In January, United Nations inspectors monitoring Iraqi disarmament reported some new Iraqi revelations, possibly intended to forestall statements likely to be made by recent Iraqi defectors, who claimed that in January 1991 they had been within three months of exploding a nuclear device, either in their own desert or against an enemy target.
They also claimed that they had gone much further than had previously been imagined in mass-producing biological weapons. It is hardly certain that anywhere near all the Iraqi sites and the weapons have been identified and destroyed.
At first it seemed that a chastened Iraqi government had shown the U.N. inspectors the program it had managed to hide before the war. Then other programs surfaced.
The Iraqi effort to develop weapons of mass destruction came to seem like an onion, and no one could say when the last layer would be reached. Indeed, the question often seems to be at which layer the U.N. will lose interest and abandon the search.
The Iraqi story is of more than regional interest, because a major theme of U.S. policy is to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The Gulf War, in one view, was as an attempt to enforce that policy by armed force. Readers may recall, for example, that Coalition briefers on the first night assured their audience that all Iraqi nuclear, chemical, and biological sites had been wiped out.
Once the war ended, the U.N. was able to inspect Iraq and to seek out elements of the Iraqi program. It soon developed that prewar information had been woefully inadequate; five years after the war ended, U.N. inspectors still are being surprised, both by what they are finding and by what the Iraqis have said.
In theory, the war left the Coalition both a carrot and a stick with which to convince the Iraqis to disarm. The carrot was the promise that eventually the oil embargo would be removed. Once that was done, Iraq could resume the international trade needed to modernize its economy. On the other hand, without the cash generated by oil, the Iraqi economy would clearly stagnate, causing substantial hardship.
The stick was the threat to resume war. At least in theory, the stunning Coalition victory demonstrated that the Iraqi armed forces were largely impotent. Again, in theory no one would have risked another Coalition attack. It seemed to follow that Sadaam Hussein, by far the most serious threat to attempts to contain nuclear—and other mass-destruction weapon—proliferation, would abandon his program.
None of this is or was as obvious as seems to have been imagined. From Sadaam’s point of view, actually possessing usable nuclear weapons is extremely attractive. He may well believe that the Coalition would not have attacked had he possessed his own decisive weapons. Even a credible claim that Iraq still has a viable nuclear program may seem, to Sadaam, to offer enormous advantages.
The Coalition reportedly let Sadaam know that any use of weapons of mass destruction (biological or chemical weapons) would be countered by nuclear attacks. That deterrent was widely credited with saving Coalition lives. Yet there also is evidence that Sadaam tried to deploy chemical weapons, and that the decisive counter was the physical destruction of Iraqi chemically-armed artillery pieces at the beginning of the ground offensive. Some believe that what has been called the Gulf War Syndrome resulted from actual Iraqi chemical attacks; others believe that the syndrome was a consequence of the widespread use of relatively untested antidotes to the Iraqi weapons.
For the Western powers, any Iraqi use of chemical weapons would be extremely embarrassing, since it would suggest that their own nuclear weapons lack deterrent value in the Third World. For example, Sadaam may simply have calculated, correctly, that the Western powers would never have incinerated Baghdad in response to attacks against their troops.
Given Sadaam’s own position within Iraq, it seems at least arguable that the only threat that would gain his attention would be a nearly direct threat against his life, e.g., by an ability to attack his deep bunkers directly, or by the destruction of the secret police that keep him in power. For example, it is unlikely that the U.S. Tomahawk attack on secret police headquarters, deliberately timed to avoid casualties, would have had much impact; the secret police personnel themselves were the important target.
Sadaam may consider the lifted-oil-embargo carrot of limited value. He has never ruled by popular consent, and his survival depends on the loyalty of his immediate associates and on his secret police. There is no evidence whatever that economic pressure felt by the mass of Iraqis will have much effect at this level; indeed Sadaam has been able to build several palaces since the end of the war.
On the other hand, he probably thinks that he has a good grasp of Western democratic practice. Before the war, he tried to manipulate Western opinion in several fairly crude ways; now, he probably believes that he can end the embargo by equating it with mass suffering among the Iraqi population. Recent statements by Louis Farrakhan, who visited Sadaam, would seem to be part of just such a campaign. Many Westerners probably unintentionally encourage Sadaam by stressing the likely effect of the embargo on Iraqi society, and by suggesting that recent defections from his inner circle are connected to that effect.
Sadaam has another lever. During the Iran-Iraq war, he bought weapons on a very large scale, often on what amounted to credit. The sellers were happy to provide the weapons because Iraq is an oil-rich country. Now it can be argued that the embargo has severely damaged countries like France and Russia, neither of which has much hope of having its large debt repaid unless the oil spigot is turned back on. Reports that Iraq is still able to obtain embargoed materiel from European countries suggests that many believe that the embargo will soon be lifted.
Then there is the stick—certainly, the wartime Coalition retains technological superiority. The massive forces that won the war, however, are no longer deployed in the region. Sadaam may reasonably doubt that those forces would reassemble.
Also, his own evaluation of his military defeat may be somewhat different from the current version in the West. The Iraqi defeat left Sadaam’s power base intact. Iraqi minorities who tried to rise after the war found that no one would prevent surviving Iraqi forces from crushing them. The no-fly rules imposed by the victorious Coalition did not include helicopters, which were decisive in the sort of civil war Sadaam then had to fight; he may have interpreted this lapse on the part of his wartime enemies as a wink in his direction.
At the time. Western commentators suggested that, even though Iraq had not been occupied, the actual experience of defeat, and the release of former Iraqi troops back to their villages, would undermine Sadaam’s authority. It also seems fair to say, however, that most Iraqis believed that the Coalition would win, and that they were not particularly surprised. Nor did this demonstration of unwisdom on Sadaam’s part have much impact. After all, the extreme pain of a very lengthy war with Iran, which arguably had far more impact on Iraqi society, does not seem to have endangered Sadaam.
To be sure, Sadaam has not been able to disregard the Coalition’s demands. Clearly, he would prefer to be rid of the oil embargo and the U.N. inspectors, and clearly he also would like to see the wartime Coalition go away. To that end, he has slowly and grudgingly retreated in the face of each new set of the inspectors’ demands.
On the other hand, he clearly aspires to regional power, which in turn requires him to be able to claim some special capability. It is possible that the recent revelations are intended, not so much to avoid more severe sanctions, but rather ultimately to impress the other Gulf states with Iraqi power.
The answers to these questions matter. According to a leaked planning memorandum, U.S. post-Cold War national strategy should be designed to preclude the rise of any further superpowers, or any additional regimes with nuclear, biological, or chemical capabilities. Strenuous efforts to promote the nuclear non-proliferation treaty fall into this category—as do attempts to control the trade in missiles and in nuclear technology.
A major theme of current research and development, for example, is to develop methods to locate secret weapons laboratories and caches, e.g., those buried under deserts. A current naval program seeks to catalog “fingerprints” of merchant ship radars, in hopes that shipments of weapons of mass destruction or their components can more easily be tracked. Much of the current tension between the United States and China can be traced to attempts to keep China from exporting long- range missiles.
Before and during the Operation Desert Storm, Sadaam was presented, at least in the United States, as uniquely evil, hence uniquely deserving of being unseated. When victory in the war amounted merely to the liberation of Kuwait rather than to the destruction of his regime, many Americans were deeply disappointed. Both the Bush and the Clinton administrations badly wanted Sadaam out of office, and saw economic pressure as a valuable lever.
It seems fairer to see Sadaam as a fairly typical Third World ruler. The word ruler is important, because to call him a national leader would be a major misunderstanding. Economic pressure has little effect on such a ruler, since the circle providing vital support is so small that its luxuries can easily be maintained.
The misunderstanding seems particularly odd since Sadaam’s position is not really too different from that of the old Soviet rulers or, for that matter, from surviving Communist rulers. In each case. Westerners imagined that, as in the West, the economic prosperity of the country as a whole was the main goal of government—when it is far more common for the main goal of government to be prosperity of the dictator himself.
By extension, threats to kill many citizens may have surprisingly little impact on the dictator, who may already have killed off a great part of his population to secure the acquiescence of the others.
All of this brings us back to the question of just what the war aim was five years ago. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the major Western powers had three choices. One was to refuse to take action. This was rejected, possibly partly because of fears that Iraq would soon become a nuclear power capable of dominating the Gulf. (Western support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War was intended to prevent Iran from becoming the single dominant Gulf power).
A second option included unilateral, more or less, action on the basis of direct ties between the United States and Britain and such Gulf states as Saudi Arabia. The third was to build a Coalition that included many Arab states.
The second option was probably rejected for fear that more or less unilateral Western intervention in the Arab world would cause enormous problems. One outcome might have been the downfall of the friendly Gulf governments, which easily could have been portrayed as tools of the West.
In 1990, it must have seemed that the third choice was by far the best, and that it would secure widespread support without having much affect on Western policy. After all, the U.N. did pass resolutions demanding not only that Iraq leave Kuwait, but also that it abandon any program of developing weapons of mass destruction. It also must have been clear, however, that the Arab coalition partners would not accept the occupation of Iraq by a Western-led army. Many may have hoped for Sadaam’s downfall, but few probably thought through what that would require.