17 February, 1998
America's agenda in the Gulf
By Martin Woollacott
THERE CAN BE no disguising the fact that we are dealing with fearful possibilities in the Gulf. Remote it may be, but what conceivably threatens there is that worst of 20th century nightmares, a war of mass destruction.
How else can we read Saddam's vow to "wage the greater jihad", Israel's announced determination to retaliate in full against any strike on its cities or America's announcement that its response to Iraqi use of chemical or biological weapons would be "swift, devastating, and overwhelming"?
These are mass destruction threats, this is deterrence in day- to-day and potentially deadly action. However slender the chances are that the threats will be carried out or the deterrence fail, even the faint possibility of such events means that governments should be utterly serious and honest in deciding the best course. This is not normal policy, with room for special interest, declarations of high principle or pleasure in the discomfiture of rivals or friends. We are not, in other words, playing games.
When Boris Yeltsin says that America could start a third world war, what he means is naturally not that Russia would ever contemplate a nuclear strike against the United States. That is yesterday's horror, not today's.
What he means is that nobody knows what a mass destruction exchange between Iraq and Israel, or Iraq and America, or all three, might lead to, how it might, for instance, pull in other regional states, some of which also have, or may have, similar weapons.
Even two or three of such weapons could kill great numbers of people, ruin the region and change the whole world for the worse. Since this is such dangerous ground, why is anybody treading on it? The answer is that the risk is not truly new, but only appears in more dramatic form because there is a possibility that America and Britain will attack Iraq.
It is a risk which, in a general way, has been with us since Middle Eastern states, beginning with Israel, began acquiring these weapons years ago, but which became more serious when Saddam used Iraq's wealth to get his own horrific tools of war. The eight-year long Iran-Iraq conflict was embryonically a war of mass destruction, the second Gulf war teetered on the edge. So the issue is not whether threatening Iraq with an attack increases this awful risk, but whether it increases it more or less than other policies.
In judging this hard question, it is important to avoid the black and white view that force is wholly bad and diplomacy wholly good. The two are intermingled, and not only in the sense that the one backs up the other. First, it is important to grasp that American policy is aimed not so much at the announced aim of restoring the inspection regime as at pushing Saddam back into the isolation from which he had begun to emerge. It is aimed, in fact, at separating Saddam from his friends.
The American squeeze is as much on Russia, France, China and the big Arab states as on Iraq itself. That squeeze is not, as incorrectly perceived, to join in or endorse a military attack but to produce the acceptable compromise on inspection that they claim is possible. Already the effort to wrest such a compromise from Saddam is producing irritation, and more than irritation, in Moscow, Paris and other capitals. The effect of the American threat, then, is to reintroduce Saddam's friends to his deeply untrustworthy nature. One Russian newspaper complained last week that Saddam's intransigence threatened to destroy Russian foreign policy's last shreds of credibility.
All roads lead to such disillusion. If the efforts of the many envoys - Russian, French and Arab - trying to come up with a formula to avoid conflict do produce one, and the US accepts it, the chances are very, very high that Saddam would soon renege on it, as he did with his "presidential sites" ploy over the last couple of months. Iraq's friends could hardly then return to their old line of urging a softening of both the inspection regime and of sanctions.
If there is an attack, on the other hand, the likely outcome would have Saddam, in its aftermath, refusing to countenance any inspection regime at all. Equally, in that situation, it is hard to see Russia and France and the others taking up the cudgels again for Iraq. It would mean an extraordinary break with the US, a break that would go far beyond the matter of Iraq. So the diplomatic end, with or without the use of force, of "re- isolating" the Saddam regime is clear.
It is reasonable, all the same, to argue that a short aerial campaign will not solve the problem represented by Saddam's refusal to accept adequate inspection. Yet that very fact enters into the calculations. Saddam is a cautious man of paranoid character who understands the US as a capricious power, sometimes unexpectedly passive in the face of provocation, sometimes unexpectedly ready to go all the way.
He and his henchmen must have noted the endless Washington discussions about the limited value of a short air campaign, but they will not necessarily have taken those as indicating that, whatever happens, they have nothing to lose. They will instead have been tuned in very intensely to the signals suggesting that the idea of bringing Saddam down for good is being seriously raised again, as it was in a recent letter by senior Republicans. They will have picked up on the talk about invasion and the lobbying of US Air Force advocates of "strategic air war", meaning an overwhelming, sustained campaign to smash the foundations of governmental power in Iraq. They will note the marine force now on its way to the Gulf.
What we in Western capitals see as options that are so politically difficult that they are highly unlikely to be taken up, Saddam and his group have to see as real possibilities. And, going back to the mass destruction risk, the Iraqis will have been alive to every word on retaliation coming from Washington and Tel Aviv.
Saddam must know he risks the revival of a full scale effort to remove him from power, even if the conflict remains conventional. If he used chemical or biological weapons, on Israel, on the Americans and British, or against Western targets on Arab territory, he would alter the nature of the struggle in many terrible ways, but one outcome would certainly be that he and his ruling elite would not physically survive. That is the kind of logic to which he has always responded in the past.
It can be said there is a good chance, therefore, that military action can be avoided, and, if it is nevertheless undertaken, only a small risk that it might tip over into a more intense conflict. That risk has to be set against the other risk, that of letting Saddam freely upgrade his mass destruction arsenal, including his nuclear arsenal, with all the possibilities that he might one day use it, represented by the alternative policy of modifying the inspection regime so that it becomes a nonsense.
Whatever happens, it is clear we are paying the price for much inattention, negligence and lack of will since 1991. In all the talk about President Clinton being a man of mixed character but a good president, it is forgotten that, under him, American foreign policy has seriously faltered, not least in the Middle East. Where once there was a coherent plan and worthwhile objectives to which the governments and peoples of the Middle East, the US, Russia and Europe could all to some extent subscribe, there came to be, instead, a muddle of ineffective policies. If Russia, France and China had grounds for their changed attitude to Iraq, it lies in this largely American failure.
Whichever risks we end up taking in the next few weeks, there has to be a new strategy for the Middle East, encompassing a tough-minded approach to Iraq's future, new moves on Iran and real pressure on Israel's obstructionist government. It does not matter whether it is provided by President Clinton or President Gore, but, without it, the risks we are supposedly guarding against in the Middle East will not only not go away but will also grow worse.-Dawn/Guardian Service