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COMMENTARY
December 19, 2001
Dancing with Iraq
The media anticipation of American action against Iraq is dominated by a huge red herring. It is assumed that the U.S. must somehow prove Iraqi involvement in the terror strikes of 9/11 before "proceeding wisely". Whereas the thought seems only to cross the paths of the Bush administration during press conferences. And in those they consistently put it down. President Bush's war cabinet members placidly admit that the U.S. "might not" have evidence of direct Iraqi involvement in the WTC strike of 2001. They remind that they are sitting on plenty from the WTC strike of 1993 and from a number of other adventures including the attempt to assassinate the last President Bush when he visited Kuwait. That there were and are terror camps in Iraq is beyond reasonable disputing; juicy evidence of their connexions to the rest of the Islamic "terror international" is likely to have emerged from the rubble in Afghanistan. And the visible evidence such as the meeting of an Iraqi agent with the plane hijacker Muhammad Atta in Prague gives the gist of the story however it's explained. The Bush people are after all not consulting Alan Dershowitz before deciding their next move. As Mr. Powell told the Sunday TV shows the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime has been U.S. policy for a long time. The only questions have been how and when. The present is an excellent time and the "how" has become increasingly obvious from the U.S. operation in Afghanistan. Yet it is not the style of President Bush to foreclose upon his own options. Asked directly Will you attack Iraq? he explains that it is poor tactics to reveal one's intentions to the enemy. The time frame remains open and the argument for continuing with preparations while pursuing the "low hanging fruit" of Al Qaeda interests in e.g. Sudan Somalia Yemen and Mindanao is unanswerable. While I have no way of checking I have reason to believe that U.S. special forces are currently giving Yemen's army discreet help in clearing Al Qaeda spider's nests in the mountains and wadis of Marib province and the desert of Ramlat-as-Sab'atain -- far off to the east of San'a. More openly a major diplomatic effort is being made to establish U.S. basing in Kenya and Ethiopia for strikes in the Horn of Africa. U.S. military advisers are working in the Philippines against Muslim secessionists in the south who are only tangentially connected with Al Qaeda. And as Secretary Powell has now acknowledged there is a U.S. presence with the Kurds in northern Iraq which is almost certainly trying to tie the bonds the U.S. made with the Afghan Northern Alliance in the first moments of that war. From the better sort of quasi-intelligence sources one learns that something like a U.S. strategy for deposing Saddam has begun to form. My own guess (which the reader is free to discount at 100 per cent) is that they will reverse the order of the Afghan incursion put down U.S. special forces bases under the no-fly zones in both the Kurdish north and near Basra in the south which will resemble Camp Rhino to the south-west of Kandahar. This would leave Saddam (as Seymour Hersh argues in the New Yorker) with two choices either hide and let the Americans build up on Iraqi soil or send his best tank brigades to attack them. Either course is a sure loser: for the moment anything of Saddam's is exposed to the air it is lost. My one worry as I've stated before is that Saddam is just smart enough to strike first this time around against Israel and with some lethal weapon declaring himself for the Palestinian Intifada. It would bring about his demise more rapidly but at the cost of terrible collateral damage. The Israelis meanwhile have their own response including a new spy satellite and a variation on the Predator missile-armed reconnaissance drone designed to find and hit Scuds on their launching pads. It is this worry more than diplomatic constraints that is now governing U.S. preparations for Iraq. This and the fear of overloading a still-narrow command structure which would prefer to fight wars one at a time and which might also at any moment have to accommodate a war between India and Pakistan. The resources are there but it is nice to have the luxury of operations reporting through one line of command rather than the kind of matrix management that must follow from simultaneous fighting in several major theatres. Serial monogamy beats polygamy. But for the record what are the diplomatic constraints? The Russians have a really good reason for not wanting the Iraqi regime to fall. They are owed something in the order of $8 billion (U.S.) much of it for arms shipments over the years and when Saddam goes down so does all hope of collecting. Hence Vladimir Putin's very earnest efforts to compromise on a new oil-for-food arrangement that the U.S. might go along with; but hence also his enervating scepticism about the kind of "smart sanctions" that would eliminate the dual-use exports Russia must send to keep its debtor on the hook. The Europeans are characteristically jittery about any further advance in the Bush administration's unilateralism. The French especially also hold debts that only Saddam would pay. They are caught between the desire to utter warnings so stiff that the U.S. will heed them and their need for room to climb down when their warnings are ignored. In the Arab world it is country by country but the trend is all one way. The Egyptians and Saudis have learned how to make throat-clearing noises just like Europeans but after watching Afghanistan with horrified fascination have jumped ahead of the Europeans on the learning curve. Their outlook is fatalist. Since they know in their bones the U.S. will go into Iraq they are beginning to look on the bright side. Their neighbourhood would be improved by the removal of that particular thug. Arab diplomats in Washington have been heard murmuring against "the perfume of Baghdad" in contradiction to their official positions. This means the official positions can change. Syria though operating on the limited brainpower of one Bashar Assad a fruitcake Jew-baiter who trained as an ophthalmologist and now fills the shoes of Hafez his brutal but cowardly father is the frontline bell-wether. The regime is a gutless version of Iraq's housing and sponsoring terrorists when the risk levels are acceptable but surrendering them when the levels rise. (It was Syria that turned over the Kurdish revolutionist Abdullah Ocalan when the Turks began assembling troops on their northern border.) And as during preparations for the Gulf War in 1990-1 Syria is now performing somersaults to associate itself with the U.S. war against terrorism and making extra distance from the Saddam regime. But Turkey which except for Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that resembles a democracy in consecutive years is the ally the U.S. actually needs. And in a signal of latent enthusiasm Turkey's defense minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu now gets himself quoted in the New York Times saying We have said that we don't wish an operation in Iraq, but new conditions would bring new evaluations to our agenda. For Turkey as for other regional powers the "new conditions" are not actually plural. The one solid sticking point has been are the Yankees serious? For if they do sincerely intend to kill the snake not scotch him it is a whole new day. At that point even the Iranian ayatollahs remember all the scores they had to settle and relax into a sublime smile. They'd rather just watch than be involved and they'd like to see the Yankees take a few casualties but they look forward to a new Iraqi regime in which the country's Shia Muslim plurality will be much better represented. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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