Getting Saddam Fear not confrontation, : then liberation - the United States, in its war on terrorism, must make a decision about Iraq

National Review, Dec 17, 2001 by David Pryce-Jones

The war against terror is swinging round the points of the compass. The needle shows Yemen, apparently, Somalia (again), and Sudan. This is reminiscent of earlier international wars waged against slavery and piracy, when the British navy took the lead bombarding harbors and attacking ships in various waters, off black Africa, and the Barbary Coast and the Pirate Coast, otherwise known as Algeria and the Gulf. Nation- building was not in the order of the day. How the various African and Arab potentates organized their affairs was up to them, so long as they accepted what were already becoming international codes of decent conduct. Some still did not fall into line until the redcoats marched up to their citadels. Had rulers on all continents synchronized efforts to eradicate barbarism, there would have been no colonialism.

Which brings us straight to the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen are all very well, but along with Afghanistan they are customary tribal societies without effective centralized government, and states in name alone. Iraq is another proposition. It is a highly centralized police state under a dictator who is a danger to himself, to his people, and to everyone within his steadily lengthening reach. The outcome of the war on terror as a whole, and the future of the Middle East, depend on the decision about Saddam that President Bush and his administration must soon make.

The case against Saddam needs no arguing. His terrorist crimes have disgraced the twenty-three years in which he has been in power. Erecting a monument to his own brutal ego, he has beggared and bludgeoned his unfortunate country. Sunni Muslims constitute about a quarter of the population. Himself a Sunni, Saddam rules through fellow Sunnis, politicized as the Ba'ath party and militarized as the Republican Guard. Known to have acquired weapons of mass destruction, he has invaded neighboring Iran and Kuwait; he has gassed Iranian soldiers and Kurds; he has fired Scud missiles at Israel (and now helps to finance the Palestinian intifada). At the conclusion of the Gulf War ten years ago, former president Bush and his allies had the chance to overthrow Saddam. The Revolutionary Guards were routed, and Baghdad lay open. On the grounds that there was no United Nations mandate for it, the decision was made against invasion and the closure of Saddam's regime. So the victory of Operation Desert Storm dwindled into a rancorous stalemate.

Iraqis, Washington argued at the time, had to take their fate into their own hands. Accordingly, Iraqi Shia Muslims and Kurds-the remaining three- quarters of the population-rose in a rebellion that they did not have the means to win. Saddam dealt ruthlessly with them, shelling Shia shrines and killing yet more of his citizens in their thousands. For a time, an opposition survived with American support in a safe haven in the Kurd- populated north. That support counted for nothing when Saddam moved to eliminate the safe haven. Allowing this to happen unimpeded, the United States heedlessly inflicted another injury on itself and its friends. An opposition in exile, the Iraqi National Congress, has some influence in Washington, and access to funds voted by Congress, but its members are generals without armies, cut off from the Iraqi population.

The United Nations has spent the years of these blunders devising diplomatic and legalistic measures to contain Saddam, freezing funds and applying sanctions and trying to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction. A team of U.N. inspectors led by the Australian Richard Butler did succeed in dismantling some undetermined proportion of the Iraqi biological and chemical arsenal. In tireless pursuit of revenge, Saddam has fought back with cunning and terror. He sent a hit squad to assassinate former president Bush in the course of the latter's visit to Kuwait to commemorate the Gulf War. An Iraqi presumed to be a Saddam agent was involved in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The Clinton administration swung incoherently between hand-wringing and the limited and somewhat arbitrary firing of cruise missiles. With their eyes on future profitable contracts, Russia and France as members of the U.N. Security Council came to the rescue of Saddam. The policy of containment collapsed in 1998 and a jubilant Saddam maneuvered the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq. Since then he has enjoyed an essentially free hand.

What with sanction-busting and smuggling, Iraq receives a petro-dollar income as high as it was before the Gulf War and sanctions, and it spends the money on armaments. In 1987, Dr. Khidhir Hamza became director general of Saddam's program to build nuclear weapons. The prospect of nuclear weapons in Saddam's hands soon appalled this scientist, and he defected in 1994. This spring he said in a public forum that Saddam is "undoubtedly on the precipice of nuclear power." This would transform the world, and Hamza advised that "the best option available is deposing Saddam Hussein." From the sidelines, Richard Butler continues to sound the alarm about Saddam's capacities and intentions.