The September missile strikes on Iraq exemplify the strengths—and weaknesses—of the U.S. post-Cold War position. The recent crisis began when Iraqi troops entered a U.S.- sponsored Kurdish safe zone in northern Iraq, apparently at the invitation of a Kurdish leader who wished to oust his U.S.- backed rival.
Iraqi secret police arrested (presumably for torture or execution) hundreds of Kurds who had cooperated in U.S.-sponsored support programs. The United States saw a challenge that had to be answered. A mix of Tomahawks and conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs) delivered by Air Force B-52s struck Iraqi air defenses. At the same time, the no-fly zone over southern Iraq was extended north to the suburbs of Baghdad. Together, these actions were described as a “message.”
Saddam Hussein briefly challenged the extended zone, and an Iraqi radar that illuminated a U.S. F-16 was attacked with antiradar missiles. Iraqi troops eventually withdrew from Erbil, the main Kurdish center, but clearly the United States had lost its power to control events in that area. In late September, the U.S. government was characterizing Iraq, which had apparently largely rebuilt its army, as once again a serious threat to the Gulf states, and was seeking permission to base more aircraft in the area. Kuwait and Bahrain agreed, but Saudi Arabia did not.
The U.S. ground presence in Kuwait was augmented. Of the U.S.-led Gulf War Coalition, only Britain and, to a lesser extent, Germany, supported the U.S. strikes. Critics of the Clinton administration charged that it had sacrificed the Coalition to make a minor political point, largely for U.S. home consumption during an election campaign.
On a technical level, the Tomahawks performed well; as many as 90% may have hit and destroyed their targets. As in the Gulf War, the CALCMs, converted from nuclear-armed ALCMs (AGM-86s), did not do as well. They are designed to attack soft targets, using fragmentation warheads (steel spheres in explosive), and in this case they seem often to have been misused against hard concrete structures. In contrast. Tomahawks have a unitary warhead about half as heavy as that of a CALCM.
Unfortunately, the technical level is not what counts. From Saddam’s point of view, practically the only issue that matters is whether he can retain power. He does so by maintaining a ruthless secret police—and an army that routinely demonstrates his willingness to wipe out ethnic groups desiring some form of independence. The army is crucial to any Iraqi government, since three large and mutually opposed ethnic groups account for the bulk of the Iraqi population: the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center around Baghdad, and the Shi’ites in the south.
Saddam’s rule to date places the Sunni minority (about 25% of the population) above the others (the Shi'ites, who are religiously allied with the Iranians, are a plurality or a majority of the population). During the Gulf War, U.S. policy was to pressure Saddam by threatening the stability of Iraq, encouraging revolt in the north and the south.
This policy, which would have been very useful in a drawn-out total conflict, was less than attractive to important U.S. allies in the region. Turkey, Syria, and Iran all have substantial Kurdish minorities, and many Kurds would like to unite the Kurdish regions of these countries into a united country of their own. Each regime therefore has a somewhat schizophrenic view of the Kurds. Those in its own country are potential rebels, to be put down on nationalistic grounds. Those across the border are a means of putting pressure on the central government across the border.
Under the Shah, for example. Iran, Israel, and the United States all supported the Kurdish movement in Iraq as a way of sapping the strength of the main regional Soviet proxy. Then, in 1975, the Shah made a deal with Iraq, and suddenly the Kurds were betrayed. As for Iran, in 1946 the Soviets supported a Kurdish independence movement in northern Iran as a way of taking over that part of the country. Again, larger issues of state soon led to a sell-out.
The more open the country, the less subtle its diplomacy. To maintain its support for the Iraqi Kurds, the U.S. government very reasonably made public Saddam’s gruesome treatment of these people, including the widespread use of nerve gas. The U.S. public generally favors the underdog; whatever the arguments about whether a pro-Kurdish stand is expedient, it is now extremely difficult for the United States to withdraw its support. On the other hand, the same Kurds across the border in Turkey are under heavy attack for their independence movement. Turkey is a major U.S. ally—but U.S. support for Kurdistan cannot be popular there. Is it shocking that Turkey did not support U.S. operations designed to protect the Kurds?
The Kurds well know that whatever support they receive generally reflects not their own intrinsic virtue but rather their nuisance value. Saddam has two main external opponents, Iran and the United States, which, fortunately for him, are themselves opponents. For Saddam, the value of Iraqi Kurds is that they can build alliances with Kurds in Iran. The Iranians of course support anti-Saddam Kurds. As it happens, the United States also supports the latter. Of course, no particular Kurds are permanently anti- or pro-Saddam. Just as they are used as pawns, they try to use their patrons to advance their own fortunes. For example, the chief beneficiary of Saddam’s purge in Erbil is now interested in talks with the U.S. government. He probably expects Saddam to offer him a bit more in order to keep him from shifting allegiance.
Of course, it further complicates matters that the Kurdish area includes a major oil-producing part of Iraq, centered on Kirkuk.
From Saddam’s point of view, his freedom to support Kurdish factions (which in practice means killing other Kurds in large numbers) is central to remaining in power. That is not negotiable. It is certainly not to be surrendered short of some absolutely devastating threat, something far more impressive than a few destroyed air defense centers.
For its part, since 1990 U.S. policy has been remarkably consistent: there will be no real peace in the region until Saddam goes. Unfortunately, just how Saddam is to be made to go is not clear. To most countries in the region, serious support for Kurdish independence in the north suggests a policy aimed either at the break-up of Iraq or, at the least, of replacing the current dictatorship with something resembling representative democracy.
Either possibility undoubtedly terrifies the Gulf states. Either breakup or democratization would presumably transfer the lion’s share of Iraqi power to the majority Shi’ites in the south. They might or might not elect to join their country to Iran, but in either case the current Sunni rulers would probably find themselves under severe attack. Every Gulf state is Sunni-ruled, and has a troublesome Shi’ite minority looking north to Iran for leadership. The U.S. and Gulf state policy which supported Iraq during the long war with Iran was, after all, intended to prevent just such a Shi’ite victory.
These ethnic considerations raise a troubling possibility. Iraqi policy may be more than a direct consequence of Saddam’s unpleasant personality. The country’s inherent internal instability may generally cause its rulers to look to external conquest as a way of justifying their rule, perhaps the way Germany’s rulers tried to unify a rather varied country between 1866 and 1945. (On a larger scale, it may be interesting to ask what unifying enemy the various Middle Eastern governments will find as they make peace with Israel.) It may follow that the only sensible U.S. policy is to try to box Saddam in, depriving him of the forces he or a successor needs to repeat the Kuwait adventure of 1990. Incidentally, the Gulf states are unlikely to agree to disarm Saddam, since the same army which threatens them is also the main instrument of control over Kurds and Shi’ites, so to some extent Iraqi disarmament means disaster for their own regimes.
That brings us back to the missile strikes and their message. The obvious hope was that, seeing his air defenses so easily destroyed, Saddam would realize that his country was wide open to follow-on bombing attacks.
Unfortunately, again, Saddam is probably not altogether terrified by the memory of 1991. as least as it applies to the strategic attacks. They were intended to cripple the Iraqi economy and the Iraqi nuclear-chemical weapons programs. As in the campaign for destabilization, crippling the economy would have been quite relevant to a long war. It had little to do with the short war actually fought, since nothing Iraq produced during the war was likely to have much impact in the battle zone. Of course the deep interdiction campaign might have been important, but in fact the Iraqis had already massed enough in the battle zone to fight much longer than they were able to. Moreover, several years after the war it is clear that Iraq was able to rebuild, that the strategic campaign did not leave it a shattered country incapable of continuing to threaten its neighbors. Saddam may even see strategic bombing as a means of solidifying his support (Iraqis are likely to blame the United States, not Saddam, for the damage inflicted) and as a way of demonstrating to the world the evil intent of the United States.
As for the Gulf War, the Iraqi Army was booted out of Kuwait by quite conventional means. As it happened, the U.S. and Coalition ground and ground support striking forces worked so well that their war seemed effortless, whereas the sustained bombing offensive lasted long enough to seem vital (and to produce numerous impressive strike videos).
Then what does (or can) strategic air attack really buy? After World War I, an Italian military aviator, Giulio Douhet, argued that air power could shorten wars by attacking an enemy’s industry and population. Surely the suffering populace would force its government to capitulate in order to end its agony.
The other theory of strategic bombing, developed in the United States before World War II, was that precision attacks could wreck enemy industries and thus so weaken an enemy that its conventional forces could no longer be sustained in combat. Although the technology available during World War II could not meet such high expectations, it is at least reasonable to imagine that modern smart or brilliant weapons can approach this ideal, if they are available in sufficient numbers. Unfortunately, this type of attack is worthwhile only in the context of a protracted war. For example, the mining of Haiphong brought real dividends because the North Vietnamese were fighting an intense war, which they could not sustain without supplies from abroad.
So what is left? Can we send any sort of message to dictators like Saddam? Perhaps the answer is still a qualified yes, but only if we are more subtle. What matters is a threat to Saddam’s continued control. We cannot expect to threaten him personally, not least because it is very much against our policy to plan to kill foreign leaders (among other things, our own leaders reasonably fear personal retaliation). However, for example, we can target his secret police headquarters and the personnel in them. We can target the files the secret police must maintain to control potential threats to the regime. Such threats might be implemented with very limited numbers of Tomahawks or similar weapons.
If strategic air attacks can truly devastate a government, then operations that open a country to them send a terrifying message. A government so threatened ought to be willing to do almost anything to avoid attacks; On the other hand, a government which has survived strategic attack largely intact may be rather less impressed.
The idea of using a limited attack to send a message became popular during the Cold War, when the existence of nuclear weapons made it unlikely that superpower governments would cheerfully follow through with mass attacks. In the United States, for example, much was made of the “limited nuclear option” or “shot across the bow” which, executed relatively early in a limited European war, would tell the Kremlin that something much worse could follow. France fielded “pre-strategic nuclear weapons” precisely for this purpose.
Then the idea grew beyond its bounds. As the North Vietnamese approached Saigon in 1975, the head of a respected European think tank apparently asked his deputy what message the North Vietnamese were trying to send. The deputy, bereft of true sophistication, answered that they were preparing to occupy their enemy’s capital.
Surely we are a bit smarter than that.