Desperately Seeking Saddam

Strategic Insights, Volume II, Issue 2 (February 2003)

by Daniel Moran

America's attitude toward Iraq has long been colored by a distinctly personal hostility toward that country's president, Saddam Hussein. Until recently, this animus has made no practical difference for American policy. During the run-up to Desert Storm the first President Bush sought to galvanize domestic and international opinion by comparing Saddam to Adolph Hitler, a comparison that is remembered because of its extravagance, and because it proved such a poor guide to United States actions at the time. Gulf War I was fought for the sole purpose of expelling Iraqi armed forces from Kuwait. American political and military leaders resisted calls to carry the war deep into Iraq, with a view to overthrowing the government in Baghdad. To have done so, it was held, would have been to defy the most obvious lesson of the Vietnam War, which was purported to be that strategic excellence is best achieved by marrying overwhelming force to "clear and distinct objectives" and a "clear exit strategy." The contrast between America's hyperbolic rhetoric and its prudential conduct caught Iraqi opposition groups by surprise. Some of these had come out of hiding in the expectation of American support, and suffered badly when that support did not materialize. Yet on the whole the wisdom of having resisted the siren song of mission creep was not questioned by early students of the war. Saddam's survival at the head of a much diminished and isolated Iraq seemed a small price to pay for having avoided the perils of quagmire.

Those perils have been put in the shade by the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. In their wake, talk of clear objectives and exit strategies has been supplanted by a determination to anticipate and confront danger, to strike adversaries before they can strike us. The exit strategy of the United States in Afghanistan was (and is) basically "we'll leave when we're done," and it seems safe to say this will be the norm for some time to come. A similar can-do, take-the-bull-by-the-horns spirit is evident in America's new attitude toward Iraq, where the United States has abandoned its strategy of containment in favor of seeking "regime change" there. Exactly what regime change entails is uncertain. There are days on which nothing short of comprehensive democratization will do. In an odd inversion of the "domino theory" of the 1960s, this goal is sometimes represented as extending beyond Iraq itself, and encompassing regional reform. On other days, it appears as if the administration will settle for the establishment of a moderately more compliant government in Baghdad, willing to come clean on the WMD question. In all circumstances, however, the one thing that is clear and distinct is that Saddam Hussein must go. How and where have accordingly become matters of discussion.

Several alternatives suggest themselves. One, which would accomplish at least the appearance of regime change while obviating the immediate need for war, would be for Saddam to be overthrown domestically. The United States has quietly but ineffectually longed for a coup d'état in Iraq since the day Gulf War I ended. One of the unspoken goals of the sanctions regime and "no-fly zones" under which Iraq has labored since 1991 has always been to make life there so miserable as to inspire Saddam's henchmen to do what needs to be done. By way of amplifying the point, Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleisher proposed back in October that "one bullet" would suffice to establish U.S.-Iraqi relations on a new basis. Alternatively, Saddam may simply perish in the rubble of his bunker, another anonymous casualty of war. Such a result has the merit of simplicity, and was very much the preferred outcome for allied planners contemplating the question of what to do about Hitler in 1945. But, of course, unlike Hitler, Saddam may survive whatever measures are required to topple his regime. Indeed, this now appears to be something the United States is willing to arrange.

The prospect that Saddam's tenure as president of Iraq may end in something other than a funeral raises a host of possibilities, in which the goals of American policy become entangled in the logic and processes of international law. This is a characteristic feature of the contemporary security environment, and one that has already caused its share of headaches for American policy-makers. The chief obstacles to action against Iraq, after all, arise from what are essentially legal facts: that the United Nations has not expressly authorized the use of force to compel compliance with its earlier resolutions; that states of modest military capability, like France and Russia, possess disproportionate strategic influence by virtue of their presence on the Security Council; and so on. The United States, for its part, clearly regards war against Iraq as an exercise in law enforcement, in which Saddam and his retinue are the criminals, while the people of Iraq are numbered among their victims. Hence the now routine characterization of the impending conflict as a war to "liberate" Iraq, a rhetorical construction reminiscent of the Second World War on the one hand, and of humanitarian intervention on the other. In the eyes of most of the rest of the world, however, American conduct exemplifies straight-forward Realpolitik, in which considerations of legality are entirely eclipsed by calculations of power and expediency. Among the many concerns raised by the prospect of unilateral American action against Iraq, one of the most searching and least easily dismissed is the fear that, win or lose, the result will diminish and subvert the rule of law in international affairs.

The Exile

The United States nevertheless wishes to employ international law as a source of strategic leverage, as is evident in the recent announcement that the administration would look kindly upon a solution in which Saddam and his entourage are afforded what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls a "haven" outside Iraq; the understanding being that, if such an exile were arranged, war would be averted, and Saddam would be spared criminal prosecution. This declaration was closely followed by another, to the effect that Iraqi military personnel who employ chemical or other weapons of mass destruction against American forces or Iraqi civilians can expect to be treated as war criminals—a threat that was also made in connection with United States operations in Afghanistan. Both statements reflect America's perennial affection for international tribunals, which it regards as a deterrent to misconduct under color of state authority. It was for this reason, among others, that the United States argued, at the end of World War II, that the surviving senior military and political leadership of Germany and Japan be tried and judged according to law (albeit law that did not yet exist), rather than simply taken out and shot, as was the preference of our British and Soviet allies. America has played a leading role in the creation of every such tribunal that has ever existed, including the newly established International Criminal Court, from which the United States subsequently withdrew its signature, for fear that the court's powers might be employed illegitimately to harass members of the American armed forces. Secretary Rumsfeld's offer of what amounts to a plea bargain thus rests upon a credible historical record: given a sufficiently decisive military result, American wars end not simply in surrenders, but in trials. In any case, the least that can be said for the Rumsfeld plan is that, from Saddam's perspective, it is an improvement on the "one bullet" option of a few months back.

This is not the first time Saddam has been offered a secure retirement in lieu of war. He rejected a similar proposal from Egypt in 1991, and it would be idle to speculate on whether anything has happened recently to change his mind. A more worthy question is whether it is genuinely in America's interest for Saddam to accept voluntary exile. Secretary Rumsfeld's comments, which have been echoed by others in the administration, including the president himself, may have been addressed less to Saddam than to world opinion, as a demonstration of America's willingness to consider every conceivable option before resorting to war; in which case the United States may be in the awkward position of being unable to take "Yes" for an answer. The same issue will arise should Saddam be killed or deposed early in the course of war expressly aimed at his overthrow. With Saddam out of the way, the political and moral basis for such a conflict would have to be reconstructed from scratch, both internationally and domestically, a discouraging prospect to say the least.

Alive and free, Saddam would remain a focus of Baathist resistance within Iraq, and a destabilizing influence on whatever regime succeeded him. Since that regime would be established by negotiation rather than war, its character and conduct would also be less easily influenced by outsiders. To this extent, the personalization of America's conflict with Iraq does now entail strategic risk, specifically that, by focusing so heavily on the fate of one man and his immediate circle, the administration may end up settling for relatively superficial changes in Iraqi political culture, so that an ultimate reckoning is merely postponed.

It is easy to underestimate how deeply the plough must pierce in order to transplant liberalism and democracy where it has not previously existed. At the end of the First World War the German Empire was overthrown from within and replaced by a parliamentary republic because the United States demanded it as a precondition for an armistice. The top of the Empire's political and military establishment was cast aside, and the country disarmed. The Emperor himself became an exile in neutral Holland in order to avoid being put on trial for war crimes. Beneath the surface of Weimar democracy, however, the deep structures of Wilhelmine illiberalism survived, in the officer corps, the judiciary, the business elite, and so on. These groups were not fascist on the whole, but traditional authoritarians who had brought ruin to Germany, yet had been spared the need to face up to and pay for their failure, because the war had ended with Germany unoccupied and unbowed. It was they who gave Hitler his chance, because they believed that, however suspect his ideas on the margins, he and his followers were nevertheless a means of throwing off foreign influence, regaining social control, and reasserting Germany's national greatness. One thus arrives at a somewhat unexpected scenario, in which radical Islamism stands in for the Nazis, and Saddam appears in the role, not of Hitler, but of William II—a dangerous but strangely antique figure, whose merely personal ouster prepared the way for a far graver crisis to come.