Clinton and Saddam: The problems with bluffs

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): U.S. President Bill Clinton claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has enough chemical and biological weapons to wipe out the world twice over. Various critics reply that every garden center contains enough lethal chemicals to wipe out a large city -- if you could get everybody to take exactly one spoonful. The problem is distribution, and Saddam can't distribute.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Clinton's loyal sidekick, helpfully warns a joint press conference that Saddam is "an evil dictator", and reporters respond by asking where Clinton has been putting his member recently. They all realize that Saddam is an evil dictator -- he was already one when he was a U.S. ally against Iran -- but they know of no clause in the American constitution that mandates U.S. presidents to rid the world of evil dictators.

The U.S. government puts out reassuring statements about how precision bombing can get Saddam's 'weapons of mass destruction' without harming a hair on the head of a single civilian Iraqi.

Whereupon General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of 'Desert Storm' in 1991, goes on NBC television and says that "we run the risk of doing the same thing we did to North Vietnam", where bombing was escalated endlessly without achieving either military or political goals. (And the North Vietnamese won, in the end).

How Clinton must long for the 19th century, when British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston would send a gunboat to chastise some wayward oriental potentate, and the whole British press would rally loyally around. Nobody would inquire if he had an 'exit strategy'. (He usually didn't, and it often ended up being a horrible mess, but at least it was fun in the early stages).

One feels a certain sympathy for U.S. planners, because the impertinent mass media of the late 20th century have made the fine old diplomatic tool of bluff almost unusable. If a government has no viable strategy for victory and is hoping to win by mere bluster, various 'experts' will soon be making that fact plain to the whole world.

So why are we on the brink of a very large aerial bombing campaign against Iraq? Because people running big, powerful countries like the United States simply cannot believe that their military power does not always enable them to coerce weaker opponents, and because it is human nature to bluff.

Unfortunately, media questioning of unsound strategies is often countered by escalating government rhetoric about the scale of the threat and the need for a massive response. (Russian President Boris Yeltsin's recent remark that "Clinton is behaving too loudly" was right on the mark).

In the end, the bluffers end up painting themselves into a corner with their tongues. That is where the U.S. government is now, and in order to save face it probably will start bombing Iraq.

This is stupid, and nobody understands that more clearly than the man who represents the biggest Iraqi opposition group: Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, president of the Iraqi National Congress.

"Everyone says Saddam is boxed in," said Chalabi last week, "but it is the Americans and British who are boxed in by their refusal to support the idea of political change in Iraq. The consequences of that are disastrous. People should read Clausewitz: "War is policy by other means." But what is the policy here?

What indeed? Simply bombing Iraq, without committing ground forces, offers little chance of getting the chemical and biological weapons Saddam may have hidden away, and no chance of overthrowing the dictator himself. Yet Washington has sworn not to use ground troops, and denied itself the goal of seeking Saddam's overthrow.

All the United States wants (so it says) is that Saddam let the arms inspectors of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) go anywhere in Iraq in order to track down and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. But if it won't invade, and it won't try to overthrow him, where's the pressure on him to comply?

"Military action alone will not remove Saddam," observed Ahmed Chalabi. "It will not remove the weapons of mass destruction. It will give (Saddam) the excuse to throw out UNSCOM. And thousands of Iraqis will die. Saddam will make sure they will, so he can get sympathy."

The basic problem now is the same as in 1991. The U.S. State Department no longer treats Saddam as a de facto ally (as it did during the war caused by his invasion of Iran in the 80s), but it still wants a strong and united Iraq as a bulwark against 'revolutionary' Iran. Given the diverse ethnic and religious make-up of Iraq, Washington believes that Iraq's unity can only be preserved by a Sunni Arab dictator with military backing.

The United States would prefer an Iraqi military dictator who was less gruesomely cruel than Saddam, and less apt to invade his neighbors -- but if it can't be sure of replacing Saddam with another man just like him, only nicer, then it will stick with the devil it knows. Since Saddam knows all this too, it was foolish to try to bluff him, and now the price must be paid.

What would be the minimum price of a large-scale aerial campaign against Iraq? Saddam would be strengthened, the United Nations would be sidelined and humiliated, Arab regimes friendly to the U.S. would be seriously weakened, and Washington would end up with egg on its face. And, of course, a certain number of innocent Iraqis (as many as Saddam can manage) would be killed.

The maximum prices could include: rejection of the SALT 2 treaty (which seeks to control much more serious weapons of mass destruction) by a Russian parliament fed up with U.S. high- handedness; a protracted 'North Vietnam'-style U.S. air war against Iraq; the definitive end of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; and chemical or biological missiles on Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

And they know all that before they start.