Overdue, Underdone: What the Coalition Air Strikes on Iraq Should Have Been About, But Weren’t

(Washington, D.C.): For the second time in as many years, U.S. and coalition forces in the Persian Gulf have been obliged to respond to Saddam Hussein’s aggressive misdeeds. Such counter-strikes are the entirely predictable consequence of previous failed Bush Administration policies — in the first instance, those that helped arm, finance and embolden the Iraqi despot and, secondarily, those that allowed him to survive Operation Desert Storm.

The Center for Security Policy welcomes today’s air strikes against Iraq — a military response that was more than justified by Saddam’s continued flouting of the will of the international community. It regrets, however, that the magnitude and the object of the U.S.-led strike was other than what is clearly required: A substantial and systematic effort to bring down Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime.

The Center deplores Marlin Fitzwater’s explanation in a White House press conference this afternoon to the effect that the United States would continue to refrain from undertaking an attack against Saddam on the grounds that such attacks have not been authorized by the United Nations. After all, at the time it approved military action against Iraq in December 1990, the U.N. explicitly sanctioned steps necessary to "establish peace and security" in the region. Under present circumstances, it is the height of folly to interpret such authority as precluding — in the words of a distinguished member of the Center’s Board of Advisors, former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr. — the "violent removal of Saddam Hussein from power."

Second, it is exceedingly difficult to attach much importance to the presence or absence of U.N. authorization in the face of that organization’s dismal standing as a result of a mounting number of botched jobs around the world. The feckless conduct of the United Nations in Bosnia, Angola, Cambodia, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq itself should clearly not set the standard for American behavior.

In any event — whether "authorized by the U.N." or not — there can no longer be any doubt that nothing less than Saddam’s removal from power will appreciably diminish the malevolence the West and its allies will confront from Iraq. Indeed, in the aftermath of today’s allied minimalist riposte, it is likely that Baghdad will be tempted to engage in further, ever more aggressive behavior, both to test the incoming President of the United States and to mock the outgoing one.

The United States can simply no longer afford to be preoccupied with the symptoms of the problem rather than its root cause: Saddam Hussein, his megalomania and the absolute, despotic control exercised by him and his ruling clique through an as-yet intact police state apparatus. This systemic problem, rather than Saddam’s so-called "cheat and retreat" — or, more accurately, "strain and gain" — tactics must be the object of urgent American military therapies.