telling Saudi readers or TV viewers about the invasion. Today, with satellite television, the Internet, and other new media, no such government silence is feasible. The information revolution has transformed the region, in ways still not fully understood.

And the era of "dual containment" is past. Europe is rapidly improving its relations with Iran, though the US for various reasons has had to move more cautiously. The tendency to view Iraq and Iran, themselves enemies, as twin threats has not entirely gone away, but the circumstances are much changed.

The world has changed in ten years, but Saddam is still in place, and so are the sanctions erected in 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait, and elaborated upon after the war. The US still maintains troops in the Middle East, and a fleet in the Gulf; it still flies, with Great Britain (but no longer with France), the Northern Watch and Southern Watch patrols over the no-fly zones (north of 36ºN and south of 33ºN), and protects an autonomous Kurdish region in the far north. It enforces sanctions at sea with its naval units, but finds it increasingly difficult to prevent leakage by land.

The wave of humanitarian flights to Iraq last year after Saddam International Airport was reopened was not so much a direct defiance of sanctions as it was a demonstration of their weakening force. The US and the UK are the only Permanent Members of the Security Council still actively supporting sanctions; France is critical and Russia and China openly calling for an end or at least a relaxation of sanctions.

But there are far more obvious leakages. Since 1998, there have been no United Nations inspectors, and Iraq's weapons programs are thus unmonitored. In addition to the oil it now sells legally through the UN's oil-for-food program, Iraq also exports considerable oil through the cooperation of its neighbors: via a pipeline to Syria and clandestine exports through Iran, according to multiple attestations, though both are banned under the sanctions.

Iraq has also used the sanctions for successful propaganda in the Arab world and elsewhere, insisting that the sanctions are causing numerous deaths among Iraqi children unable to acquire medicine. (How Iraq cannot afford medicine when it is paying thousands of dollars to each Palestinian family which loses a member in the intifada is of course a question, but in propaganda terms, both elements increase Saddam's popularity in the Arab street.)

Certainly, something seems to be wrong with the present system: there is no longer any check on Saddam's weapons programs, obvious leakage in the ban on oil sales and other sanctions, and a growing sympathy with Iraq not only in the Arab world but in the West as well. (In the Arab world, only Kuwait remains unremittingly anti-Iraqi, for obvious reasons; Saudi Arabia's criticism of the bombing of the radar sites, however lukewarm, was a reminder that even the Saudis are beginning to distance themselves from US policy.)

It is true that some Gulf states are less dismayed by the sanctions' effect on Iraq than by their failure to get rid of Saddam. Machiavelli's dictum that if one strikes at a prince, one must kill him, is perhaps relevant here: if the present policy is merely going to leave Saddam in place while he gains more and more support from the populations of the other Gulf states, why should the conservative regimes support it? A policy that actually got rid of Saddam might be preferable, but the Saudis are nervous about a breakup of Iraq or a Shi‘ite-controlled Iraq. (Iraq is majority Shi‘ite but has always been ruled by a Sunni establishment.) But if Saddam cannot be eliminated, conciliating him may make more sense than continuing to provoke him. (He openly threatened retaliation against Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as Israel, after the February 16 US-British airstrikes.)

European and Arab discomfort with the present sanctions regime is the most vocal, but there is considerable debate within the US policy community as well, with advocates of policies ranging from conciliation to open military confrontation. A recent column by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times (in the form of a proposed memo from Colin Powell to George W. Bush) suggested offering to resume diplomatic relations with Iraq and lift all sanctions on three conditions: US weapons inspectors are allowed in (US, not other UN); there remain sanctions against major weapons sales, and Iraq continues to honor troop movement limitations.

That may be a utopian scenario; the opposite extreme, one which calls for an extensive bombing campaign against Iraq combined with arming the Iraqi opposition (not just funding them) and taking direct action against Saddam's support structure (for example, freezing foreign accounts of senior Iraqi officials) has been advocated by some who are now in the new Bush Administration. And there are various options between these extremes.The growing isolation of the US and Britain,and the growing clamor from France, Russia, China, and the Arab world for a change in the sanctions regime, makes some change likely. Britain's apparent push for "smart" sanctions of some sort adds to this. Below we consider some of the options.

The Options:

The Status Quo
The status quo is the one option which seems to be increasingly frail. Even Great Britain is beginning to call for some softening of sanctions, and there are many within the US government who agree, not to mention the virtual unanimity in the Arab world, Western Europe, Russia and China that the sanctions as presently enforced have run their course and are no longer effective.

The sanctions leak badly; there is a growing international willingness to defy them; and there is no system of inspection of Iraq's weapons programs, leaving Iraq presumably free to build weapons at will, if it can acquire the materials through leaky sanctions. And the continuing economic sanctions allow Iraq to play the propaganda line it has long pursued of blaming deaths of Iraqi civilians on the West even while spending money on luxuries elsewhere.

Proactive Efforts to Bring Down Saddam
Some in the US policy community believe that much more could have been done over the past decade to bring down Saddam Hussein. And in fact, when Gulf Arab officials criticize present US policy, it is often at least implicit that one weakness they see in the policy is that it is aimed at the Iraqi people but not at the Iraqi leadership, leading to conspiracy theories suggesting the US actually wants to retain Saddam in power in order to justify its military presence in the region.

That is a conspiracy theory with little grounding in fact, but it stems from a Middle Eastern puzzlement at why the world's last superpower seems unable to bring down Saddam.

The problem is what it always has been: it is easier said than done. One thing that Iraq does very well is the security of the leader. And Saddam's notorious use of doubles and willingness to execute senior officials at the slightest sign of disloyalty goes a long way toward terrorizing those who might be expected to stage a coup.

Arguments for a more proactive effort usually involve the following steps, or some combination of them:

Fuller support of the Iraqi opposition. Some advocate training and arming the Iraqi opposition as a fighting force, recognizing them as the legitimate authority in Iraq, and providing support to any liberated areas of Iraq. The problem with this approach has been that the opposition remains divided within itself. Even the one "liberated" area of Iraq, the Kurdish autonomous zone, is deeply divided between the two major Kurdish parties. And few of the Iraqi opposition groups other than the Iranian-backed Shi‘ite movement (the group with which the US has the least influence) have shown much eagerness for actual guerrilla warfare against the Iraqi Army.

Targeting Saddam's core leadership cadre rather than the whole nation. This approach has not really been tried. It may be too late to try to freeze the overseas bank accounts of the Iraqi elite as those are presumably already well hidden, but there may be other ways of targeting them (even literally, militarily). Saddam's personal security is so great that only someone very close to him is likely to be able to take him out. Making life uncomfortable for those close to him (while making it clear that once he is gone, there will be few questions asked) might have some effect.

A sustained bombing campaign. An all-out effort to degrade the infrastructure of Iraqi power — not the country as a whole — might have the same effect as the previous idea: damage the villas of the Tikriti elite, rather than merely the radar stations, and perhaps they would turn against Saddam.

The problem is that there are no guarantees, and some of these tactics would be hard to implement. Jordan was once a good base for operating against Iraq, but with popular opinion in the street increasingly anti-American because of the intifada, it might not be so today. Other Arab countries are less willing to do the US' bidding than they were before the intifada. And the Iraqi opposition have been a notoriously weak reed.

"Smart" Sanctions
The latest buzzword is a shift from the present sanctions to "smart" sanctions, which more or less acknowledges that the present system is not smart. The British have let it be known that they are advocating "smart" sanctions in Blair's visit to the US.

"Smart" sanctions are generally defined as concentrating on blocking Saddam's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction and threaten his neighbors, by maintaining sanctions on military equipment and high technology and limitations on deployment of air and ground units, but lifting commercial and economic sanctions to allow Iraq to return to a normal trading status in most areas. The problem is control of dual-use technologies and Iraq's long history of managing to acquire weapons technologies through the back door.

"Smart" sanctions would be one variety of the approach advocated by Thomas Friedman in the column mentioned earlier: even restore diplomatic relations, but on certain strict conditions. The problem is that Iraq has rebuffed some similar approaches in the past, insisting on an unconditional lifting of sanctions. But if another formula were actually on offer, it is at least arguable that he might accept it.

Conciliation
Russia and China, and many Arab countries, claim to advocate an even more conciliatory approach: welcome Iraq back into the community of nations, treat it as a fully sovereign state, and engage Saddam Hussein as an ordinary head of state. This is what in another context was called "constructive engagement": if one conciliates a hostile regime, it will become more normal in its behavior.

The strongest argument against the conciliatory approach is that it has been tried: it is what the West did in the latter years of the Iran-Iraq war and in the period 1989-90, between the Gulf wars. There is little reason to believe that it would work much better now: is there really any sign that Saddam has changed? He is threatening Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel; his son ‘Udayy suggested that the best way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of what Iraq now portrays as a victory would be to include Kuwait in the maps of Iraq in schoolbooks.

Conciliation, needless to say, has fewer advocates in Kuwait than in some countries farther afield.

Other Options
The above options are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some combination is possible: perhaps a carrot-and-stick approach in which a confrontational stance is coupled with a clear set of actions which would lead to a lifting of sanctions.

Another option might be a "lift and deter" approach in which sanctions are lifted, but with the clear understanding that any Iraqi threat to its neighbors will be met with immediate and unrestrained response, and that the use of weapons of mass destruction may be met with the same. Such an approach was probably not credible on the part of the last US Administration, which clearly shied from any military action which might lead to substantial US casualties. But a credible deterrent threat, combined with the carrot of a lifting of sanctions, might arguably have some effect.

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