The Washington Post
Sunday, November 29, 1998

Henry Kissinger

Bring Saddam Down

The third crisis with Iraq in a year ended like all the others. Iraq reinstated the inspections system, Washington backed off from military action (this time recalling forces already under-way), and both sides have claimed victory. In a sense both sides are right. We win the battles, but Saddam Hussein is winning the war.

True, after each crisis the inspectors have returned to Iraq. But, equally, each time there has been a hiatus—the last one of three months—without any inspections, enabling Saddam to shuffle equipment and material from sites on which the inspectors were closing in. When inspections resume, months are consumed devel-oping a new database, and by the time it is completed, Saddam has come up with new harassing tactics to degrade it.

In his statement of Nov. 15, President Clinton laid down specific criteria by which compliance with U.N. resolutions will henceforth be meas-ured, and he implied that he would retaliate without warning if these are not met. Similar threats were uttered after each previous crisis, and the administration will not find it any easier to implement them this time. If Saddam reverts to his earlier tactics of raising narrow objections to the composition or specific demands of the inspections team (as indeed he is already doing), the international consensus in favor of retali-ation—and even within our own government—is likely to turn brittle.

Administration spokesmen have talked as if the international support that existed at the time of the aborted raid can be recycled indefi-nitely. This is a dangerous illusion. That consen-sus resulted from a highly evanescent constella-tion of circumstances: Saddam's brazen shutdown of the entire U.N. inspections process, the admin-istration's unexpected electoral performance, the success of the Wye negotiations, the global financial crisis (especially Russia's) and France's temporary preoccupation with European issues.

The cumulative impact of the various Iraqi crises amounts to a strategic setback:

* Each crisis has reinforced a pattern in which Saddam, not we, controls the timing and subject matter of the confrontation.

* With each successive crisis, American policy has become more captive to a fragile U.N. consensus. It is symptomatic that, in his Nov. 15 statement, the president invoked the world com-munity 10 times and the U.S. national interest exactly once.

* Each crisis has eroded our support among the Persian Gulf and other Arab states. Having seen us go to the brink and back down three times, they will be reluctant to believe we are in for the long haul.

* Each aborted military action has weakened the readiness and morale of America's armed forces.

* In each crisis, nations opposed to military action (and the U.N. secretary general) held out the end of sanctions as a carrot for Saddam to return to inspections. Saddam's argument—that the sanctions are the main issue—gains ground.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has described our policy as keeping Saddam "in his box." But that goal is unachievable as the issues are at present defined. UNSCOM (the U.N. Special Commission, the inspection group) is a weak instrument. After years of the world's most intrusive inspections system, the team still does not know whether Saddam has remaining weap-ons of mass destruction.

But should UNSCOM work perfectly and were it in a position to certify that Saddam was disarmed, sanctions would then be "reviewed," the euphemism for being lifted, and the inspec-tions system reduced to caretaker status. We thus find ourselves in a Catch-22 situation. The better the inspections system works, the more rapidly restrictions on Iraq will be ended—and Saddam will be in a position to start rearming.

The administration has not been willing to face the fact that the issue is not UNSCOM but the continued rule of Saddam. While the president on Nov. 15 paid lip service to a policy of bringing down Saddam, he offered no plan for accomplish-ing this. He seems to have no confidence in a military solution. He justified aborting the mili-tary strike on the ground that "if we take military action we can significantly degrade the capability of Saddam Hussein to develop weapons of mass destruction and to deliver them, but that would also mark the end of UNSCOM. So we would delay it, but we would then have no oversight, no insight, no involvement in what is going on within Iraq."

This statement reflects three assumptions: that Saddam is likely to remain in office for the foreseeable future; that our military capacity to degrade Iraq's strategic capability is less useful than inspections; and that Saddam's regime is bound to survive American retaliation. In its military plans, the administration seems wedded to the kind of limited escalation that has been discredited wherever it was tried, most notably in Vietnam.

Unwillingness to face head-on the problem of Saddam's continued rule dates back to the endgame of the Gulf War. President Bush de-serves enormous credit for mobilizing a global coalition against Saddam's occupation of Kuwait (based, by the way, on the world's knowledge that he was prepared to act alone). But we stopped short of overthrowing Saddam because it was believed that, with the freeing of Kuwait, we had outrun the U.N. authorization, that further war-fare would risk the breakup of the country and additional casualties and that, in any case, Sad-dam would fall as a result of his disaster.

When Saddam survived, the United States was left with three policy options: (1) to reconcile with a hopefully chastened Saddam, (2) to keep Saddam "in his box," (3) to make it a national policy to overthrow him.

(over)