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Why
Is the West Still Bombing Iraq?
By JONATHAN
POWER
July 6th., 2000
LONDON - One of the many imponderable issues of the
forthcoming U.S. presidential election is the Saddam
Hussein question, to bomb or not to bomb, to sanction or
not to sanction, to try and overthrow him or to accept
the status quo. Already advisers to George Bush are
letting it be known that a toughening of the effort to
depose him is high on the candidate's agenda.
Hanging like an albatross around Mr Bush's neck is the
widespread sentiment that when his father as president
led the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War he had a sword at
the throat of Saddam Hussein and failed to use it. At the
end of the war President George Bush Senior allowed
Saddam to withdraw his forces from Kuwait and southern
Iraq with half of his Republican Guard intact. Within
days he was using these to savagely repress rebellions by
Iraq's Shiite Muslim and Kurdish peoples. Will Bush
Junior feel he has to be tougher that tough with Saddam
to erase this stain on the family record?
Or will he surprise everyone as his father did when he
inherited the Nicaraguan imbroglio from Ronald Reagan?
Then, despite all his predecessor's rhetoric about the
dire threat of Nicaragua's Sandinistas to the very
security of the U.S. itself, he quickly made up his mind
to close down U.S. military support for the opposition
Contras. What had been a sacred cause to the Republican
right quickly vanished into the mists of history. As his
father had the inconsequential Sandinistas in
perspective, will George Bush Junior reduce Saddam
Hussein to his proper size?
U.S. policy with Iraq is in a cul de sac. Every three
days on average, U.S. and British aircraft take off to
bomb Iraq. The Pentagon says more than 280,000 sorties
have been flown in the near decade since no-flight zones
were imposed on Saddam in the north and south of the
country. The targets are mainly military but, inevitably,
given the policy of flying higher than 6,000 feet there
are regular reports of civilian casualties. Amnesty
International will soon be issuing a report critical of
the U.S. and Britain for not obeying the Geneva
Conventions on the rules of war.
Sanctions first imposed by Security Council decree in
April 1991 remain fully in place. Britain and the U.S.
resist any attempt to dilute them. The people of Iraq
once reasonable prosperous have been reduced to penury .
Well over half a million Iraqi children have died as a
result, say UNICEF. A former U.S. Secretary of Defense,
Robert McNamara, is reported to have called these
sanctions " a weapon of mass destruction".
Where does such a policy lead? The Republican
hard-liners seem only to be thrashing around in their
attempts to toughen it to the point where it might
provide the coup de grace. One line is to beef up the
Iraqi opposition with arms and training, although its
past record of achievement has been unremarkable. Another
as Robert Zoellick, a Bush advisor, has argued, is to
"slowly take away pieces of his territory..... As the
allies successfully did in the north with the Kurdish
enclave so they should use their air power to carve out
an autonomous entity for the Shiites in the south."
This begs the question: if ten years of continuous
warfare has not toppled Saddam why should such relatively
marginal increments to policy deliver his head on a
plate? Why, anyway, does the U.S. want Saddam's total
capitulation? Because, it is argued, they fear Iraq's
development of weapons of mass destruction.
This is thinking that can't see wood for trees. When
the UN inspection system was working it had a remarkable
record of disarming Iraq. As President Bill Clinton has
conceded, the UN arms inspectors found and destroyed more
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than were destroyed
during all the days of intensive bombardment during the
days of the Gulf War . To the outside world's surprise
the inspectors discovered that Iraq was on the threshold
of building a nuclear weapon. Later defections by high
ranking Iraqi officials have also revealed the advanced
state of Iraq's biological weapons programm.
Inspections may have been suspended but the relentless
pressure of sanctions continue. As long as they remain in
place Saddam cannot buy the where-with-all to re-start
his nuclear and biological weapons programms. (He may be
able to make small quantities of biological weapons with
materials he has at hand, but he has a limited ability to
make them useable and deliverable. ).
Moreover, his military machine has never recovered
from the damage brought about by the allied onslaught of
ten years ago. Iraq has no significant airforce or navy.
His army's tank and armoured car ranks are decimated and
what remains is antiquated. He probably has no working
rockets and, even if he has, their range is derisory.
America and Britain have a problem. Perhaps it is they
don't know when they've won. They've confused getting rid
of Saddam, a nice option if you can easily do it, with
the central must issue of containing Iraq's aggressive
military prowess. On the latter there can be little
debate that they have Saddam pretty well cornered.
Which brings us back to the long-suffering innocents
of Iraq. Do they have to be bottled up too? It cannot be
beyond the wit of the Security Council to devise a
sanctions regime that allows civilian reconstruction
without re-building the military might of Iraq. The
argument over so-called "dual use" items, for example
chlorine that can be used either for the water supply or
for building chemical weapons, is taken too far. Of
course, chlorine, computors, machine tools and even
bedsteads can have military uses. But as long as Iraq is
not supplied with the kind of state-of-the-art fighting
equipment that Reagan, Thatcher and Mitterand happily
sold him large quantities of before the Gulf War, there
are enormous limits on what he can do. He will certainly
not have the power to do what he did to Iran, much less
than to the allied coalition in the Gulf War. To win a
war with America, or even hurt it badly, a country needs
more than the odd home made weapon of mass
destruction..
Whoever wins the U.S. election should do a
"Nicaragua": open the windows, clear the air. Ten years
on it's time for a major change of tactics. Victors
should not keep grinding away. The new American president
should stand up and announce: "we won the war, we
discovered and dismantled most of the weapons, now we
want to help re-build Iraq and give its children a
positive future. There is only one thing we will not do
this time round: sell it the guns to start another war".
A policy such as this would, I suspect, have no trouble
winning the votes of all the members of the Security
Council, and being universally enforced, as well as
admired.
I can be reached by e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By JONATHAN POWER
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