Foreign Policy By Catharsis: The Failure of U.S. Policy Toward Iraq.

• Author: Zunes, Stephen

TEN YEARS AFTER THE GULF WAR, U.S. policy toward Iraq continues to suffer from an over-reliance on military solutions, an abuse of the United Nations and international law, and a disregard for the human suffering resulting from the policy. Furthermore, it has failed to dislodge Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. The GulfWar coalition built by the first Bush Administration is in tatters, U.S. credibility has been further compromised in the international community in general and in the Arab world in particular, and Saddam Hussein's standing in Iraq and throughout the region has been enhanced. Meanwhile, problems which threaten the stability of the region far more than the Iraqi dictator -- such as the violent interruption of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, uneven economic development, and the ongoing militarization of the region -- continue to grow, in part due to U.S. policies.

Despite initial hopes that the new Bush team would be more pragmatic than the ideologues who dominated the Clinton Administration policy towards the Gulf, it appears at this writing that it is unlikely that such a shift will take place. Though Colin Powell's advocacy of what he refers to as "smart sanctions" are a tacit admission of the need for change, they fail to address the underlying humanitarian, economic, strategic and political problems with the U.S. approach to Iraq and the Gulf as a whole.

This article examines U.S. policy towards Iraq in relation to the alleged strategic threat posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein to the region.

EARLY APPEASMENT

With antipathy towards Iraq so strong as to lead the United States to engage in an ongoing low-level bombing campaign and to lead the most devastating sanctions regime in modern history, it is perhaps surprising that the United States tolerated the abuses of Saddam Hussein's regime for as long as it did. Most of us familiar with the Middle East did not have to wait until Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Iraq to know that Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator. Many of the crimes committed by the Iraqi ruler now cited by U.S. officials as examples of the heinous nature of his regime were actually committed in the 1980s when the U.S. was quietly supporting Saddam in his war with Iran.

It is ironic that it was the senior George Bush who, as president, first emphasized how Saddam Hussein had "used chemical weapons against his own people." The March 1988 massacre at Halabja, where Saddam's forces murdered 5000 civilians in that Kurdish town with chemical weapons, was downplayed by the Reagan Administration, in which he was the vice-president, even to the point of claiming that Iran, then the preferred enemy of the U.S., was actually responsible. When ABC television correspondent Charles Glass revealed sites of Saddam's biological warfare programs in early 1989, the State Department denied the facts presented and the story essentially died. Glass recently observed that the State Department "now issues briefings on the same sites."

When a 1988 Senate Foreign Relations committee staff report brought to light Saddam's policy of widespread extermination in Iraqi Kurdistan, Senator Claiborne Pell introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act to put pressure on the Iraqi regime, but the Bush Administration successfully moved to have the measure killed. Indeed, even before the Halabja tragedy, U.N. reports in 1986 and 1987 documented Iraq's use of chemical weapons, which were confirmed both by investigations from the CIA and from U.S. embassy staff who had visited Iraqi Kurdish refugees in Turkey. However, not only was the United States not particularly concerned about the ongoing repression, the use of chemical weapons and the potential use of biological weapons, the U.S. was actually supporting the Iraqi government's procurement effort of materials necessary for the development of weapons of mass destruction.

During the 1980s, American companies, with U.S. government backing, supplied Saddam with much of the raw materials for Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program as well as $1 billion worth of components necessary for the development of missiles and nuclear weapons. A Senate committee reported in 1994 that American companies licensed by the U.S. Commerce Department had shipped large quantities of biological materials usable in weapons production in Iraq, some of which were later destroyed by U.N. inspectors. This report noted that such trade continued at least until the end of the decade, despite evidence of Iraqi biological and chemical warfare against Iranians and against Iraqi Kurds. (1) Much of this trade was possible because the Reagan Administration took Iraq off of its list of countries supporting terrorism in 1982, making them eligible to receive such items, despite Iraq's ongoing support of Abu Nidal and other terrorist groups. (2)

As late as December 1989, the Bush Administration pushed through new loans to the Iraqi government, in order to facilitate U.S.-Iraqi trade. (3) Meanwhile, according to a 1992 Senate investigation, the Commerce Department repeatedly deleted and altered information on export licenses for trade with Iraq in order to hide potential military uses of American exports. (4) Such policies raise serious questions as to why, if Iraq has really been such a danger to American security, the U.S. helped facilitate the development of its military capability and its acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

THE WEAK STRATEGIC CASE

The sudden reversal in perceptions regarding Iraq's potential threat is all the more ironic given that Iraq's military, including its potential and existing weapons of mass destruction, was significantly stronger in the late 1980s. Saddam then had his full complement of medium-range missiles, a functioning air force and a massive stockpile of chemical and biological weaponry and material. Yet successive U.S. administrations dismissed any potential strategic threat to the point of coddling Saddam's regime with overt economic subsidies and covert military support. Since then, the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent inspections regime have destroyed virtually any aggressive military potential by Iraq. UNSCOM has reported destroying 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of live chemical weapon agents, 48 missiles, six missile launchers, 30 missile warheads modified to carry chemical or biological agents and hundreds of related equipment with capability to produce chemical weapons. In late 1997, UNSCOM director Ric hard Butler reported that they had made "significant progress" in tracking Iraq's chemical weapons program and that 817 of the 819 Soviet-supplied long-range missiles had been accounted for. There were also believed to be a couple of dozen Iraqi-made ballistic missiles, but these were of questionable caliber. (5)

Iraq's armed forces are barely one-third their pre-war strength. Even though they have not been required to reduce their conventional forces, the destruction of weapons and economic difficulties have led to a substantial reduction of men under arms. The navy is virtually non-existent and the air force is just a fraction of what it was before the war. Why then, when Iraq had only a tiny percentage of its once-formidable military capability, did the U.S. suddenly start portraying Iraq as an intolerable military threat in 1998? It is no surprise, under these circumstances, that so many Americans, rightly or wrongly, suspected President Clinton of manufacturing the crisis to distract the American public from the sex scandal surrounding his office. Indeed, the December 1998 bombing began on the very day of his scheduled impeachment by the House of Representatives.

The Clinton Administration was never able to publicly present any credible evidence that Iraq even had biological weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the late 1990s which was used to justify U.S. air strikes, though Iraq has certainly in the past produced both chemical and biological agents and may indeed continue to do so, albeit at a greatly reduced capacity. UNSCOM inspections revealed evidence of the production of large amounts of biological agents, including anthrax, and have charged that Iraq had "vastly understated" the amount of biological warfare agents they had manufactured. In response, UNSCOM placed sophisticated monitoring devices to detect chemical or biological weapons, though these were dismantled after the bombing raids of December 1998 known as 'Operation Desert Fox'. (6) However, the mass production or deployment of such weapons would almost certainly be detected and destroyed in the unlikely event that Iraq was able and willing to advance production to a level that could be a m ajor threat to neighboring countries.

More importantly, there are serious questions as to whether the alleged biological agents could be successfully dispersed in a manner that could harm the civilian population, given the rather complicated technology required. For example, a vial of biological weapons on the tip of a missile would almost certainly be destroyed on impact or dispersed harmlessly. Frightening scenarios regarding mass fatalities from a small amount of anthrax assumes that the Iraqis have successfully cultivated the rare strain lethal to human beings (an anthrax bacillus is usually fatal to animals but rarely to humans) and have developed the highly sophisticated means of distributing them by missile or aircraft. To become a lethal weapon, highly concentrated amounts of the spores must be inhaled and then left untreated by antibiotics. Similarly, the winds would have to be just right, no rain could fall, the spray nozzles could not clog, the population would not be vaccinated and everyone would stay around the area targeted to be at tacked.

It is also hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft, presumably some kind of drone, would somehow be able to penetrate the air space of neighboring countries, much less all the way to Israel...