Clinton ‘Legacy’ Watch #3: Saddam Lives to Fight Another Day

(Washington, D.C.): Like
prestidigitators bent on distracting
observers from the locus of the real
action, the Clinton Administration would
have the American people concentrate on
its myriad, ephemeral foreign
policy-related signing ceremonies and
photo opportunities. In this manner, it
encourages the delusion that Mr.
Clinton’s “legacy” will be one
of lasting accomplishment.

In fact, the Administration’s record
has been an almost unbroken one of
short-sighted and self-serving reactivity
— adopting ill-considered and ad hoc
responses to emerging crises. The
operative consideration appears to be the
readiness with which such responses can
be translated into favorable press or
other forms of political capital, not
their consistency with the Nation’s
long-term interests. In the absence of a
strategy for defining, protecting and
promoting enduring U.S. interests, the
Clinton team is creating a legacy of
policies that seriously disserve those
interests. A case in point is the Clinton
Administration’s handling of Iraq.

Over the past four-and-a-half years,
the Clinton Administration has pursued
policies towards Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
that have alternated between more-or-less
benign neglect (i.e.,
“containment”) and poorly
executed efforts at removing the despot
from power. Today, six-plus years after
the end of Operation Desert Storm, Saddam
Hussein is getting more formidable every
day — something that cannot be said of
either element of Mr. Clinton’s approach
to Iraq.

The Unraveling Sanctions

The unworkability of an American
policy toward Iraq that relies on the
indefinite maintenance of international
sanctions is evident in the eroding
support such sanctions enjoy in the
region and in the UN Security Council.
Russia, China, France, Egypt and Jordan
are among the nations that have been
working to normalize relations with Iraq
and championing its cause with respect to
the elimination of the sanctions regime.
They have already succeeded in brokering
the partial lifting of that regime,
permitting Iraq to resume oil sales to
purchase food and medicine.

No less troubling is Saddam’s success
in defying the UN Special Commission
(UNSCOM) charged with overseeing and
enforcing the elimination of Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction and ballistic
missile programs. Iraq has not only
failed fully to declare its stocks of
such weapons — let alone destroy
them — it has also become increasingly
brazen in its interference with the
UNSCOM inspection missions aimed at
confirming Iraqi compliance. Such
interference has included shredding
documents, barring inspectors from sites,
physically impeding inspectors within the
sites and blatantly lying to UN
inspectors.
Even so, on 25 June, UNSCOM’s outgoing
chairman, Rolf Ekeus, declared that
“We have documentary evidence about
orders from the leadership to preserve a
strategic [chemical weapons] capability.
That means to keep the production
equipment ready to produce at any given
moment.”

Worse yet, Saddam is clearly working
to expand his weapons of mass
destruction capabilities. For example, on
21 July, a U.S. Customs sting operation
intercepted an illegal shipment of 34
military helicopters to Iraq.
While these helicopters were equipped
with gun mounts and missile-firing
mechanisms, one other modification was of
particular interest: They had
been armed with devices for dispersing chemical
agents — agents Iraq
claims it no longer possesses!

Then on 23 July, United Press
International revealed that Iraq has
developed an unmanned drone out
of a Polish-made aircraft and modified it
for “spraying chemical weapons and
biological agents,
reconnaissance, artillery spotting,
dropping leaflets and broadcasting
propaganda.”

Unfortunately, Iraq
is also managing to upgrade other
elements of his armed forces. The
Associated Press reported on 26 June that
the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Central
Command, General Binford Peay, had
revealed that Saddam’s elite Republican
Guard has been “gradually
improving” and “has managed to
rebuild despite the sanctions.”
Among other things, the Republican Guard
has successfully purchased and taken
delivery of equipment and spare parts for
Russian-made tanks and armored vehicles.

It is extremely worrisome that, at the
very moment that, on the one hand,
Saddam’s campaign for further relaxation
of the sanctions regime is entering high
gear and, on the other, his flouting of
the regime is paying strategically
troublesome dividends, Amb. Ekeus has
been replaced by an ambitious Australian
diplomat well known for his willingness
to subordinate principle and security to
the art of the deal. Characteristically,
the new UNSCOM chairman Amb.
Richard Butler announced on 25
July as he concluded his first mission to
Iraq that Saddam’s regime and the UN have
found “a new sense of
cooperation.”

The replacement of Rolf Ekeus’
scrupulously honest assessments of Iraqi
non-compliance with Richard Butler’s at
best self-deluding testimonials to Saddam
Hussein’s “cooperation” sets
the stage for further erosion in the UN
sanctions regime and the U.S. policy of
containment upon which it critically
relies. And the Iraqi dictator is fully
prepared to play his part on that stage.
For instance, in the course of a
two-and-a-half hour-long harangue on 17
July marking Iraq’s National Day, Saddam
telegraphed Iraq’s new strategy for
securing relief from the remaining
international sanctions. He said, in
part:

“We do not want relations
between Iraq and the Security
Council, or between the Iraqi
representatives and the Special
Commission, to be pushed toward
an impasse. Therefore, we hope
that the Security Council will
take measures to convince us that
it has indeed started to
implement its commitments, even
if this leads to the U.S. using
the right of veto.”

Saddam understands that — despite
President Clinton’s 10 July 1997
assurance to the Congress that he remains
“determined to see Iraq comply fully
with all of its obligations” — the
United States is anxious not to be
isolated with respect to Iraq. In
particular, Washington wishes to avoid
being portrayed as the sole impediment to
Iraq’s rehabilitation in the
international community. By encouraging
its friends to force the United States
into precisely that position, the Iraqi
dictator calculates correctly that the
Clinton team will be compelled to agree
to further liberalization, if not the de
facto termination of UN-mandated
sanctions.

The Failed
Effort to Topple Saddam

The ignominiousness — and ominous
strategic implications — of such a
retreat would only be rivaled by the
debacle arising from the Clinton
Administration’s failure with respect to
the other aspect of its Iraq
policy: its half-hearted, disjointed and
ultimately abortive follow-on to the Bush
Administration’s effort to remove Saddam
Hussein from power. As Warren Marik, a
retired CIA case officer with 25 years
experience and member of the Center for
Security Policy’s Board of Advisors has
documented, the Clinton team thwarted,
undermined and then betrayed the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), an organization
that sought to build a broad and cohesive
anti-Saddam coalition in Northern Iraq.
The INC’s strategy was, of necessity, a
longer-term one, designed to demonstrate
organized resistance in Iraq and to erode
Saddam’s military power base.

By March 1995, the INC was ready to
launch a limited offensive against Saddam
Hussein’s forces, provided the U.S.
delivered on its promise to supply air
cover. According to Ahmed Chalabi, a key
figure in the coalition, it was designed
to force “Saddam to go on full
alert, to try to fight back, and see that
his units would not fight for him.”
Such a demonstration would, it was
believed, lead to military defections,
adding to the opposition’s forces even as
it sapped Saddam’s offensive
capabilities.

The Clinton Administration was
persuaded, however, that a nearer-term
option might be available if it backed a
group of exiled Iraqi military officers,
known as the Iraqi National Accord (INA)
and led by General Adnan Nuri. The INA
held out the promise of a sudden military
coup that would quickly remove Saddam
from power.

Just 48 hours before the attack,
General Nuri — who is strongly suspected
of being a double agent for Saddam —
held an emergency meeting with
representatives of the Central
Intelligence Agency and alleged that the
INC was trying to draw the U.S. into
another war with Iraq. The Clinton White
House panicked; on the morning of the
offensive, a note was delivered to the
INC leaders telling them, according to
press reports, that, “If you go
ahead, it will be without U.S.
involvement or support. It is your
decision.”

When U.S. military support was
withdrawn, the INC coalition fractured
with one group withdrawing and one group
deciding to press ahead with its attack.
Nabeel Musawi, who participated in the
operation, told ABC News: “We
discovered the Iraqi Army to be …much
worse than we imagined it to be. These
guys were just waiting for a bullet to be
fired in the air — not at them
— to surrender.”
Without U.S. air cover, the offensive
collapsed within a month. According to
Musawi, “Shortly thereafter, the
Kurdish factions … went back to
fighting each other.”

In one of several scathing assessments
of the Clinton Administration’s
mismanagement of the CIA’s covert
operations against Saddam Hussein, the Washington
Post‘s James Hoagland reported that
a CIA source told him that in retrospect,
the nature of the INC effort changed when
Clinton took office. It went from
“How much do you need?” under
President George Bush to, “How much
can you get along on?” under Clinton
and National Security Adviser Anthony
Lake. The CIA source concludes that
“the Clinton White House refusal to
come up with a few million dollars
jeopardized or stymied the whole
operation.”

Starting in the Spring of 1995, the
Clinton team began underwriting the Iraqi
National Accord’s promised coup to the
tune of $6 million. According to
Hoagland, “Two CIA sources noted
that the pressure within the Clinton
Administration to get on with
overthrowing Saddam accelerated when
[John Deutch became CIA director], and
intensified more as the 1996 presidential
election campaign moved nearer.”

Unfortunately, as Chalabi, Marik and
others in the Agency had warned, the
INA had been “deeply
penetrated” by Saddam’s operatives.
The coup attempt failed in late June 1996
when Saddam Hussein arrested hundreds of
the INA’s military contacts and executed
thirty Iraqi military officials assumed
to be associated with the INA.
Subsequently, Saddam moved to reestablish
control of much of Northern Iraq,
dividing and conquering the Kurds and
others opposed to his rule. In the
process, many involved in the INC’s
operations were murdered; many others
were forced to flee, rolling up what
remained of the CIA’s network in the
North.

In the words of Warren Marik:

“We got too impatient with a
genuine effort to install
democracy and turned instead to
fighting Saddam with incompetent
Saddams, who are headed for the
dust heap of history….In
northern Iraq we ran a political
program that was to eventually
reduce Saddam’s control over Iraq
and make him nothing more than
the mayor of Baghdad. That kind
of slow, salami-slicing operation
worked in Afghanistan, and
against the Soviet Union in the
Cold War… but we tied ourselves
in knots [in Iraq].”

For his efforts to try to stimulate and
inform a debate about U.S. policy toward
Iraq, Mr. Marik has been subjected to
harassment via federal inquiry by the
Clinton Administration. (See href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_106at”>the attached
article by Jim Hoagland in the 24
July Washington Post for more on
George Tenet’s investigation of Warren
Marik.) He, Jim Hoagland and
others, notably Laurie Mylroie (another
distinguished member of the Center’s
Board of Advisors), who have repeatedly
warned about the dangers posed by Saddam
Hussein and demanded that those who have
contributed to his continued hold on
power be held accountable should be
commended and encouraged, not assailed
and suppressed.

The Bottom Line

Ahmed Chalabi, a leader of the INC,
has observed: “We have learned the
hard way that covert action that is not
part of a large strategic political
program is of no value.” Unless
prompt corrective action is taken —
involving a renewed and concerted effort
to bring down Saddam and, in the
meantime, to deter further erosion in the
sanctions regime — this debacle may
prove a fitting epitaph for President
Clinton’s Iraq policy. If so, the
repercussions of this abysmal aspect of
the Clinton “legacy” will
trouble U.S. security and interests for
many years to come.