John F. Garofano ’82 submitted this opinion piece for the April BatesNews alumni and parent newsletter.
Foreign policy is always a question of choosing among bad options, and the Iraq dilemma is surely one of the most difficult confronting the U.S. in recent history. A war will cost U.S., allied and Iraqi lives and lead to a prolonged, possibly ugly occupation of the country, while its impact on the region and on the Arab-Israeli peace process is unclear. Yet disarming Saddam Hussein and securing his vast complex of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities will likely be less costly than leaving him and his weapons in place. The reasons have to do with Saddam's goals, his methods (and, frequently, his lack of a methods), and the weapons themselves. Important but secondary reasons include terrorist connections and the future of the Middle East.
Saddam is not interested merely in ruling Iraq. His goals, as he has repeatedly stated, are to redraw the map of the Middle East and to realize his dream of uniting the Arab world under his rule. That this may involve expelling U.S. forces from the region, "incinerating half of Israel," and other tasks is immaterial to him.
His methods are another matter. Internally, Saddam has conducted campaigns of extermination against ethnic Kurds and Shia Muslims, resulting in the deaths of more than 50,000 Iraqi’s and in one of the greatest ecological disasters on earth due to his draining of the Marshes south of Baghdad. He carries out unspeakable brutality against children and spouses in order to extract confessions. He has assassinated thousands of potential or imagined rivals. And he has demonstrated his willingness to use his mass destruction (WMD) on his own populace as well as in military campaigns.
As murderous as he has been for Iraqi civilians – a truth seldom noted by protestors -- Saddam's foreign policy is even more worrying due to his repeated irrational behavior. He attacked Iran thinking the Ayatollah’s regime would crumble and fall and even declared victory after six days of fighting; the war lasted a decade and killed perhaps a million on both sides. He invaded Kuwait and planned to invade Saudi Arabia thinking the U.S. would either not respond or would respond half-heartedly. Even more foolishly, he failed to withdraw late in 1990 when he had a good chance of maintaining his military forces and full sovereignty. Later, he actually planned to assassinate the elder President Bush without regard to the consequences. He is insulated, isolated, given to major military gambles, and quite possibly manic. There are many more examples of what one analyst has called his “unintentionally suicidal” actions. Yet perhaps his most irrational behavior is his addiction to WMD. Rather than use oil wealth to build a minimal social infrastructure and a powerful conventional military force, he has chosen to flush billions of dollars down the drain in order to pursue offensive weapons that the international community seeks to ban.
All of this means that we cannot treat Saddam as just another nasty despot who can, if necessary, be kept in his box, and that the likelihood of controlling him decreases as his weapons programs continue. We are talking about hundreds of tons of some of the most deadly chemicals, bacterial agents, and viruses known. These literally can kill millions. (The Federation of American Scientists’ website, www.fas.org, is helpful on these). He has already launched ballistic missiles at three neighbors and apparently held off on using chemical weapons against U.S. troops in the Gulf because, characteristically, he mistakenly believed the ground war would last for months, not days. Should he obtain a nuclear weapon, it would be a defining moment in world history, about which we could do little.
The history of the inspections regime shows that physical inspections are virtually irrelevant to disarmament, which requires instead a government willing to disarm, full cooperation of relevant scientists and staff, and pervasive and accurate intelligence about where weapons and their precursors are hidden. Unfortunately, this has left Saddam with plenty of weapons that he is willing to use and, if he has not already done so, share with terrorist organizations with similar goals. Saddam’s terrorist connections -- not to mention direct activities -- go back more than a decade. Alliances have been built on much less.
As the main supporter of Palestinian statehood for the last decade, the U.S. will reinvigorate that role once Saddam is out of the way. Saudi Arabia’s public discussions about political reform, Iranian students protesting against their government’s handling of dissidents, small steps towards democratization in Lebanon and Jordan – all indicate that there is hope if one sociopath can be forced to disarm as demanded by a UN weakened by ten years of inaction.
John F. Garofano
Professor, National Security Affairs
National Security Decision Making Department
Naval War College
Newport, RI 02841
garofanoj@nwc.navy.mil
