TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020491/02049915.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.4 KB | 209 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 48

MILITARY OPTIONS

Three Ethical Dilemmas


By LISA BEYER -- Reported by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame/
Washington and Gavin Scott/Chicago


    As the battle grinds on in the gulf, thoughts of a quick
solution irresistibly spring to mind. Why not assassinate
Saddam? Or threaten to nuke Baghdad? Or carpet bomb the Iraqis
to kingdom come? The U.S., in fact, does have potent weapons
that have not yet been unsheathed. "We have a toolbox that's
full of lots of tools, and I brought them all to the party,"
General Colin Powell said last week. Field commander H. Norman
Schwarzkopf bragged, "We could end the war in two days, but we
don't want to destroy Iraq."

    The U.S. and its coalition partners are also worried that
a lethal knockout punch to Saddam would turn him into an even
greater hero on the Arab street than he already is. And though
the allies view their campaign in the gulf as just, there are
moral limits to the conduct of war, even when confronting an
opponent who behaves as despicably as Saddam. "Military
professionals have a very strong sense of what distinguishes
the work they do from butchering," says Michael Walzer, a
professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, N.J. "It is a moral sense, even though it's
entangled with professional pride and a sense of what works and
what doesn't." Still, if the allied strategy of waging a fair
fight should fail, the war's prosecutors may come under
pressure to resort to more drastic means.


    1. Should Saddam Hussein Be Assassinated?

    Ordering a hit on any particular person, even one as
diabolical as Saddam, is dirty business. But assuming Saddam's
death would stop the Iraqi war machine cold, it would mean one
life in exchange for the thousands, or tens of thousands, who
might die if the battle continued. British Prime Minister John
Major spoke for many people around the world when, alluding to
the prospect of Saddam's murder, he said, "I for one will not
weep for him."

    Under a 1981 Executive Order, the U.S. government is
forbidden to participate in assassination. But the rules of
battle arguably supercede that prohibition. In wartime,
international law recognizes military commanders as legitimate
targets; as commander in chief of Iraqi forces, Saddam thus
qualifies. (Of course, so does President Bush.) Washington's
denials notwithstanding, Saddam has been pursued by allied
bombers. His presidential palace has been hit; his
command-and-control centers have been hit; most of the places
allied intelligence thought Saddam might be have been hit.

    Saddam reportedly shuttles among half a dozen underground
bunkers -- including one that is luxuriously appointed and
designed to withstand a nuclear blast -- or hides out in
civilian neighborhoods, which he knows the U.S. will not
intentionally attack. Israeli military officials say privately
that if they were to retaliate for Iraqi assaults on their
territory, they would happily go after Saddam. But even with
their renowned ability to ferret out foes, the Israelis cannot
get a fix on him. "When it was possible, nobody thought of it,"
says a high-ranking official in Jerusalem, "and now that
everybody is thinking of it, it's almost impossible."

    The difficulty of zeroing in on Saddam is one reason the
Bush Administration has so assiduously denied that it is
gunning for him. Washington does not want to declare killing
Saddam as a goal and risk failing to achieve it, repeating last
year's humiliation of having Manuel Noriega slip through U.S.
hands during the invasion of Panama. "Every day that Saddam
survived," says a White House official, "would be seen as a
victory for him and a loss for us."

    There are other compelling explanations for Washington's
denials. An explicit U.S. threat to kill Saddam might encourage
terrorist attacks on U.S. targets, including President Bush,
and might subject allied POWs to even worse treatment by Iraq.
It could conceivably make assassination a more acceptable
political tool. Most important, if the allies are seen to have
slain Saddam on purpose, they will make him a martyr among many
Arabs. Washington's hope, and it is probably an unrealistic
one, is that if Saddam dies "incidentally" in a raid, his
canonization can be avoided.

    Would a successful strike on Saddam end the war? The
assumption of most allied military analysts is that with its
leadership decapitated, the Iraqi regime would quickly wither.
Saddam has built his government on little else but a cultish
loyalty to himself, enforced by fear. There is no deputy
waiting in the wings. Saddam's survivors, reared in his school
of terror, might rip one another apart competing to replace
him, leaving the Iraqi war effort adrift without a pilot. If
a clear successor regime does emerge, it might well sue for
peace, since the confrontation over Kuwait was of Saddam's
making, not some realization of deep-rooted Iraqi ambition.
Given the decisive blow Saddam's departure would deal Baghdad,
it is safe to assume that the allies in future raids, as in
past ones, will try to hit him.


    2. Should a Nuclear Bomb Be Used Against Iraq?

    Suppose an American offensive against Iraq bogged down in
a bloody stalemate, and Saddam turned his chemical or
bacteriological weapons against American troops with
devastating effect. Might the U.S. then use nuclear weapons in
retaliation and to shorten the war?

    No, say Pentagon planners. Publicly, U.S. officials have
refused to rule out going nuclear. "We'd prefer to keep Saddam
guessing," says an Administration source. But Washington
decided early in the confrontation with Iraq not to supply
nuclear weapons to the ground troops in Saudi Arabia. Nearly
400 nuclear warheads are thought to be aboard American ships
in the gulf region. Using them, however, would yield no
military advantage that would come anywhere near offsetting the
horrendous political fallout.

    For 45 years the U.S. has tried to convince the rest of the
world that its dropping of the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was an aberration. What's more, the linchpin in
Washington's strategy to limit the spread of atomic weapons is
a formal promise never to use them against a non-nuclear-armed
state. If the U.S. violates its own policy to nuke Iraq, which
by all indications does not yet have the Bomb, other countries
might rush to develop atomic arms and possibly to use them. At
the same time, revulsion over America's use of the ultimate
weapon -- once again against a non-Western people -- would
probably shatter the alliance against Saddam.

    And what would America gain? Nothing to speak of. Advanced
non-nuclear weapons such as fuel-air bombs and cluster bombs
can do virtually as much damage to battlefield targets as nukes
would. The only sites a nuclear device could eliminate more
effectively are cities, for instance Baghdad or Basra. Today's
city-aimed missile would not necessarily pack the wallop of
Little Boy, the 12.5-kiloton A-bomb that fell on Hiroshima. But
even a 2-kiloton package would kill thousands of civilians,
violating the most basic rule of war: non-combatants are not
fair game.

    Similar arguments apply to a retaliatory use of chemical
weapons. Though being ripped apart by shrapnel is a horrible
way to die, the prospect of an agonizing death from nerve gas
is somehow more frightening. Unlike explosives, chemicals can
drift into civilian areas. If the U.S. were to unholster these
weapons, it would have a hard time continuing its campaign to
ban them altogether after the war. And like nukes, there is
nothing chemicals can achieve militarily that cannot be
accomplished with more acceptable arms.


    3. Should Carpet-Bombing Raids Be Expanded?

    If replying to Saddam with weapons of mass destruction is
unacceptable, an alternative is the old-fashioned method of
leveling great swaths of territory with non-nuclear bombs.

    The allies are already carpet bombing the more than 100,000
Iraqi Republican Guards massed at the Kuwait-Iraq border. The
hope is that if the Guards are hit hard enough, the whole Iraqi
military will crumble. If not, it may become necessary to bomb
Iraq's frontline troops as well in preparation for an allied
ground assault. Whereas the Republican Guards are fiercely
loyal to Saddam and have profited from his patronage, the
soldiers holding down Kuwait are mainly conscripts, some of
them as young as 17. According to defectors, many are anything
but gung-ho to fight. War theorists make no distinction
between a cynical professional soldier and an innocent,
reluctant one. "Anyone in a uniform is a fair target," says
Nicholas Fotion, a professor of military ethics at Emory
University. But other analysts see a gray area. Says ethicist
Robin Lovin, an associate professor at the University of
Chicago Divinity School: "I'm not sure that carpet bombing
conscripts is morally different from bombing civilians."

    And what about retaliating for an Iraqi chemical or
biological strike by going after civilians? There are
circumstances that military theorists believe justify a breach
of the hands-off rule on noncombatants. This would be a
situation in which a country faces not just defeat but the
destruction of its people, society or culture as, for instance,
Britain did at the hands of the Nazis in the early 1940s. But
the allied attacks on German cities such as Dresden toward the
end of World War II are now widely considered unwarranted
because it was clear by then that the allies would win.
Likewise, some military ethicists today believe the nuclear
strikes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unjust.

    For the U.S. and its Western allies, the stakes in the gulf
will never approach what they were for Britain in World War II.
And given the vast superiority and variety of weapons the
allies have to fight Saddam, it is hard to imagine them finding
themselves in a state of desperation. "I can't see any
realistic way that Saddam could put us in a position where we
would want to fight a dirty war," says Fotion. "Let him abuse
prisoners, attack cities, use poison gas. We have plenty of
ways to fight him and still hold the high moral ground." That
is not only the most pious place to be, but it is also the best
vantage point from which to begin to reorder the postwar world.