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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 27KB | 518 lines

<text> <title> The United States in the Middle East </title> <article> <hdr> Current History, January 1992 The United States in the Middle East: The Gulf War and Its Aftermath </hdr> <body> By Adeed Dawisha--professor of government and politics at George Mason University. "The king is dead. Long live the king." This was hardly the kind of clarion call the administration of United States President George Bush or the American public wanted to hear in the wake of the Persian Gulf war. "Baghdad's Dictator"--as Bush continued to call Iraq's president Saddam Hussein--had emerged from the war not just defeated but bloodied and humiliated. His much vaunted army devastated, and his economy in shambles, Saddam would surely be headed for a quick and ignominious exit from Iraq's political scene. That was the conventional wisdom in early March 1991: the king was dead. Or so it seemed. But in the fall of 1991, Saddam, his confidence apparently restored, was still in power, ruling over the hapless Iraqi people in a way that suggested little had changed. Although he was careful not to push the United States too far, neither did he seem ready to submit to "international will." Indeed, as the days passed, Saddam grew more defiant, intent on showing the world, as well as the Iraqi people, that he was back at the helm, and that news of his death was greatly exaggerated. In Washington the debate that followed the war took the gloss off Bush's military triumph, particularly after it was revealed that General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of United States forces in the Gulf, had preferred to continue the war effort, presumably until Saddam's demise. Bush's decision to call a cease-fire on February 27 was increasingly characterized as having been "too hasty." Saddam's Resilience "Why did the allied forces stop short of ridding Iraq and the world of Saddam Hussein?" This question dominated the American political debate after Bush's unilateral announcement of a cease-fire. And when major insurrections in March by the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in southern Iraq were ruthlessly suppressed by the remains of Saddam's supposedly "devastated army," many came to believe that with its cease-fire announcement the White House had lost its best, and perhaps only, opportunity to overthrow Iraq's "dictator." Bush and members of his administration insisted that they had done the right thing. First, they argued, none of the United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions issued after Iraq's August 1990 invasion sanctioned interference in Iraq's internal affairs. The objectives of the resolutions were Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait and the restoration of Kuwait's sovereignty. The resolutions could justify the destruction of Iraq's offensive capability, even its economic and industrial infrastructure. But hunting down Saddam himself was outside the language of the resolutions, and any such action would have quickly lost international, especially Arab, support and would have undermined the international coalition that Bush had so painstakingly built. Administration officials further argued that forcibly removing Saddam from power would have been a logistical nightmare, entailing a military thrust as far as Baghdad and engaging some of the Iraqi leader's best equipped and most loyal troops. The allied forces would have had to hunt Hussein down at immense risk. Once they had captured him and eliminated his government, the allied troops would have had to stay long enough to put another government in place--and that is when the real problems would have begun. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney expressed this apprehension: "What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'a government or a Kurdish government or a Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?" (The Soref Symposium: American Strategy after the Gulf War--Washington D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1991, p. 45.) Cheney's view suggests another reason for American reluctance to eliminate Saddam. Administration officials were apparently convinced that one of two outcomes, neither of them attractive, would follow Saddam's demise. The first would be either a Baathist or a military regime. In other words, the ruling elite that had participated in the invasion of Kuwait and the war against the United States would remain in power. Administration officials knew that would not be tolerated by the American public. The second outcome would be a balkanization of the Iraqi state into three conflicting areas: Kurdish in the north, Shiite in the south, and Sunni in the center. The northern Kurdish region would destabilize the large Kurdish minorities in Iran, Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria. In the south, the Shiites could look to their co-religionists in Iran for protection, a state of affairs that would not only threaten American strategic interests, but would also be unacceptable to the Kuwaitis and Saudis. Observers in the Middle East ascribed ulterior motives to America's reluctance to remove Saddam Hussein from power. One argument pointed to the Security Council's resolutions demanding that Iraq pay war reparations. Indeed, on August 15, 1991, the Council voted to allow Iraq to sell $1.6-billion worth of oil, but with the stipulation that 30 percent of the income from the sale would be set aside for reparations. Those who argued this said that if Saddam were replaced with a compliant and democratic regime, then the allies of the United States, notably Kuwait, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, would find it more difficult to demand reparations from Iraq. Ulterior motives notwithstanding, it was also suggested that the White House overestimated Hussein's vulnerability and underestimated his instinct for, and power of, survival. Certainly, the administration could be excused for thinking that his days were numbered as his humiliated army began to return to Baghdad. Few other dictators had survived such a devastating defeat. America's Arab allies shared this perception. Most Arab observers thought Hussein would not last more than six months. Lieutenant General Khalid bin Sultan, the commander of the Arab coalition forces and the son of Saudi Arabia's defense minister, gave Iraq's leader only 40 days, and repeated this prediction many times. The insurrections that erupted in early March in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north seemed to confirm expectations that Saddam would be overthrown from within, either through the insurrection or by elements of his own ruling circle. But Saddam was able to suppress the rebellions with surprising ease. In the cities of southern Iraq, thousands of Shiite rebels were killed. In the north the defeat of the Kurdish insurrection was so complete, and the fear of Saddam's retribution so pervasive, that by early April more than one and a half million Kurds had fled their homes for the Turkish and Iranian borders. Hussein's troops might not have matched the coalition's superior technology, but they could still easily suppress any uprising within Iraq. With Western hopes for a quick overthrow of Iraq's leader dashed, Bush decided on April 16 to pursue British Prime Minister John Major's suggestion to establish "safe havens" for the Kurds in northern Iraq. Bush announced that American, British, and French troops would build and protect several interim refugee camps for the Kurds in the flatlands of northern Iraq. When asked whether this would constitute an infringement of Iraqi sovereignty, Bush replied that his decision