Reports last week of Prominent Hammer -- a high-level, top-secret Pentagon study of how America's armed forces would perform in two theaters simultaneously -- have convinced even President Bush's most rhetoric-weary critics that he is serious about action in Iraq. But Prominent Hammer may also have convinced Bush (his hawkish advisors notwithstanding) that an armed attack is not the way to deal with the poverty-stricken country.
President Bush has repeatedly said that "regime change" in Iraq is one of his foremost goals for the Gulf region, as well it should be. Saddam Hussein is an incorrigible despot who has shown himself willing to use any means to keep a stranglehold on power. He has launched chemical and biological attacks on the Kurds of Northern Iraq, killing as many as 200,000 and affecting countless others by tainting the water supply. He has purged political dissidents repeatedly, executing those he deems most dangerous and suppressing others by fear. His Sunni government stays in power in Shiite-dominated Iraq only through control of the military, a massive and multilateral intelligence system for monitoring dissidents, and the terror of a police state. Iraq is what expatriate Kanan Makiya aptly called the "Republic of Fear" in his book of that title.
But such a broad goal as "regime change" could mean anything. Presumably the administration would like to emulate last winter's action in Afghanistan, in which American forces crippled the Afghani infrastructure from afar with precision guided weapons and extensive reconnaissance. But Hussein's regime is a lot different from the Taliban. It is older and more mature, considerably larger, better trained, better funded, and more disciplined, to say nothing of the loyalty that it secures through fear. It is not clear that air attacks -- or even reconnaissance -- would meet with as little resistance in Iraq as they did in Afghanistan, where the Taliban did not have the type of surface-to-air defenses that Iraq does, and where the army was only around 20 percent the size of Hussein's. Prominent Hammer estimated that a military victory in Iraq would place an acute strain on the armed forces and would require at least 200,000 troops. Kenneth Pollack of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in Foreign Affairs this spring, conjectured that it could take as many as 300,000 -- more than half the force deployed in the Gulf War.
Nor would an attack pay off right now. The truth is that nobody knows exactly where Saddam keeps his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and he's had ample time to hide it since he ejected U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998. Without specific targets, a bombing campaign would yield little. Even if Hussein were pressured to readmit inspectors under intense U.S. diplomacy (this is the option that would likely win the most international support), he would continue the same cat-and-mouse game that he played with the U.N. team throughout the 1990s.
Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the University of Haifa, is not optimistic about the U.N. inspections route. "Don't forget that [Hussein] had almost four years to hide everything. He knows how to hide it, and not too many people know things now, so you don't have a huge reservoir of informers. It's possible that [the inspectors] simply won't get anywhere, and after six months they will have to report to the U.N. And they'll say that they have found nothing and the Iraqis will call for a complete lifting of the embargo."
Even now, the current international sanctions against Iraq are breaking down under the lucrative oil deals Hussein offers France, Russia, and China. Without the sanctions, a recent German intelligence report estimates that Hussein will have an atomic bomb in three years. Unfortunately those same sanctions, which keep Saddam from radically destabilizing the region by amassing the missiles to deliver his weapons, take a massive humanitarian toll on the Iraqis. The oil-for-food program was conceived to keep world oil prices down while assuaging the widespread poverty, starvation, and draught caused by the economic collapse brought about by the sanctions of the early 1990s. But because the sanctions offered no financial sustenance for his regime, Hussein began stealing from the special U.N. coffers filled by the sale of his oil. Today he rips off the Iraqi people to the tune of $2 billion annually to fund his weapons programs and operate his police state. Under a less repressive regime those conditions would nurture revolt, but against Hussein's police apparatus no internal uprising stands a chance.
Finding the warheads is obviously impossible without inside information, and Hussein's regime is more leak-proof than Bush's White House. But the real issue isn't the warheads America knows he has, it's the missiles he will use to deliver them. The scuds he keeps somewhere in Iraq's western desert can travel only 600 kilometers, but that's far enough to hit Tel Aviv. The problem is exacerbated by Hussein's paranoia; he has indicated repeatedly that if he ever feels his back against the wall, if he ever loses touch with the Republican Guard, or if there is ever an invasion of any sort, his missile officers should push all the buttons. The buttons, of course, will launch dirty bombs -- loaded with aflotoxin, seran gas, anthrax, and other poisons -- against Israel, rather that the ordinary scuds he fired during the Gulf War.
Any provocative American maneuvers, therefore, will have to take into account Israel's potentially nuclear response to a chemical or biological attack by Hussein.
"Their declaratory position is that they will not be the first party to introduce a nuclear weapon into the region," said the aforementioned Kenneth Pollack, director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "For them, it's going to be a matter of how much damage Saddam does. If he delivers a biological agent that kills 50,000 Israelis, all bets are off. If he delivers an agent that forms a little puddle in Tel Aviv and three people get sick, I think that the Israelis are going to likely respond at a much lower level." But even that might complicate politics in the Middle East; there are a number of Arab states looking for an excuse to attack Israel, and what better reason than to protect another Arab state?
None of which justifies leaving Hussein alone. He is a brutal hater of democracy, and if his disregard for the Iraqi people is not reason enough for action, his trigger-happy ability to undermine regional stability is. The sanctions are deplorable, but so is Hussein's pursuit of a nuclear device.
Which is why, if the Bush administration is committed to "regime change," its only possible option is to foment an internal coup d'ètat. It will not be easy, given Hussein's repression savvy, and the CIA has not exactly shown itself to be adept at choosing its client insurgents over the last half century. For that reason, any effort to topple Hussein must be as inclusive as possible. Rather than install another failed puppet dictator at the expense of the local population, an international coalition led by the United States should implement a government with a broad non-partisan character, such as the one in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) -- the pet of neoconservative hawks in the administration and on the think-tank circuit -- purports to be an umbrella organization for Iraq's opposition groups, but Chalabi is vehemently partisan and not particularly inclusive. He has not been to Iraq since he was a teenager, and his organization has no infrastructure in place in Iraq to sustain governance. The INC should not be allowed to determine the makeup of the administration that replaces Hussein. The new government must be as ecumenical as possible to represent Iraq's diverse population, which includes Arabs, Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, and thousands of smaller tribes and clans.
Since the end of the Gulf War, the CIA has abandoned two coup attempts, which -- with international backing and the CIA's intelligence resources -- might have succeeded against the incumbent regime. That means that any future coup makers will be hesitant to accept support from the United States. The CIA will be tempted to topple Hussein alone, but that will only augment Iraqis' hatred of the "imperialist" United States and lend credence to the bin Ladens of the Middle East. A successful coup now will require an Iraqi instigator legitimized by Iraqi support (and ideally, the support of Iraq's army); extensive information, supplied by every possible source, including intelligence agencies the world over; military informers; and high-level defectors.
It is unlikely that after decades of Hussein's tyranny, Iraq is ready for an immediate transition to a free-market democracy (or even a pro-Western government, both of which would ease the influx of relief and capital). But no subsequent regime could be as bad for the Iraqis or the region as Hussein's is. If the United States is bent on direct action in the region, it should move to undermine Hussein's regime from within, rather than take him on in a military confrontation.
