World War II, many historians have argued, was an unnecessary war. It was the consequence, so the argument goes, of short-sighted and pusillanimous policies followed, for different reasons, by the leaders of the two Great Powers of Europe who alone had the power to stop Hitler in his tracks. They did not do so because, in the final analysis, their nerve failed, because the specter of another world war, following the slaughter of 1914-18, was simply too horrible to contemplate. In the end, however, the policies of 1936-38, driven by these fears, made inexorable the very outcome which had been most dreaded.
Whatever the cogency of these arguments, it still remains true that Germany was a first-class military and industrial power, and the policies of its rivals and opponents, however well-conceived and executed, might not have dissuaded a regime hellbent on expansion by aggression from pursuing adventurous courses.
If there is something to the argument that the 1939 war was unnecessary, then it has to be said that the Gulf War of 1991 was doubly unnecessary. Doubly so because, unlike Germany, Iraq is far from being a first-class industrial and military power. The armaments it was able to accumulate were mainly purchased abroad, or manufactured locally with foreign help. The enormous military establishment it developed and sustained was paid for not out of the productivity of the Iraqi economy, but from the ransom exacted by oil-bearing countries following the OPEC coups of 1973 and 1979. The enormous sums garnered by Iraq from the sale of oil at exorbitant prices were disposed of at their unfettered pleasure by the handful of Ba’thist conspirators who had hijacked the Iraqi state in 1968, and who by thuggish methods continued to keep it under their absolute control.
It follows, hence, that responsibility for the crisis which erupted with the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 lies that much more heavily on the policies which various powers chose to follow vis-à-vis Iraq: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which spent very large sums to enable Saddam Hussein to continue the war against Iran which he had begun in 1980; France, and to a lesser extent other arms exporters, which as early as the mid-1970’s blithely, indeed furiously, exchanged the latest military aircraft, tanks, torpedo boats, and missiles for (recycled) petrodollars; the Soviet Union, which, even earlier, concluded a treaty of friendship with the new regime, and also supplied it with quantities of weapons, even though, when the crunch came, they proved a broken reed; and, above all, the United States, which came to be the predominant power in the area and which, possibly as early as 1980, during the dying days of the Carter administration, began its “tilt” toward Saddam Hussein—a tilt which leaned so far toward him that it ended by looking uncommonly like an embrace.
The justification for this tilt was, of course, Khomeini’s “fundamentalist” regime in Iran. The regime was very unfriendly toward the U.S. and, in holding U.S. diplomats hostage for more than a year, showed itself contemptuous of civilized usages and given to barbarous habits. This justifiably aroused feelings of resentment and hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. What, however, created great concern was the fear that the fundamentalism which Khomeini preached would create an irresistible wave which could overwhelm the region, destroy friendly regimes, and ruin American interests.
The sequel showed that this panic had little basis to it. Lebanon excepted, Khomeinism outside Iran was everywhere a failure. That it flourished among the Lebanese Shiites is explained by the Lebanese civil war, which had been raging since 1975 and which had seriously destabilized and shaken from its moorings a hitherto traditional community, as well as by the complicity of Syria, which provided bases from which Iranian Revolutionary Guards could organize, train, and control armed groups of Shiites, in the illusory hope that out of the Lebanese turmoil would arise an Islamic Republic of Lebanon.
Elsewhere—in Iraq where Shiites are a majority; in Bahrain where they are also a majority; in Kuwait where they form an important group in the population; in Saudi Arabia where they predominate in the Eastern oil-bearing provinces—there proved to be little prospect of Khomeini-style regimes establishing themselves. Nor is this hindsight. In the first place, Iran did not—does not—have the capacity or the resources to control, let alone rule, unfamiliar Arabic-speaking populations, even though those happen to be Shiites. For in the second place, the Shiites of Iraq or other Arab countries have little familiarity or affinity with Iranian Shiites.
Thus, even if Iran had won the war triggered in 1980 by Saddam’s seizure of a piece of its territory, it by no means follows that a successor regime in Baghdad would have exposed the area to dangers so great that Saddam would at all costs have had to be preserved. The arguments in favor of a pro-Saddam policy were, and remain, ill-founded and delusive. Radical Islamic fundamentalism may have been, by reason of its pretensions and ambitions, as well as of its rousing millenarian appeal, highly dangerous. So, however, was the ideology of the Ba’th with its pan-Arab ambitions and its equally millenarian demagogy. Why should a Nasser or a Saddam inciting Arab masses be preferable to a Khomeini inciting Muslim masses?
The preservation of Iraq as a state within its existing boundaries was, again, argued to be imperative for regional stability. Ever since its independence in 1932, however, Iraq time and again has itself fomented regional instability, as when it helped the Arab rebellion in Palestine, and sought to annex Kuwait, in the 1930’s; as when it sought to give the Axis powers a Middle Eastern base in 1941; as when it organized plots and intrigues aimed at destabilizing Syria in the 1950’s; as when it sought again to seize Kuwait in 1961; and as, finally, when Saddam attacked Iran in 1980 and invaded Kuwait in 1990.
To be partial to the kind of ideological politics which has brought about such dangers and disasters, to find it less threatening than Khomeini’s ideological politics, is most puzzling. It argues the persistence over decades in the official world of a belief in the benign character of Arab nationalism. The origins of this belief are both complex and obscure. There is little doubt, however, that it has been continuously and assiduously inculcated within universities and other influential precincts, decade after decade, by many Orientalists, notably by the old-established and far-flung firm of Sir Hamilton Gibb and Sons, principal purveyors of this kind of mental baggage.
To have tilted toward Iraq also argued a belief that Iraq’s friendship was bought cheaply at the price of Iranian hostility; yet, all things considered, Iran is in so many respects a much more important country than Iraq for the U.S. to have on its side. It is much more populous and extensive than Iraq, it abuts directly on the Soviet Union, and, not being Arab, cannot take part in the dangerous and destructive games of pan-Arab politics. How much more prudent, therefore, to have stood on the sidelines in the Iran-Iraq war, or to have wished both sides the best of luck.
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Much information has by now come to light which shows the indulgence with which the U.S. treated Iraq during the last decade. Secret data gathered by satellite and surveillance aircraft concerning Iranian military dispositions seem to have been passed on to the Iraqis. Iran’s efforts to counter Iraqi attacks on oil tankers sailing the open seas were hamstrung by the presence of a large U.S. naval force, and by the U.S. reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers. The use by Iraq of poison gas on the battlefield was condoned, even though it was in contravention of an international convention to which Iraq was a signatory. Gas was also used against Iraqi Kurds and on that occasion the Iraqi Defense Minister publicly declared that for every insect there is an insecticide.
April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who quoted this remarkable declaration in her recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also said that she believed at the time that sanctions, which were then mooted in Congress as a response to the gassing of the Kurds, “would have resulted in the withdrawal of our diplomatic mission ultimately from Baghdad.” “My point was,” she went on, “by staying there we could undertake diplomatic activity. It is very difficult as we all know to undertake diplomatic activity if you’re not present and you don’t have access to the host government.” To the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Glaspie explained that her presence on the spot fortunately enabled her, even though it took her weeks to do so, to get a pledge “that they wouldn’t do it again, but”—she triumphantly added—“we got it. We did get it. And I don’t think we would have got it if we’d left.”
April Glaspie told of another accomplishment. After three years of hard work she at last succeeded in obtaining compensation for the families of sailors who had died when, in 1987, the USS Stark suffered an unprovoked attack by an Iraqi warplane. The incident was handled with tender understanding, to the point that it was Iran which attracted blame for the attack.
We have also learned (New York Times, April 10, 1991) that $1.5 billion worth of products with military applications were authorized for export to Iraq between 1985 and 1990. In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dennis E. Kloske, Under Secretary for Export Administration in the Department of Commerce, alleged that in April 1990 he had asked for an embargo on the export of those products to Iraq but that “the State Department adamantly opposed my position, choosing instead to advocate the maintenance of diplomatic relations with Iraq.” We do not, of course, know whether this disagreement relates only to April 1990, or whether Commerce and State had been earlier of one view in approving such exports to Iraq.
Nor is the rationale for this policy in any way mysterious. By the mouth of John Kelly, its Assistant Secretary for the Near East and South Asia, the Department of State testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also in April 1990, that the policy “has been to attempt to develop gradually a mutually beneficial relationship in order to strengthen positive trends in Iraq’s foreign and domestic policies.” There was a great deal more to this effect.
The policy clearly failed, but not through bad luck or unforeseen developments. Rather, because it plainly rested on a serious misjudgment of the character of the regime and of the ambition of its leader—a misjudgment which lasted for a decade, which no evidence could seemingly shake, or at least induce to reappraise. The failure was too prolonged to be ascribed to this or that officeholder: it was institutional. As such it invites comparison with a similar colossal failure in Britain, where during 1936-37 a policy on Palestine was invented in the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, and was valiantly persisted in until the debacle of May 1948, when a civilized and relatively powerful government simply decided to abandon ignominiously a territory, for which it had been responsible for 30 years, to the barbarous arbitrament of war.
All that has transpired since the invasion of Kuwait goes to indicate that Saddam took the Bush administration by surprise. This, to the onlooker, is itself no surprise given Washington’s decade-long mindset. One has, however, to say that even so the administration had no right to be surprised. Leaving aside its judgment of the character and intentions of the Iraqi regime, there were other elementary and general considerations which should have started alarm bells ringing, following the Iran-Iraq ceasefire in the summer of 1988. When the British abandoned the Persian Gulf in 1971, such balance of power as remained in the region was due to the fact that the two largest states, Iran and Iraq, acted as a counterweight to each other. Khomeini’s triumph in 1979 and his subsequent devastation of the Iranian army greatly weakened this balance, and the U.S. tilt toward Iraq gave it the coup de grâce. Gravity is not trifled with, and water will find its level, so that, even if Iraq had been ruled by angels, the radical undoing of the balance between 1971 and 1988 was bound to create an extremely perilous situation.
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The mirror-image of the administration’s surprise at Saddam’s action was Saddam’s own surprise at the administration’s reaction to his move. Nothing that had happened between 1980 and literally the very eve of the invasion—when the administration was still adamantly resisting the sanctions which some members of Congress wished to impose on Iraq—would have led Saddam to expect that the U.S. would, in short order, array a stupendous military force against him and unleash it with immense destructive effect. He, however, unlike the administration, was fully entitled to be surprised. A man who, on his way to the top, had negotiated many perilous passages with a single-minded and unscrupulous ruthlessness, rightly judged that actions spoke louder than words, and what U.S. actions he had observed must have seemed contemptibly wimpish and limp-wristed. He said and implied as much in his first and last interview with April Glaspie. His skepticism about U.S. resolve proved unexpectedly wrong, to his own—perhaps temporary—undoing. Now that his enemy has in the aftermath of Desert Storm in effect again become his protector, however, he may console himself with the thought that he was right after all: that unfortunate as it was, Desert Storm was an exception—the exception which proves the rule.
Desert Storm ended abruptly. We know next to nothing about the debates, the calculations, the influences which bore on the sudden decision to halt the destruction of the Ba’thist regime, or about the negotiations between General Schwarzkopf and the Iraqis. After the event, General Schwarzkopf declared that he would have liked to go on. He then retracted his statement. He also said that he had been “suckered” into allowing helicopter flights which the Iraqis had asked permission to make, allegedly for administrative purposes. This statement he did not retract. If he had been “suckered,” why then did he not stop the flights when he discovered that helicopters were being used to put down the uprisings which the administration had previously encouraged? There was also a flurry of warnings by the administration that poison gas should not be used inside Iraq, and the helicopters should not be used to attack the civilian population. If these warnings were seriously meant, then the U.S. had ample means of enforcing them.
The result of all these acts of commission and omission has been that Saddam was able to crush opposition to his rule, to kill who knows how many of his subjects, and to make millions of others into homeless and destitute refugees. The justification given for this cruel policy, and for heartlessly persisting in it when its consequences became manifest, was that the integrity of Iraq had to be preserved, and that changing the Iraqi regime was the responsibility not of the U.S., but of the Iraqi people. It is the U.S., however, which allowed the tanks, the helicopters, and the soldiers to escape and be used by a ruler whom no law can restrain, and no popular suffrage can dismiss from office.
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Even assuming that maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq is a vital U.S. interest, defending this interest by enabling Saddam to remain in power may exact too high a price not only from the luckless inhabitants of Iraq, but from the U.S. as well. Here, analogies with past events again present themselves to the mind. When the Allies landed in North Africa in November 1942, Admiral Darlan was in Algiers. For a brief moment it looked as though this man, tainted by his record in Vichy and his relations with the Nazis, would be recognized as the French authority with whom the U.S. would deal in respect of these French territories. None can say what consequences would have followed in French politics, in the relations between France and the U.S.—whose representatives had anointed Darlan—and for the good repute of the U.S., had not Darlan’s assassination shortly afterward mercifully brought to an end a misguided and disastrous policy. In the present instance it will not fail to be said, with good reason, that having for months held Saddam up to the execration of mankind, the U.S. was now enabling him, for tenebrous and perhaps unavowable reasons, to survive and continue in power. What had started out by being a war in a good cause would now be tarnished by the catastrophic sequels of a policy the rationale for which is alembicated and highly obscure.
Another analogy. Iraq as it exists today is an invention of British policy in 1920-21. It was formed following a rebellion in the summer of 1920 by Shiite tribes in the middle Euphrates, with the encouragement and complicity of Iraqi Sunni officers who were part of an Arab regime set up, financed, and armed by the British in neighboring Syria. The Shiite uprising was put down shortly afterward. A few months after that, however, the same Sunni officers who had encouraged the rebellion from Syria were brought to Baghdad and installed in office by the very British against whom they had fomented the rebellion. It seemed to the Shiites that while they had borne the brunt of the fight against the British and been severely punished for it, their Sunni confederates, instead of being similarly punished, had actually been rewarded, and they themselves were now subject to the unfettered and arbitrary rule of members of a group which had been their traditional oppressor. Instead of the gratitude they expected, the British had to confront in the state which they had invented bitter accusations of deviousness and treachery which have lasted to this day.
Before Desert Storm was unleashed, many voices were raised to warn that an attack on Saddam Hussein would release a flood of anti-American feelings in the Arab and Muslim world. In the event, while the war lasted there was, by and large, very little to justify such alarms except among those populations whose governments or leaders for one reason or another had supported Saddam.
American action was seen to be clean-cut, decisive, and justifiable. American arms, above all, had gained a swift victory over an army inept in battle, but adept at oppressing and looting helpless civilians. The U.S., then, was a power whose purposes were clear and clearly executed.
What is the Arab and Muslim world to make of the volte-face which so swiftly succeeded the victory? Trust, naturally, will be destroyed. The generality of people, whose minds do not match the subtlety and complexity of Washington policy-makers, will fail to comprehend how such an enemy could be spared, and will fear that behind the imposing military prowess there lurks the canker of uncertainty and the risk of undependability; not a party to go tiger-hunting with. Saddam will seem like one of those legendary heroes who, encompassed by dragons, emerges unscathed from the ordeal, and anti-Americanism will receive a mighty boost. One recalls Nasser triumphant after Suez.
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The abstention of U.S. forces while Iraqi helicopters and tanks were killing Shiites and Kurds recalls other Middle Eastern episodes, of a sinister kind. In the 20th century the Middle East has been the stage of many wars, in which took part Western armies whose credo was that armed conflict had to be subject to certain rules which regulated the conduct of warfare and the behavior of armed forces toward the enemy and toward civilians affected by the operations of war. In particular, it was recognized that duty and honor alike required an army to protect civilians from anarchy and lawlessness. For many reasons it was not always possible to discharge this obligation. And it has happened a few times that, out of some political calculation or other, army commanders have deliberately looked the other way when civilian life and property were put at risk by reason of war.
Before the present events in Iraq, the most recent incident which produced a worldwide outcry took place in 1982 at Sabra and Shatilla, where the victorious Israeli army encamped outside Beirut failed to act when the Lebanese Phalange descended on these Palestinian quarters to carry out an indiscriminate massacre. But nobody in Israel seriously contended that this was anything but a blot on an army which had hitherto prided itself on the purity of its arms.
Sabra and Shatilla had precursors. In 1945, while Tripoli in Libya was under British military administration, the Jews were the victims of an attack by a mob which led to many hundreds being killed and much property destroyed. The military authorities, whether out of negligence or because of some obscure political calculation, did not act to suppress the disorder until too late. If it was negligence, then it was criminal negligence, and if cynical calculation, then nothing was gained by this act of omission.
In may 1941, following a pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad, Britain and Iraq became involved in hostilities. British troops occupied the port of Basra and the Iraqi administration withdrew from the city, which was thus delivered to rapine. On General Wavell’s order, the local British commander refused to order his troops to stop the mob which was on the rampage, and the local British consul adamantly refused all pleas to intervene. The reason for this mean-spirited and dishonorable conduct was that Wavell believed that if British troops stayed on the sidelines, they would not be accused of wishing to supplant the Iraqi government—a government which was then doing its best to damage British interests and fan anti-British sentiment.
Some two weeks later, the Iraqi army collapsed, and British troops were at the gates of Baghdad. They were forbidden from entering the city by the British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, in the belief that if British troops did not show their faces, then the prestige and stability of the government which was to succeed that of the failed coup would be preserved and strengthened. The calculation was as foolish as Wavell’s, and the action as mean-spirited and dishonorable. It resulted in the murder of some 600 Jews, accused by the mob of being pro-British, and the destruction and looting of a great deal of property.
At the end of September 1918, British troops were at the gates of Damascus. Their commander, General Allenby, forbade all troops, except the so-called Northern Arab Army, to enter the city. It was thus intended to show that Damascus had fallen to Arab forces, and that their leader, the third son of the Sharif of Mecca, should be installed at the head of an Arab administration, so that the French claim to the territory might be foiled. The result, again, was to deliver the city to the horde of Bedouins and Druzes who had been dignified by the title of Northern Arab Army and who went on the rampage and compelled British troops to intervene. A few months later, while British troops were still occupying Syria, a mob fell on Armenians in Aleppo. The Arab administration which had been set up, financed, and armed by the British, was either unable or unwilling to confront the mob, and British troops in the vicinity allowed the disorder to go unhindered, again, presumably, lest the prestige of the Arab administration be hurt.
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It is in this dismal perspective that one has to place the fatal American decision to stop the fighting before the regime in Baghdad had asked to surrender, and the even more fatal decision to permit it to use helicopters and armor, which had been allowed to escape destruction, against its own population. These decisions are said to have been motivated by the desire to preserve the integrity of the Iraqi state. Why the integrity of a state with such a continuous record of violence and malfeasance should have been thought worth preserving is quite mysterious. And who says that an Iraq which has preserved its integrity is less of a menace than one in which Baghdad’s despotic and terrorizing rule has been dismantled? In such a grisly cost-benefit analysis, the cost is heavy and visible, the benefit shadowy and illusory.
