John Wojdylo’s piece, Saddam and the heart of darkness, mounted a powerful case for taking Saddam out. Iraqi Australian Zainab Al-Badry took issue with John in Thank God for Australia because…, and today John responds.
Zainab Al-Badry
Disclosure: I am an Iraqi who doesn’t support a US attack.
I just finished reading John Wojdylo’s article about Iraq and have to write in response:
* The mentality of George Bush is taking over – you are either with us or against us. Why do people assume that not supporting the US plans to attack Iraq means automatically that we favour the alternative, ie Saddam’s regime?
* In talking about the Iraq-Iran war, John conveniently forgot to mention who encouraged and supported Saddam to start and continue the war. It is a well known fact that the American administration, specifically the Republican government at the time, (along with the its allies) helped and supplied Saddam for fear of the growing power of the Islamic regime in Iran.
* George Bush said “the US is committed to lasting institutions like the UN”. If that is the case, why doesn’t the US start by paying off its debt to the UN??? Why doesn’t the US administration consider the consequences of threatening and bullying the UN to do whatever the US dictates or else?? What does that do the credibility of the UN?
* If the US attacked Iraq to change the regime and the war proved to be a longer one than it was predicted or planned for, who would guarantee that the US will not use nuclear weapons to end the war as it did at the end of WWII?
* Like any Iraqi, nothing is dearer to my heart than to live long enough to witness the day my country and my people are set free from this dictator and his regime. However, can anyone blame us if we do not trust the US and back its efforts to oust Saddam? I have been in Iraq during the Gulf war and witnessed how the American troops abandoned my people and left them to the mercies of Saddam and his thugs. Why would I trust the US again? I have no doubt now that the US wants to get rid of Saddam – what I don’t accept (and indeed I find it insulting to my intelligence) is someone telling me (or the whole world for that matter) that the US is doing so for all the good reasons in the world, or that oil is a “secondary factor”. Would the US or any of its allies send their armies and incur all those heavy expenses if Iraq didn’t happen to float on oil?
***
Saddam Hussein’s Will to Power
By John Wojdylo
In Thank God for Australia because… Zainab Al-Badry makes some important points that I’d like to address.
Zainab writes, “Like any Iraqi, nothing is dearer to my heart than to live long enough to witness the day my country and my people are set free from this dictator and his regime.”
Let us all pray for this. And let us also pray that after this tyrant is gone, Iraqis will have the opportunity and ability to build a stable society with solid democratic institutions.
But while on the subject of a democratic Iraq, I believe caution is in order with the widely prevalent empiricist view (not that Zainab holds it) that a democratic Iraq will begin to exist only when the political entity begins to exist. Democratic Iraq has already begun to exist, in a preborn form, insofar that it exists in the hearts and minds of her expatriates, her numerous emigres and defectors, as well as citizens at home. This means that the strength of the future political entity depends on the strength of the democratic dream being dreamt now.
Conversely, flaws in the present dream will be born as flaws in the future political entity; or worse, may prevent the future entity from being born at all. Is now the time to give democracy a chance? Is now the time to take the risk?
Furthermore, a world view that is informed in every aspect by aversion from risk – whose conclusions and analytical ground are driven by risk-aversion at all cost – can only delegate full responsibility for creating the physical preconditions for a democratic Iraq to others who wield power.
In that case you will almost certainly have no influence on the outcome. Those who take the risk, in contrast, might gain influence – but that is not certain. Hence the risk.
Zainab continues: I have no doubt now that the US wants to get rid of Saddam – what I don’t accept (and indeed I find it insulting to my intelligence) is someone telling me (or the whole world for that matter) that the US is doing so for all the good reasons in the world, or that oil is a “secondary factor”.
Nobody is trying to insult anybody. And I did not say that all the reasons of all American stakeholders in the action are snow-white pure.
(But purity of intention and principle seems to be wished by many. The illusion of purity comes from naivety, or perhaps a religion of purity in which everybody is innocent except the ones who show open belligerence. It ends up being an aesthetic view, in that belligerence is judged to be wrong just because it is ugly, regardless of the good it can do.
The cause and symptom of this is failure to tell – and face – the dreadful truth: this failure pervades many of the news reports and much of the commentary we read, and reinforces the blue-sky world that many want to exist.
This affects perception and cognition of the contemporary world situation – and hence affects the conclusions that people reach. For example, if one is led to believe in the purity of motives of UN Security Council members – where “principle overrides politics” [The Australian, 16/9] – then when the Yanks go charging in on the white horse, no wonder they seem to be smashing all the decent mores of international law single-handedly.
Yet the Russians and French are almost certainly acting out of economic self-interest, if not also political, strategic interest. The Chinese themselves are sensitive to Arab ties, which makes one suspect that their motives are not principled either. (A couple of weeks ago, an exhibition in Beijing marking the anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth was banned by the communist authorities because it featured a letter written by Einstein in which he declared his support for a Zionist state.)
The reality is that nations almost never act out of purely altruistic motives. Nor should they necessarily. International law is not as well-defined as national law in advanced democracies. Nevertheless, it can and ought to be an essential normative influence in a chaotic world.
I think the Americans have a case when they worry that the moral basis of international law has been undermined in recent times. The US has been outmanoeuvred in the Security Council on the question of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with Saddam Hussein pulling the strings.
I did say that the most important and overwhelming reason for American action may well be good. In this case, oil is a “secondary factor”, in the sense that action is not out of pure economic self-interest. This difference is of fundamental importance – since otherwise, for instance, stopping Hitler (after which the Americans gained great influence in the world) could be regarded as a premeditated act of American imperialism.
Why was stopping Hitler not an act of American imperialism? Why is stopping Saddam also not American imperialism, if Saddam is as dangerous as he appears to be?
I believe the answers to these questions are pivotal in a moral understanding of the current situation: in trying to answer them, you can discover a lot about what you think is right. Also, it becomes easier to see why many accounts of current events are poor.
In the cases I have in mind, the facts the journalists see as worth reporting are not as important as the facts they leave out; therefore their accounts, although providing some factual basis, do not touch on the most urgent concerns of our time. Worse, they allow the reader to avoid the reality facing us, while diminishing our understanding of the danger. Some of these journalists create the appearance of believing in a sort of absolute objectivity.
For example, Paul McGeough wants to write a historical chronicle in the mould of Herodotus: an amoral account that ostensibly exposes the self-interest of the players. But in his interpretations, their self-interest has become axiomatic, to the point that he is incapable of distinguishing between self-interest and a wider good, even if it did exist. He rules it out in advance. He is not objective. (Paul McGeough on the oil factor is atsmh).
He fails to see the contradiction in his position: the fact that he is able to write openly about current events at all depends on the free world having imposed its will in the last half century. But he writes as if all impositions of will are merely acts in self-interest.
But things could have turned out differently. Keeping to the Herodotus theme, and drawing on a rather long illustrative bow, had the Assyrians conquered the Lydians, the Greek cities would have fallen to the Cimmerians, and Herodotus would have been writing not about history, but about training horses. [Barbara Porter, “What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been”, Pan Books.]
McGeough then might have been covering intrigue at the races at some Babylonian race meet, where he would be beheaded if he wrote anything the dictatorial ruler arbitrarily disliked.
We take our freedoms for granted, but these had to be won by our forefathers (and mothers). The free world must retain power if it is to enforce its views of justice, human rights and law. Power comes first, law later. McGeough appears to take as axiomatic that power equals self-interest. The poverty of this view is evident in all his articles.
The problem is, we are being denied a picture – certainly, one picture from a plurality – that may in fact turn out to be the right one. If it is proved right, then we may now be making a terrible mistake in downplaying Saddam Hussein’s threat. It may be the last major historical mistake we make.
***
In my Webdiary piece Saddam Hussein and the Heart of Darkness, I mentioned oil. I’ll now clarify its role.
Oil is inextricably bound in the problem: it is unavoidable to think of oil when thinking about Saddam Hussein and American strategy against him.
But the meaning one attaches to oil as an American motive depends on only one thing. What do you believe Saddam Hussein’s ambitions are? And how close is he to realizing them?
We must think of oil not just because of the Americans, but because oil can become Saddam’s weapon once he gains a nuclear device which he can then use to threaten the countries around him and impose his will. This can be within 18 months if he is supplied with weapons-grade fissile material today. In the mafia economies of Eastern Europe, how long will it be before some muttra or politician chooses instant wealth over the lives of millions?
Oil is undoubtedly important. If Hitler had held off invading the Soviet Union in 1941 and instead massively reinforced Rommel’s troops in North Africa, then he could have captured the oil fields in the Middle East. More important than being “good for business”, it would have won him the war.
I repeat: it would have been more than “good for business”.
Hitler would have gained political control over much of the world, and probably even conquered a lot more of it. The Holocaust would have been extended to Australia.
Many historians consider Hitler’s choice in 1941 one of his greatest blunders. What if Saddam Hussein has learned from Hitler’s mistake?
So I ask you: What do you believe Saddam Hussein’s ambitions are? And if you think that they are not much, how do you account for the consistent signals to the contrary manifested over more than a decade?
What do you think he intends with his explicit pan-Arab supremacism; with his indominatable manifest efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction; and statements like the ones he made in 1996 at a meeting of military officers, as told to Mark Bowden by Major Sabah Khalifa Khodada, former career officer in the Iraqi army:
He told Khodada and the others that they were the best men in the nation, the most trusted and able. That was why they had been selected to meet with him, and to work at the terrorist camps where warriors were being trained to strike back at America. The United States, he said, because of its reckless treatment of Arab nations and the Arab people, was a necessary target for revenge and destruction. American aggression must be stopped in order for Iraq to rebuild and to resume leadership of the Arab world. Saddam talked for almost two hours. Khodada could sense the great hatred in him, the anger over what America had done to his ambitions and to Iraq. Saddam blamed the United States for all the poverty, backwardness, and suffering in his country. [Mark Bowden, “Tales of the Tyrant”, Atlantic Monthly, iraqwatch]
Four weeks ago Saddam threatened a sovereign nation (Qatar) with “total annihilation”. Why do commentators like Paul McGeough not address Saddam’s explicitly stated ambition and his manifest intention to fulfil it, and instead write conspiracy theories about American motives, or banalities about Toyota truck mechanics in Baghdad?
It is known that Saddam Hussein has an advanced design for a nuclear device that will work if he can only find weapons-grade fissile material – does he have the material already, or are the WMD he now has enough to carry out his threat against Qatar? Why has nobody even asked this question in the Australian media? Why is contemplation of the reality not penetrating through to the Australian public? Why are we losing ourselves and pushing away all cares under the brilliant blue skies of spring? Are we making a terrible mistake?
Or perhaps Saddam’s threat was just an empty boast? But then: On what grounds do you, Zainab, dismiss Saddam as harmless, especially as you know very well how dangerous he can be? As you said, you have seen it with your own eyes.
If you have confidence that Saddam Hussein is not as dangerous as he says he is, why not apply the same level of confidence to the Americans? Alternatively, why does Saddam Hussein not enter your thinking? Why the obsession with America?
Zainab Al-Badry: “I… witnessed how the American troops abandoned my people and left them to the mercies of Saddam and his thugs.”
I’ll come back to this later.
Saddam told his official biographer that he isn’t interested in what people think of him today, only in what they will think of him in five hundred years. On what grounds do we discount his manifest intention to unify the “Arab people”, inspire a flowering of Arab culture and power – and to seek revenge on the United States for causing “all the poverty, backwardness, and suffering” in his country?
Does he intend to extend his terror to the entire Middle East and Caspian Sea area? As I argued previously, I think not – I think he wants to facilitate the fall of the West and be remembered for 500 years because of it.
He said this explicitly in 1996, at the meeting of military officers that included Major Sabah Khalifa Khodada. (See the quote above.) On what grounds do journalists dismiss out of hand his repeated statement of his intention?
At 66 years of age, he knows he is too old to reign over an empire. And he knows he must act soon. His regime would not survive his death – but then how do you feel about Islamists gaining control of Middle East and Caspian Sea oil?
I think there’s good ground to believe that Saddam Hussein presents an urgent and substantial threat to Americans, as well as to the rest of the free world. That’s why even if the Americans benefit from control over oil, this fact is of secondary importance. The most important thing is that Saddam Hussein is stopped from fulfilling his ambition. Just as Hitler was stopped from fulfilling his.
Paul McGeough was therefore wrong when he wrote:
For now, the urge to give history a label even as it is happening has forced many to embrace Bush’s name for this global upheaval – the war on terror. History, however, may well record it as the first oil war of the 21st century.
It is not a war over oil: it is a war for freedom. Just as the muppets say it is.
On the other hand, perhaps McGeough doesn’t believe that Saddam is much of a threat. But he has never explained why. And his work is clearly not objective, because it excludes outright the possibility that Saddam means what he says.
Zainab Al-Badry asks: “Would the US or any of its allies send their armies and incur all those heavy expenses if Iraq didn’t happen to float on oil?”
They did in Normandy. They did in Korea and Vietnam. And to a lesser extent in Kosovo. The Americans, on occasions, really do seem to be possessed by this dream of a “free world”. Can such a dream only ever be an illusion, and must all efforts to achieve it necessarily amount to self-interest?
As I said, it is unavoidable to think of oil when thinking about Saddam Hussein and American strategy against him, because oil can become part of Saddam’s strategy to achieve his ambitions.
(It already has become part of his strategy. The advantage he has gained in courting France and Russia, and getting them even more deeply involved in oil in Iraq, is that he now has the automatic support of two members in the UN Security Council.
Paul McGeough: In a telephone interview from Amherst, Michael Klare observed that… Saddam had selected companies from the nations that were most likely to blunt any US designs on Iraq: “His hope was to persuade them not to act against Iraq and this now has become a part of the diplomacy at the United Nations…”)
But as I said, the meaning one attaches to oil as an American motive depends fundamentally on only one thing: What do you believe Saddam Hussein’s ambitions are? How close is he to realizing them?
This is the starting point for evaluating American or anyone else’s actions on the question of Iraq.
On the other hand, on what grounds do you discount the threat of Saddam Hussein? Why does he not enter your thinking about the dreadful situation we are in now? Why do you believe Saddam’s will cannot have consequences for you, even if you live in Australia? What is the basis of your certainty?
I believe that we have been forced into a dreadful choice by the destructive will of Saddam. His destructive will exists, we just have to deal with it.
Zainab Al-Badry writes: “I… witnessed how the American troops abandoned my people and left them to the mercies of Saddam and his thugs. Why would I trust the US again?”
I’ve met people who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, where the Polish Home Army was eventually crushed while Stalin’s troops waited a few kilometres away in the outer suburbs. After the war, Stalin had many of the surviving hero officers shot, because they were among the cream of Polish society and could have posed a threat to Soviet rule.
Why might Bush Snr’s betrayal in 1991 not be equivalent to Stalin’s betrayal in 1944?
One reason: what if Saddam Hussein had carried out his threat to use biological weapons in the event that Coalition forces entered Baghdad? He had certainly brought a significant part of his stockpiles in around Baghdad. What if Coalition forces entering Baghdad would have meant the death of countless civilians?
Perhaps Saddam’s threat of germ warfare was taken seriously, and the potential catastrophe of mass civilian casualties was enough to persuade Coalition leaders to back off and give the tyrant a chance to prove his virtue by conforming to international law.
The point is, the Americans may have had good reason – or, at least, may have made a difficult choice – for the tragic betrayal of the Iraqi and Kurd insurrectionists, who had bravely taken control of 14 out of 18 provinces.
Coalition leaders may have believed that the rule of international law was strong enough to allow the civilians of Baghdad to be spared while neutralizing the tyrant’s threat in the long term through diplomacy and inspections. This optimism would have been particularly strong after Bush Snr’s bombastic and far-fetched pronouncement that victory in the Gulf War was the beginning of a “new world order”.
In the decade since, instead of proving his virtue, Saddam has brazenly outmanoevred all organs of international law and continued on the path towards fulfilling his ambition. The skill and effectiveness of his manoevring becomes absolutely clear when his international dealings are collected together and placed in sequence. (I recommend the paper, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and the 1997 Gulf Crisis, Middle East Review of International Affairs, meria)
Why should the US be trusted this time to do the job properly and get rid of him? Each Iraqi must answer this question for themselves. You are the ones who have most at stake in supporting a possible liberation of your country. It’s your risk: You must make the choice alone.
Why might anyone have confidence that the Americans are more committed this time? For one, the US military appears to be planning an invasion of Iraq by one hundred thousand or more American soldiers – this time, the US is staking the lives of many more of its sons and daughters on regime change.
The immense stake the Americans are laying down this time seems to me to signal a far greater commitment than in 1991; a commitment, for one, to seeing a stable government in Iraq following Saddam’s removal.
At least the noises coming from Washington sound promising:
Mr Powell tried to assure Congress and US allies that Washington would not allow Iraq “to be broken up into three pieces”.
He also warned Congress it would be costly. “It will take a strong American presence,” he said, both military and political. “We recognise we are on the cusp of a very, very demanding and long-term commitment if we have to go down this road.”
But, reflecting the President’s optimism, he added that there was also the opportunity to create a government “that could be a model for other nations in the region”. [SMH 27/9]
The optimistic noises ought not lull anybody into a sense of security. The future is never certain. We do not know whether the Iraqi officers who will be ordered by Saddam Hussein to fire their germ weapons will ignore him; we do not know if Israel will respond with nuclear weapons; we do not know if Arab and Muslim states will rise up against their governments after Arabs are killed by nuclear weapons.
We do not know if Saddam Hussein will win in the end anyway, by provoking a national “suicide” (in fact it would be murder-suicide) and thereby rousing the Arab and Muslim masses in the Islamic belt around the equator, in a wave that would overthrow their authoritarian rulers.
But the question you must answer is: Are the risks – for democratic Iraq, for the region, and for the free world – of not acting greater?
And the choice for everybody – Iraqi, Kurd and outsider alike – is: Are we morally bound not to take the risk in stopping him now? Must we wait for Saddam Hussein to achieve his ambition? This would give him the power to threaten us with unleashing the Holocaust unless we submit to his will.
(Or, we may reject the concept of alternative altogether, and hope that Saddam is amassing WMD merely for his private collection.)
Saddam Hussein’s will for destruction has forced us into a horrific dilemma. If we don’t act soon, when we are relatively powerful, we may be condemning free civilization to oblivion. But if we act now, many, many people may die.
Absolute compassion – whereby any form of killing is forbidden – backs us into a corner. Absolute respect for human life means we must submit to Saddam Hussein’s will, whatever the cost.
Many of the antiwar voices we are hearing are in fact people yearning for an absolute. They elide at all costs the horror of the choice. In fact, the horror of responsibility, of having killed.
There are always risks for the Iraqi who decides to trust the Americans this time. The post-war situation may turn out to be too hard for the Americans, who may then settle for a strongman-led puppet government.
But there are always risks when trusting anybody. The Iraqi opposition is too weak to effect change by itself: it must rely on somebody, and the Americans appear to be the best bet.
In every scenario, even the seemingly most straight-forward case, Iraqi pro-democracy forces must battle for a just, democratic Iraq.
Each individual Iraqi must make the choice for themselves. It’s not for me to say.
Zainab Al-Badry: Why do people assume that not supporting the US plans to attack Iraq means automatically that we favour the alternative, ie Saddam’s regime?
I did not say this. The choice is between acting or not acting, not between being for or against Saddam. “Not acting” does not mean you support Saddam. It means that you do not want to be part of this attempt to get rid of him by force, for whatever reason.
Ultimately it also means you are ready to submit to his will, whatever the cost. It doesn’t mean you are for him – but it may mean you will be forced to collaborate with him. See the example of Tariq Aziz below.
Finally, Zainab Al-Badry writes: In talking about the Iraq-Iran war, John conveniently forgot to mention who encouraged and supported Saddam to start and continue the war. It is a well known fact that the American administration, specifically the Republican government at the time, (along with the its allies) helped and supplied Saddam for fear of the growing power of the Islamic regime in Iran.
Zainab is probably too young to have witnessed or to remember the circumstances surrounding that war. So I begin by quoting from the The New York Times (“He’s too unreasonable for deterrence”, Kenneth Pollack, 28/9):
In 1974, for example, he attacked the Kurds even though Iran had been arming and supporting them (with American and Israeli support). He believed, for reasons unknown, that Iran would do nothing to help its proxies. The shah responded decisively, sending troops into Iraqi Kurdistan, mobilizing his army and provoking clashes along the border. To stave off an Iranian invasion that he feared would end his regime, Saddam signed the humiliating Algiers accord, which gave Iran everything it wanted from Iraq, including contested territory.
The contested territory, whose loss was so humiliating for Saddam, was the Shatt-al-Arab, a sixty-mile strait formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as they flow into the Persian Gulf [Mark Bowden]. He was obsessed with it, then in 1980 Saddam attacked Iran under the misguided assumption that the new Islamic Republic was so unpopular that it would collapse after one good shove. He embroiled Iraq in a war that nearly destroyed his own regime. [Kenneth Pollack]
The Shatt-al-Arab was at the forefront of his mind when he attacked Iran. In fact, the Shatt-al-Arab was so important to him that despite the terrible consequences of that war, he believed he had won a great victory by reclaiming it:
It ended horrifically, eight years later, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis dead. To a visitor in Baghdad the year after the war ended, it seemed that every other man on the street was missing a limb. The country had been devastated. The war had cost Iraq billions. Saddam claimed to have regained control of the Shatt-al-Arab. Despite the huge losses, he was giddy with victory. [Mark Bowden, “Tales of the Tyrant”]
Finally, I cannot believe, as Zainab Al-Badry claims, that Saddam Hussein needed any encouragement from the Americans to start and continue the war; or that such encouragement influenced him even if they did give it. As amply demonstrated on many occasions, he has a mind and a will of his own.
It is wrong and a falsification to claim – as Paul McGeough and many others repeatedly do – that Saddam was a pliant servant of the Americans so it is they who are therefore to blame for his actions. By denying that Saddam has a mind of his own, it is much easier to avoid facing the reality of the threat that Saddam Hussein poses to the free world today.
The irrelevence of the Americans in Saddam’s planning for war against Iran is clearly demonstrated in the recollections of Salah Omar al-Ali, former Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, of a conference of unaligned nations in Cuba, September 1979.
“Well, Salah, I see you are thinking of something,” Saddam said. “What are you thinking about?”
“I am thinking about the meeting we just had, Mr. President. I am very happy. I’m very happy that these small problems will be solved. I’m so happy that they took advantage of this chance to meet with you and not one of your ministers, because with you being here we can avoid another problem with them. We are neighbors. We are poor people. We don’t need another war. We need to rebuild our countries, not tear them down.”
Saddam was silent for a moment, drawing thoughtfully on his cigar. “Salah, how long have you been a diplomat now?” he asked.
“About ten years.”
“Do you realize, Salah, how much you have changed?”
“How, Mr. President?”
“How should we solve our problems with Iran? Iran took our lands. They are controlling the Shatt-al-Arab, our big river. How can meetings and discussions solve a problem like this? Do you know why they decided to meet with us here, Salah? They are weak is why they are talking with us. If they were strong there would be no need to talk. So this gives us an opportunity, an opportunity that only comes along once in a century. We have an opportunity here to recapture our territories and regain control of our river.”
That was when al-Ali realized that Saddam had just been playing with the Iranians, and that Iraq was going to go to war. Saddam had no interest in diplomacy. To him, statecraft was just a game whose object was to outmaneuver one’s enemies. Someone like al-Ali was there to maintain a pretense, to help size up the situation, to look for openings, and to lull foes into a false sense of security. Within a year the Iran-Iraq war began. [Mark Bowden, “Tales of the Tyrant”]
Tariq Aziz, smiling and amiable, is nowadays doing excellently as a replacement al-Ali. He is a weak man who has chosen submission to Saddam’s will, despite the tragic personal cost to him:
I suppose I can just about bear to watch the “inspections” pantomime a second time. But what I cannot bear is the sight of French and Russian diplomats posing and smirking with Naji Sabry, Iraq’s foreign minister, or with Tariq Aziz. I used to know Naji and I know that two of his brothers, Mohammed and Shukri, were imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein – in Mohammed’s case, tortured to death. The son of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to twenty-two years of imprisonment last year; he has since been released and rearrested and released again, partly no doubt to show who is in charge. Another former friend of mine, Mazen Zahawi, was Saddam Hussein’s interpreter until shortly after the Gulf War, when he was foully murdered and then denounced as a homosexual. I have known many regimes where stories of murder and disappearance are the common talk among the opposition; the Iraqi despotism is salient in that such horrors are also routine among its functionaries. Saddam Hussein likes to use as envoys the men he has morally destroyed; men who are sick with fear and humiliation, and whose families are hostages. (Christopher Hitchens)
I hope I’ve given a satisfactory answer to Zainab Al-Badry.
To summarize my general position:
Saddam Hussein plays to win. He has manipulated and deceived the United Nations for the last decade, splitting it so that it cannot hinder his ambition. He has repeatedly stated that he intends to revenge himself against the US and Israel, and facilitate the creation of a pan-Arab state that will be the premier power the world. He already manifestly has biological and chemical weapons, and is very close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, if he hasn’t got one already. These weapons are very easy to hide, especially in a country as vast as Iraq; and we know enough about Saddam to foresee that this is what he will do if UN weapons inspectors return. (The citations supporting this are in Saddam Hussein and the Heart of Darkness.)
The mistake we’re making is the typical empiricist flaw: we believe that if we cannot see a smoking gun, then it cannot exist. We have lost the ability to imagine people’s true appearance – what another person actually looks like through the outlines they leave behind. (Not merely conjuring their surface appearance, which is the surface they want us to see.)
Under the brilliant blue spring sky, we are not even interested in recording the outlines. Thus we place ourselves at the mercy of one who might be willing our destruction.
Saddam Hussein’s will for destruction has forced us into a horrific moral dilemma.
If we don’t act soon, when we are relatively powerful, we may be condemning free civilization to oblivion. But if we act now, many, many people may die.
Do we resist assimilating evidence against Saddam Hussein, and deny that he intends to establish a pan-Arab nuclear dominion in the Middle East while exacting “revenge” against the US and Israel, because we want to avoid the horror of the choice and responsibility that would entail?
And if you think that Saddam’s stated ambition does not amount to much of a threat, please account for the consistent and dense matrix of signs over the last six years that clearly outline his intention to fulfil that ambition.
Do not trust any journalist or commentator who does not take such an account seriously.
* * *
Postscript
The news article appeared about 1.30pm Saturday in Der Spiegel. Four hours later, it appeared in the BBC News website. Twenty hours after Der Spiegel, the story hit Australia and appeared on the ABC website. Both the Australian and the Herald are carrying it in their Monday editions, while at the ABC it didn’t make it to a “top story”.
According to the Anatolia news agency, Turkish authorities had arrested two men who were transporting 15.7kg of weapons-grade uranium in a lead canister under the seat of a taxi. They were stopped near the Syrian border, 250km from Iraq. The uranium was thought to originate from an ex-Soviet bloc country.
I had just finished writing the following paragraph:
We must think of oil not just because of the Americans, but because oil can become Saddam’s weapon once he gains a nuclear device which he can then use to threaten the countries around him and impose his will. This can be within 18 months if he is supplied with weapons-grade fissile material today. In the mafia economies of Eastern Europe, how long will it be before some muttra or politician chooses instant wealth over the lives of millions?
An objective news organisation – one which has not ruled out in advance the possibility that indications suggesting Saddam is attempting to fulfil his ambition, as described above – would have recognised the significance of this story immediately, and given it serious billing, regardless of the fact that it came from the Turkish news agency.
It is a frightening story. But if you do not understand the background, if you have not made it a point to understand Saddam Hussein’s point of view, then it sounds like just another smuggling bust.
15kg is the text-book figure for the approximate amount of weapons-grade uranium required to make a single atomic bomb, particularly with the advanced design the Iraqis have. (The Australian, in “Uranium Raises Saddam Link” (30/9), quotes the wrong figure: “The atomic bomb used on Hiroshima in 1945 contained about 25kg of weapons-grade uranium.” They should have checked a physics book, not a history book. And they should have been up to date with Iraqi atomic bomb design.)
Two paragraphs in Kenneth Pollack’s New York Times article, “He’s too unreasonable for deterrence” (28/9), stand out:
“In August 1990, after he realized that America might challenge the invasion of Kuwait, he ordered a crash program to build one nuclear weapon, which came close to succeeding. (It failed only because the Iraqis could not enrich enough uranium in time.) His former chief bomb-maker has said that Saddam intended to launch the bomb as a revenge weapon at Tel Aviv if his regime were collapsing.
Iraqi defectors and other sources report that Saddam told aides after the war that his greatest mistake was to invade Kuwait before he had a nuclear weapon, because then America would never have dared to oppose him…”
Has Tel Aviv been saved because of the actions of a few alert Turkish security personnel?
But wait! Just as knowledge causes us to take fright, scientific knowlege, in this case, also allows us to relax for a while. For there’s no way any dealer would have risked seeing $10 million vaporized in an instant by packing a critical mass of enriched uranium in such a small space. The standard practice is to break it up into distinct lumps and to keep these far apart.
Either the figure of 15.7kg is wrong, or the uranium is not weapons-grade.
But the angst felt at the initial reading of the likely false news provided the spur to read Kenneth Pollack’s article more closely, and to understand Saddam Hussein a little better. So here’s the article, originally in theNew York Times.
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He’s too unreasonable for deterrence
By Kenneth M. Pollack, Saturday, September 28, 2002
Saddam the miscalculator
The writer, a former CIA analyst of the Iraqi military, is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and author of “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.”
WASHINGTON: Some have suggested relying on deterrence to deal with Saddam Hussein. They admit that the containment regime which constrained Iraq during the 1990s has frayed beyond repair, but they argue that Saddam can be kept in check by American threats to respond to any new Iraqi aggression with force – including nuclear bombardment, if necessary.
Certainly deterrence is a seemingly reasonable alternative to war; after all, it worked with the Soviet Union for 45 years. Unfortunately, those who seek to apply it to Iraq base their views on a dangerous misreading of Saddam.
Proponents of deterrence argue that he will not engage in new aggression, even after he has acquired nuclear weapons, because he is not deliberately suicidal and so would not risk an American nuclear response. But Saddam is often unintentionally suicidal – that is, he miscalculates his odds of success and frequently ignores the likelihood of catastrophic failure.
Saddam is a risk-taker who plays dangerous games without realizing how dangerous they truly are. He is deeply ignorant of the outside world and surrounded by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear. When Yevgeni Primakov, a Soviet envoy, went to Baghdad in 1991 to try to warn Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, he was amazed to find out how cut off from reality Saddam was. “I realized that it was possible Saddam did not have complete information,” Primakov later wrote. “He gave priority to positive reports … and as for bad news, the bearer could pay a high price.” These factors make Saddam difficult to deter. His calculations are based on ideas that do not necessarily correspond to reality and are often impervious to outside influences. In 1974, for example, he attacked the Kurds even though Iran had been arming and supporting them (with American and Israeli support). He believed, for reasons unknown, that Iran would do nothing to help its proxies. The shah responded decisively, sending troops into Iraqi Kurdistan, mobilizing his army and provoking clashes along the border. To stave off an Iranian invasion that he feared would end his regime, Saddam signed the humiliating Algiers accord, which gave Iran everything it wanted from Iraq, including contested territory.
In 1980 Saddam attacked Iran under the misguided assumption that the new Islamic Republic was so unpopular that it would collapse after one good shove. He embroiled Iraq in a war that nearly destroyed his own regime.
In 1991, rather than withdraw from Kuwait and head off a war, he convinced himself that the American-led coalition would not attack and that even if it did his army would win. The best evidence that Saddam can be deterred comes from the 1991 Gulf War, when he refrained from using weapons of mass destruction because of U.S. and Israeli threats of nuclear retaliation. But a closer look at the evidence provides a more ominous lesson.
When Secretary of State James Baker met with Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the war, the letter he presented from President George H.W. Bush to Saddam threatened the “severest consequences” if Iraq took any of three actions: use of weapons of mass destruction, destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields or terrorist action against the United States. This did not stop Saddam from destroying the oil fields or dispatching hit teams to the United States, so the notion that he is easily deterrable is dubious.
Saddam did not use chemical munitions against coalition ground forces because he initially believed that he did not need them to prevail. Nevertheless, he did keep stockpiles farther back from the front, suggesting that he planned to use them if the battle did not go as he expected. As it happened, the coalition’s ground advance was so rapid that Iraq’s forces never had a chance to deploy those weapons.
A better case can be made that Saddam was deterred from launching Scud missiles tipped with chemical or biological agents at Israel for fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation. But even here the evidence is hardly perfect.
After the war, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that Iraqi engineers knew that their warheads were awful and probably would have done little damage if they had worked at all. For this reason, Saddam might have considered the conventionally armed Scuds to be the most potent arrows in his quiver.
After the Gulf War, UN inspectors and Iraqi defectors revealed a set of secret plans and orders issued by Saddam, which are disturbing at best.
He had set up a special Scud unit with both chemical and biological warheads that was ordered to launch its missiles against Israel in the event of a nuclear attack or coalition march on Baghdad. Since no one outside Iraq knew about this unit and its orders, it was clearly intended not as a deterrent but simply as a force for revenge.
In August 1990, after he realized that America might challenge the invasion of Kuwait, he ordered a crash program to build one nuclear weapon, which came close to succeeding. (It failed only because the Iraqis could not enrich enough uranium in time.) His former chief bomb-maker has said that Saddam intended to launch the bomb as a revenge weapon at Tel Aviv if his regime were collapsing.
Iraqi defectors and other sources report that Saddam told aides after the war that his greatest mistake was to invade Kuwait before he had a nuclear weapon, because then America would never have dared to oppose him. What all this suggests is that if Saddam is able to acquire nuclear weapons, he will see them as tools to achieve his goals – to dominate the Arab world, destroy Israel and punish the United States. He will brandish them to deter the United States from interfering in his efforts to conquer or blackmail neighboring countries.
Both invasion and deterrence carry serious costs and risks. But a well-planned invasion, one that mustered overwhelming force and the support of key allies, could keep those risks to a minimum. Staking hopes on a policy of deterrence would run the much greater risk of postponing the day of reckoning to a time of Iraq’s choosing.
Given Saddam’s history of catastrophic miscalculations and his faith that nuclear weapons can deter not him but America, there is every reason to believe that the question is not one of war or no war, but rather of war now or war later – a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them.