Prepare Now for the Iraqi Endgame

(Washington, D.C.): Recent developments in Iraq demand fresh attention from American
policy-makers: Unless action is urgently taken, the United States may find itself confronting a
number of
ominous prospects: the sanctions regime unraveling; Saddam Hussein still in power and
stronger
than at any time since the end of Operation Desert Storm; and with U.S. allies in the region
distancing themselves from Washington and seeking to cut the best deals they can with the
resurgent Butcher of Baghdad.

‘Handwriting on the Wall’

As Dr. Laurie Mylroie, editor of the valuable e-mail newsletter Iraq News and
longtime member
of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors, has noted in her publication of today’s
date:

“Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement yesterday lauding the
diplomat-supervised palace inspections and calling for accelerated action toward
lifting sanctions. As Tass reported, ‘It is necessary to step up efforts toward complete
fulfilment of the mandate of the United Nations Special Commission [UNSCOM], and
enhance the effectiveness and transparency of its work, taking into account the priority
importance that the lifting of sanctions has for Iraq. There exist now good conditions
for speedily sorting out whatever questions the commission still has and for closing all
disarmament files, which will make it possible to discuss the lifting of the oil embargo
strictly in accordance with the Security Council’s decisions.’

“On 28 March, Egypt’s newspaper of record, Al Ahram, asserted, ‘It has
become
necessary for the United Nations to start seriously working to lift the unfair and
unjust blockade imposed on Iraq and its people because the reasons for imposing
it disappeared once the Gulf War ended and Kuwait was liberated.'”

These comments, whether issued by or simply reflecting the views of their respective
governments, are hardly surprising given the statements being made by UN personnel including
UNSCOM’s Chairman, Ambassador Richard Butler. As the Center noted in its 1 April 1998
Decision Brief entitled Endgame for
UNSCOM?, Butler asserted that Iraq’s cooperation with
UNSCOM’s inspections of the Iraqi presidential sites engenders “the appropriate environment for
the conduct and conclusion of the disarmament tasks.”⁽¹⁾

The truth is, as could have been — and was — predicted, href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾ the Faustian deal negotiated with
Saddam by UN Secretary General Koffi Anan created an irresistible momentum toward the
effective end of the Iraqi inspections and sanctions regimes. It may not happen this month or even
next but, as Dr. Mylroie has put it, “the handwriting is on the wall.” It is now just a
matter of
time and how unsatisfactory are the circumstances under which Saddam clambers out of
the “box” in which the Bush and Clinton Administrations have tried unsuccessfully to keep
him in since 1991.

Time to Empower an Effective Iraqi Opposition

Another member of the Center’s Board of Advisors, Douglas J. Feith — a
former Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense and Middle East expert on the National Security Council during
the Reagan Administration — recently laid out a game-plan for U.S. policy in light of this state of
affairs. In the 20 March edition of the Jerusalem Post, Mr. Feith urged that the
United States be
prepared to implement a strategy that would protect U.S. and regional interests, whether Saddam
once again breaks his promises and/or the sanctions-and-inspections regime comes undone:

“A sensible aim [of such a strategy] would be to maximize chances that
Saddam
Hussein’s regime can be undermined and replaced by a popular opposition
movement….The key to such a strategy is building on the existing no-fly zones. U.S.
military power could support a declaration that those zones in the north and south of
Iraq must also become ‘no-drive zones’ for the Iraqi military. The goal would be to
protect these limited areas as a base for Iraqi opposition forces….

“An Iraqi opposition movement – comprising Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds and
Christians – now functions under the umbrella of an organization called the
Iraqi National Congress, which espouses democratic and pro-Western
principles. Were the US to recognize the INC as the provisional government of
Iraq, it could release to it portions of the $800 million in Iraqi government assets
that have been frozen in the US since Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. This could
help the INC establish its authority in the exclusion areas and fund opposition
military forces.

“In protecting the exclusion areas, the US could put into the opposition’s hands
virtually all the approximately three million barrels of oil that Iraq could produce
daily. One of Saddam’s principal vulnerabilities is the concentration of
Iraq’s oil in the mainly Kurdish north and mainly Shi’ite south, both regions
in which large-scale anti-Saddam uprisings occurred immediately after the 1991
Gulf War. The opportunity still exists to exploit the powerful anti-Saddam
resentments that fester there.

“The US should urge the UN to lift sanctions from any area of Iraq under
the opposition’s control. This would tell the Arab world and others that
America aims not to punish innocents in Iraq, but to relieve Iraqis of penalties
they suffer as a result of Saddam’s rule. The opposition would gain financial and
political strength from oil sale revenues. And, if Iraq’s oil were controlled by the
opposition, Russia and France would have less incentive to back Saddam against
the US and more to cultivate ties with his opposition.

“The US could bolster that opposition and encourage defections by working to
have Saddam and his top officials indicted as war criminals and challenging
the current regime’s right to represent Iraq at the UN. America’s purpose would
be to communicate impressively that Iraq’s future is not with Saddam, but the
democratic opposition. To that end, the US should also make the small but
valuable investment needed to establish a Radio Free Iraq.

“The Iraqi military is in general ill-paid, ill-equipped, and maltreated. Even the
Republican Guard units, which enjoy the greatest privileges, have evinced signs of
discontent with their wicked, overreaching dictator. It is by no means certain that
the various elements of Iraq’s army would fight well, or, in some cases, at all if
the U.S. showed determination to delegitimate Saddam and to create exclusion
areas to be placed under Iraqi opposition control, defended with U.S.-supplied
anti-tank weapons, and protected by the U.S. Air Force and, only if necessary, by
U.S. ground forces.

“If Saddam attempts to subjugate the exclusion zones, the US is capable of
pushing him back as it pushed his forces back from Kuwait. If he refrains from
challenging the zones, he will lose much of his ability to threaten his neighbors,
for he will have lost control of Iraq’s oil. He is unlikely to survive for long
thereafter and would be largely defanged if he did….” (Emphasis added
throughout.)

Jordan Gets It, Does the Clinton Administration?

Interestingly, the 27 March edition of The Forward reported a fact largely
unremarked by other
American media: “Just as the Senate is appropriating $10 million for the removal of Saddam
Hussein, King Hussein of Jordan is throwing his support behind the free, democratic
Iraqi
opposition, the Iraqi National Congress (INC).“

The Forward noted that “At a press conference [earlier in March] with Secretary
of State
Madeleine Albright [the King] said, ‘As far as I am concerned, I visualize Iraq as a free
country, as a democracy, as an example of pluralism. I hope that the people of Iraq will
be
able to come together in dialogue to live in a democracy.'” It also included remarks by
yet-another valued member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors, former
Assistant
Secretary of Defense Richard Perle:

“‘There’s a lot of momentum now with the INC,’ said [Mr. Perle,] a resident scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most vocal proponents of deposing
Saddam. ‘One of the arguments that has been used against the INC is that there is bad
blood between King Hussein and [INC leader Ahmed] Chalabi. I
think the King
going out of his way to see Chalabi is a good indication that there is no
problem.‘”

Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration — whose irresolute, incompetent and/or
subversive policies⁽³⁾ toward the Iraqi opposition have
repeatedly undercut the INC — still seems
unwilling to take the same stance as the King of Jordan by embracing the only broadly based,
democratic and organized force capable in due course of liberating Iraq, namely the Iraqi National
Congress. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it in a speech to the American Society of
Newspaper Editors on 2 April: “We will explore ways to work more effectively with the Iraqi
democratic opposition.”

Dr. Mylroie asks:

“What does the administration intend to do with the opposition? In pursuit of what
goal — the ‘containment’ of Saddam or his overthrow? The opposition is not interested
in containing Saddam, a policy which is not working anyway, which is why the US is
losing Arab support. Moreover, given that this is the second year of a second term
administration, if the administration were serious, it would be beyond the stage of
‘exploring options’ by now.”

The Bottom Line

The time has clearly come for proactive action on Iraq. The Clinton Administration’s must
not be
allowed to employ vacuous rhetoric about its support for the Iraqi opposition as a cover for a
policy that is, at best, characterized by drift and at worst by appeasement of Saddam and his
sponsors in Moscow, Beijing, Paris and the UN. The Congress is to be applauded for its efforts
to date to empower and assist the Iraqi opposition. The executive and legislative branches must
now begin to work together to articulate and implement the strategy articulated recently by a
distinguished bipartisan group led by Richard Perle and former Democratic Congressman
Stephen Solarz⁽⁴⁾ and lucidly summarized above
by Douglas Feith.

– 30 –

1. See letter dated 27 March 1998 from the Executive Chairman of
the Special Commission
addressed to the President of the Security Council (UN document # S/1998/278).

2. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
This Is the Time to ‘Bash’ — Or At Least Repudiate
— The U.N.; Bipartisan, Bicameral Consensus Emerges That Saddam Must Go
(No. 98-D 36,
26 February 1998).

3. A recent example of such subversive policies may be the manner in
which the defection of
Nassir Hindawi, widely believed to be the father of the Iraqi biological weapons program, was
ineptly handled — resulting in his imprisonment in Baghdad (and presumably, in due course, his
execution). Congress should immediately establish whether the Clinton CIA was responsible for
trying to exfiltrate this invaluable human asset who reportedly sought to flee Saddam’s regime
with a treasure trove of information about the Iraq’s still-concealed BW activities. If so, did it
rely yet again upon organizations known to have been penetrated by Saddam — such as the Iraqi
National Assembly or the Kurdistan Democratic Party? This episode could be more than just a
tragically wasted opportunity to gain insights into the ongoing threat posed by Iraq; it could be a
paradigm for the Administration’s continuing fecklessness in dealing with that threat.

4. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
‘Serious Consequences’: If Clinton Means It,
Here’s the Alternative to His Failed Strategy of ‘Containing’ Saddam ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_33″>No. 98-D 33, 24
February 1998).