Next Step : Is Embargo Enough to Stop Saddam?

Like a giant anaconda slowly and relentlessly squeezing its prey, the world’s most sweeping international embargo is tightening its grip around Iraq. “The countdown has begun,” a senior U.S. official says confidently. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Yet the outside world may have to wait longer than many analysts expect for the blockade to squeeze the last breath of resistance from Baghdad--provided the rising level of rhetoric and the frustration over the foreign captives don’t flare into conflict first.

Unlike other oil-rich Persian Gulf nations, Iraq has placed its highest priority on developing a more independent agricultural and industrial base. But it still imports goods large and small from around the world--cotton, medicine and razor blades from Egypt, beef from Argentina, dairy products from Ireland, grain from the United States and Australia, fresh produce and cooking oil from Turkey, cars, steel and television sets from Japan, and everything from matches to warplanes from the Soviet Union.

But Iraq’s most vulnerable side is its dependence on food imports: A full 80% of everything that Iraqis eat comes from abroad.

And, besides the pressure to replenish stocks of bullets and ballistic missiles, Iraq’s biggest challenge in the face of the Western sanctions will be to fill the stomachs of more than 17 million Iraqis, tens of thousands of foreign workers and captives who are trapped in Baghdad, and the million-plus residents and foreigners in Kuwait, U.S. and private analysts agree.

Even the most optimistic estimates give Iraq two to six months of survival on its current food reserves. First will come the shortages. Then, rationing. And finally--over the long term--could come actual starvation.

But the impact is likely to be uneven. U.S. estimates show that Baghdad had a 115-day stockpile of rice in July, but only a nine-day supply of corn, which is mainly needed to feed livestock. The country’s sugar stocks should last only about 20 days.

The slow strangulation is already being felt. In a dramatic acknowledgment of the embargo’s impact, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein last week publicly appealed for his countrymen to eat less. Baghdad bakeries have stopped making pastries. And despite threats of severe punishment for hoarders, stores in the Iraqi capital were mobbed last weekend as panicked shoppers rushed to buy up huge sacks of flour, sugar and other basic goods. In occupied Kuwait, the bread lines are four hours long.

How long Hussein can survive politically as conditions deteriorate also may defy the odds, according to the limited Western intelligence available.

“Most of the opposition is abroad, in prison or in the ground,” a U.S. analyst concedes. While Iraq’s restive Kurds in the north and its Shiite majority in the south have long been hotbeds of dissent, the only two groups strong enough to mount an effective challenge to Hussein are the Revolutionary Command Council and the military, which have served as his power bases since he became Iraq’s president in 1979.

The Bush Administration’s implicit strategy has banked on the worsening economic squeeze to foment enough opposition inside Iraq to bring on the overthrow of Hussein--prompting Iraq to retreat from Kuwait and eliminating the threat of future Iraqi adventurism.

Initially, U.S. officials were ecstatic about how quickly the embargo began to take hold. America’s allies cooperated in deploying a multinational fleet almost immediately. And Turkey and Saudi Arabia lost no time in closing the Iraqi oil pipelines in their countries.

But Riad Ajami, professor of international management at Ohio State University and author of a new report on the Iraqi economy, asserts that for all the Western efforts, Iraq may not begin to feel any real pain for 45 to 60 days.

Part of the reason is that Iraqis are relatively well fed. The average Iraqi eats 3,000 calories a day--a very high rate of food consumption compared to Third World countries. “Iraqis don’t begin at the level of Bangladeshis or Mozambicans,” an Administration economist says.

Analysts say that how long the initial period of shortages lasts will depend on three factors--the amount of goods that Iraq has stockpiled, the size of the country’s next harvest and the amount of storage capacity that will be available for foodstuffs.

“There’s evidence that this (Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) was planned months ahead,” says William B. Quandt, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a National Security Council staff member during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “Saddam (as Hussein is widely known in the Middle East) has been able to plan for things for some time, and he must have anticipated at least a partial embargo.”

Baghdad has been spending almost $2 billion a year just for food imports--four times the value of its food exports. And virtually everything it buys is essential: wheat, rice, flour, sugar, milk, eggs, beef, chicken and livestock feed.

With the current harvest season just beginning, Baghdad may be able to offset the impact of the embargo in the short run, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official says. Iraq has the most arable land in the Arab world--about 20% of a country that occupies 168,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than California. About 70% of Iraq’s arable land is currently being cultivated.

But Iraq has limited storage facilities, such as grain elevators, and building a long-term reserve would be difficult, according to Samir Milady, an Egyptian expert on international food policy.

Analysts say Hussein is likely to put off full-scale rationing of basic necessities until the last possible moment, if only because it opens the way for would-be political opponents. And Iraq may have bought itself an additional five to six months by reportedly looting $5 billion in gold and cash from Kuwait’s central bank.

The biggest unknowns are the amounts of food and other necessities that may be brought in by Turkish smugglers, or transshipped through Jordan, or trucked in from as far as the illegal “pirate” ports of Lebanon. “No embargo in history has been 100% successful,” Ajami points out. “Market prices can make strange bedfellows.”

But Ajami says Iraq’s money may not go very far. “The prices of all these goods will quadruple before they get to Baghdad,” he says, “and the psychology of sanctions will begin to be felt long before that, undermining the confidence of people in Saddam’s ability to run the economy and the state.”

As a result, experts say that the first signs of malnutrition could be seen in Baghdad within four months. If this occurs, the situation could get desperate by early next year. “That’s when people will begin to slaughter animals and resort to what all people do in desperation: eat what they haven’t eaten before,” Ajami says. “That’s also when the shortages will be so acute that the world will see images that will make everyone uncomfortable about starvation and children with inadequate diets.”

U.S. officials concede that Hussein may eventually be able to buy more time by appealing to the single loophole in the U.N. resolution that imposed the embargo--an exemption for humanitarian aid.

“There is potential for serious disagreement on the prohibition of foodstuffs for humanitarian purposes,” says a U.S. official monitoring the embargo. “At the moment, we’re applying the embargo strictly (because) there’s no indication that Iraq needs food. But if starvation sets in, it’ll certainly play to the court of world public opinion.”

A State Department strategist agrees. “If we see pictures of Americans in Iraq and Kuwait suffering like everyone else, I wonder how popular sanctions will be,” he muses. Yemen and Brazil have already said they will consider sending food on humanitarian grounds to prevent starvation.

Even so, the current embargo has far more potential to succeed than any previous international boycott, for one reason: It has the endorsement--and full participation--of both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The loss of imports from both countries will hurt Iraq severely. Since diplomatic relations were resumed in 1984 after a 17-year break, the United States has gradually become Iraq’s leading supplier of food, accounting for about a third of Iraqi imports and providing virtually all the country’s rice, corn, animal feed and vegetable oils. In 1988, U.S.-Iraqi trade totaled $2.8 billion.

The Soviet Union, historically a close political and military ally of Iraq, has been the major supplier of the country’s technology, machinery, oil-extraction equipment and arms. During the first nine months of last year, Soviet-Iraqi trade totaled $2.1 billion.

Moreover, the embargo comes at a time when Iraqis already have had to tighten their belts as a result of Hussein’s eight-year war with neighboring Iran. A decade ago, on the eve of its invasion of Iran, Baghdad had amassed a $40-billion surplus in foreign exchange. But like water in the desert sands, the funds quickly evaporated as Hussein poured out billions to maintain his arsenal.

Just as Hussein misjudged the Western reaction to his invasion of Kuwait last month, he underestimated the cost of the war with Iran in 1980. Hussein thought the military foray would be quick and dirty. But the tenacious Iranians fought back, and within two years the conflict was costing him $1.5 billion a month.

Iraq’s oil exports plummeted then, too--by as much as 80%--because a pipeline to the Mediterranean through Syria was cut off and its sole outlet to the sea was hostage to the war.

As the supply of basic foodstuffs began to dry up, Hussein warned that Iraqis would have to absorb new economic hardships through “rationalization” and an end to all “non-essential spending.” His regime was in such dire financial straits that he urged Iraqis to turn in their gold jewelry and heirlooms.

For weeks, Iraqi television showed footage of women donating gold bracelets, necklaces and rings, which together brought in 50 tons of gold worth more than $600 million, according to the Baghdad press. Even Hussein’s wife contributed her personal valuables to the cause.

In all, Iraq’s misadventure in Iran and the subsequent drive to rebuild the country has left Baghdad with a debt of between $80 billion and $100 billion--half of it owed to gulf neighbors and half to European institutions.

Indeed, some analysts believe that Hussein’s economic plight may have played a role in precipitating the current gulf crisis. “The debt and the credit squeeze were as much responsible for Iraq’s decision to invade Kuwait as the historic territorial claims,” says a congressional staffer who specializes in the Middle East. “(Hussein) needed the money more than the land.”

Still, today’s waiting game may not be all in the West’s favor.

“Iraq can probably survive two or three months before the brunt hits the public too badly, but we will also get tired of this (standoff) before long,” Quandt points out.

Some even believe that Hussein may ultimately prove better able to stay the course than President Bush. “Saddam can hold out longer than American public opinion in keeping a huge force in Saudi Arabia,” says Ken Katzman, a former CIA analyst now at Defense Systems Inc., a Washington consulting firm. “He’s confronted long odds for a long time and always survived. If we look to sanctions to destroy him, then we’re looking under the wrong rock. Sanctions are not the way to rattle his cage. He only understands force, violence and military strength. That’s what it will take to fundamentally change his view of the crisis.”

Although Administration strategists are hoping for an Iraqi version of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe to rid the region of the “Saddam problem,” they concede there are no Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas waiting in the background to challenge Hussein’s rule.

The Kurds, who account for 15% of Iraq’s population, have been a constant irritation to the regime. With help from foreign intelligence agencies--the CIA, Israel’s Mossad and pre-revolutionary Iran’s SAVAK--Kurdish guerrillas mounted a potent, though ultimately unsuccessful, insurgency in the early 1970s.

Kurdish guerrillas, however, continued small-scale attacks on their own in their northeast strongholds. By 1987, the unrest so angered Hussein that he blew up 500 Kurdish villages and relocated up to a half-million Kurds. In the spring of 1988, his forces used nerve and poison gases in the village of Halabja against Kurds who had supported Iran in the war, killing about 5,000 of them. Since then, he has created a virtual cordon sanitaire around the region.

In talks in Washington this past week, Jalal Talabani of the Kurdish Democratic Party pledged support to Kuwait’s ruling Al Sabah family in its fight to regain control of the tiny city-state. Kuwaiti officials-in-exile say the Kurds will again try to mount new attacks in the north to divert Iraq’s troops now massed along the southern borders with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Another potential hotbed is Iraq’s Shiite community, which accounts for 60% of the population. Again, however, Hussein has ruthlessly tamed opposition. After the 1979 revolution in predominantly Shiite Iran, Hussein executed Iraq’s leading radical Shiite cleric, Mohammed Bakr Sadr, and deported an estimated 200,000 Iraqi Shiites of Iranian origin across the border into Iran. The remnants of the group Al Dawa--Arabic for “The Call,” which Sadr headed--are now headquartered in Tehran.

Although the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini appealed to the Iraqi Shiites to side with their brethren in Iran and to rise up against Hussein, the majority were loyal to Iraq instead. Indeed, the majority of troops in the Iraqi army are Shiite, mostly in low-ranking positions. Nationalism has had more appeal than religious roots.

But tiny cores of resistance did surface: In September, 1987, a small cell of Al Dawa operatives opened fire during a parade to celebrate the annual Army Day in Baquba, just north of Baghdad. Although troops returned fire, at least 50 were killed, according to foreign envoys, who were among the dignitaries invited to attend.

According to European envoys, however, Western intelligence is not looking to the Shiite community as the primary challenge to the strong-arm rule of the Takriti clan, from which Hussein comes and members of which permeate the government.

That leaves two bodies: the military and the Revolutionary Command Council that serves as Hussein’s inner circle. As yet, however, foreign envoys cannot identify viable individuals or cells within either that would be capable of taking over. “Sanctions will eventually squeeze Iraq very hard, but that will not necessarily lead an army officer to bump him off,” Quandt says.

Ajami agrees. “(Hussein’s) intelligence capability prevails in all segments within the military,” he says. “It would be hard for him not to find out about any movement against him. There’s also no guarantee that a group of young officers would be any more compromising than Saddam. Iraq could end up with an even worse monster.”

Hussein’s abrupt peace offer to Iran last week could lead to dissent within some military quarters angered by the enormous financial and personnel losses suffered during that eight-year conflict. At the same time, however, the Iraqi leader’s appeal to the Arab world to rise up against foreign military intervention and political domination--to prevent Arab resources from being diverted to Western coffers--appears to have growing appeal, not only in Iraq.

Most U.S. analysts argue that Hussein is eventually doomed. “He’s finished--period,” the congressional expert says. “If he goes forward, he faces defeat and overthrow. If he goes back, there will be a lot of questions about why this took place at all, especially after his peace with Iran on Iranian terms. And if he stays put, he’ll be strangled economically.”

But most analysts are also unable to come up with a workable scenario for Hussein’s overthrow.

Three factors--the prospect of a prolonged stalemate as the embargo slowly squeezes, the absence of visible domestic opposition and the escalating tension over American hostages in Iraq and Kuwait--have led a growing number of U.S. experts to predict that foreign military force will be the only short-term means of removing the “Saddam problem” from the Middle East political equation.

From now on, it is a test of wills--and time.

Staff writers John Thor-Dahlburg in Moscow, Kim Murphy in Cairo, Nick B. Williams Jr. in Dubai, and James Gerstenzang in Kennebunkport, Me., contributed to this report. Hugh Pope in Istanbul, Turkey, also contributed to this article.

But There Are Risks for Bush, Too

* Detention of 3,000 Americans in Iraq and Kuwait could evolve into the biggest hostage crisis yet for the United States.

* There may be terrorist attacks by Islamic militants anxious to punish America for intervening.

* The economic fallout from the intervention could tip America into recession.

* Intervention may trigger such a popular backlash in the region that it undermines the very moderate Arab regimes it was meant to aid.

* Failure to make Hussein back down could severely damage American credibility, inspiring an even worse regional arms race as regimes decide they can no longer count on either superpower for protection.

* Rather than the world’s policeman, the United States could come to be seen as the world’s cowboy, slowing the evolution to a post-Cold War order.

* There could be an Iraqi attack against U.S. troops.

The Noose Around Iraq

* Syria, an old and bitter rival, sends troops to Saudi Arabia and reinforces its border;

* Turkey cuts off one of Iraq’s main oil pipelines and joins in U.N. economic sanctions;

* A hostile Kurdish minority in northern Iraq pledges support for Kuwait and waits for Saddam to slip;

* Iran welcomes Iraqi peace overtures but demands a withdrawal from Kuwait and nurses the bitter wounds of a long war;

* U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf threaten to halt sea shipments into or out of Iraq;

* Saudi Arabia, bolstered by tens of thousands of U.S., Egyptian, and other troops, cuts Iraq’s other main oil pipeline;

* Jordan tries to walk a tightrope between its moderate Arab and Western benefactors on one side and its neighbor, Iraq, on the other.