Staying there: U.S. and Saddam Hussein

July 29, 1991
The Washington Post, New Republic

The president’s Independence Day radio address resounded with all the patriotic
grandiloquence his speechwriting staff could muster. George Bush lavished accolades upon
America’s “sons and daughters who stood watch on the desert and seas of the Gulf, bearing
witness by their presence to the vision that compelled us.” He plucked the same, worn
Churchillian chords in speeches to flag-waving throngs in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and
Marshfield, Missouri. But the spectacle of Mr. Bush’s glory-basking, set against the background
of the renewed depredations of a resurgent Saddam Hussein, is a bit much to stomach. What’s
happened in Iraq since our grand “victory” isn’t a bit of rain at a Fourth of July picnic; it’s a
deluge, washing the guests, the food, and the marching band out to sea.

The notion that the administration’s war council knew what it was doing when Mr. Bush ended
the war after 100 hours has lost any credibility it might previously have had. At first some
believed (though not we) that continued sanctions and internal resistance would finish the job of
replacing Saddam’s regime with a more palatable form of government. But the administration’s
failure to come to the aid of Kurdish and Shiite rebel forces, after encouraging their rebellion,
made clear that it was more concerned with preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq and a
propitious “balance of power” in the region than getting rid of the dictator or protecting
persecuted “minorities,” one of which constitutes 65 percent of the population. Our belated,
inadequate, and soon-to-be prematurely withdrawn “safe havens” are a pathetic cover for our
sorry abdication of responsibility following the war. The latest horrifying, unsurprising news is
that Saddam perseveres in his efforts to build atom bombs.

In his January 27 press briefing, General Norman Schwarzkopf announced that Iraq’s nuclear
capability had been “neutralized.” If that wasn’t assurance enough, Iraq promised, as part of the
April 3 cease-fire agreement, to hand over or destroy all nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons as well as its large ballistic missiles. Saddam seemed to comply, by handing over
chemical and biological stocks, destroying some of the missiles, and allowing the United Nations
to inspect eighty-eight pounds of enriched uranium registered under the nuclear non-proliferation
agreement, of which Iraq is a signatory. But as the Pentagon learned from an electrical engineer
who defected to U.S. forces in northern Iraq in May, Saddam was concealing as much as ninety
additional pounds of weapons-grade enriched uranium, in violation of the truce agreement.
According to this source and satellite intelligence, Saddam continues his nuclear program using
homemade calutrons, an obsolete technology that has nonetheless brought him terrifyingly close
to being able to produce two Nagasaki-type weapons.

Saddam wants nuclear bombs for one simple reason: revenge. Through nuclear blackmail, or
actual genocide, he intends to reverse his humiliation at the hands of the United States. Both
before and after the war, he swore that he had no nuclear program, had never had a nuclear
program, had no interest in a nuclear program. When the president responded with an explicit
threat of more bombing, Saddam acknowledged enriching uranium–but only one pound for
peaceful purposes. He also admitted possessing the calutrons he promised did not exist–but only
thirty of them. Saddam is, of course, still lying about what he has, in an atttempt to preserve as
much hardware and software as he can.

The U.N., charged with enforcing the terms of the cease-fire, has proved comically weak. After
the United States tipped off U.N. inspectors about the location of the Iraqi uranium processing
plants, the Iraqis played cat and mouse with them for two weeks, at one point firing automatic
weapons over their heads to discourage photography of a convoy of illicit equipment. The U.N.’s
only lever is to continue sanctions. As weapons go, economic sanctions are more cruel and less
discriminate than any of the bombs we dropped on Baghdad. They may result in the deaths of
thousands of Iraqi children, from starvation and disease, by the end of the summer, but are
unlikely to make Saddam budge from his fortified and well-stocked underground bunker. Nor
does the nuclear non-proliferation regime, which failed to detect that Saddam was on the doorstep
of becoming a nuclear power before the war, have any effective enforcement mechanism. It falls
to the United States–if non-proliferation is to mean anything at all–to enforce the terms of the
cease-fire. And if non-proliferation cannot be enforced on a country that has signed a treaty and
been humiliated in war, then it is largely meaningless.

Mr. Bush has sought to make Saddam comply by means of belligerent rhetoric. His threat of
force may be effective in getting Saddam temporarily to turn over what uranium and enriching
equipment he has. But even then the problem, as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times
recently put it, “is not his capabilities but his intentions.” Even if the United States were to bomb
Iraq’s nuclear sites (and Saddam successfully disguised many of them in the Gulf war), there
would still be the problem of Saddam’s potential. It is not as hard to build weapons of mass
destruction as it used to be. Saddam was able to mine uranium ore and enrich it without imported
equipment. If not for the war, it is likely he would now have a bomb, according to Leonard
Spector of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who until recently remained a
skeptic about the state of Iraq’s nuclear development. It now appears that not even the Israelis
knew how close Saddam was to building a bomb. Despite the war, he may be able to build one
yet.

This predicament, it should be noted, is no one’s fault but Mr. Bush’s. It was clear almost from
the moment he ended the war that we were leaving a job unfinished. Some of the consequences of
this mistake cannot be undone. It is, however, no less imperative to finish the war. This doesn’t
mean occupying Iraq, but ti does mean deposing Saddam Hussein. Whether this is accomplished
by U.S.-supported internal rebellion, smart bombs, or an assassination squad matters little. If Bush
feels constrained by the executive order that bans the murder of foreign leaders, he can issue
another executive order to permit it, just this once. It ought to be possible to get rid of Saddam
without a full-scale military invasion. The termination of Baath rule should, in any case, become a
staged goal of U.S. policy–and if Iraq is fragmented in the process, the stability of the region will
not suffer unduly. If Saddam does not scrupulously honor a deadline for surrendering every ounce
of uranium, along with everything else covered by the cease-fire, we should enfirce its terms
against the violator, rather than his unfortunate subjects. Until the butcher of Baghdad is gone or
buried, the Gulf war cannot be won, despite all of Mr. Bush’s triumphalist rhetoric.