‘Dual Containment’ Isn’t Scaring Iran or Iraq

The recent crisis in Iraq reveals a wide gap between what the American public is told and how the same events are perceived in the rest of the world. Americans were told by their government that 44 cruise missiles had put Saddam Hussein back in his box.

But what the rest of the world perceives--especially the Gulf states, which are both key suppliers of energy and totally dependent for their security on U.S. support--is that our military riposte was so many pinpricks that failed to prevent a political victory for Hussein.

The Iraqi president’s political survival has forced the United States into a policy of “dual containment” against Iran and Iraq, the two strongest nations in the region. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states are not strong enough to resist either of these countries alone, much less the two combined. The countries under U.S. protection are, at once, conscious of their dependency and nervous about too visible an association with Washington. With the United States as the guarantor of all the frontiers and arrangements in one of the most volatile regions of the world, everything has depended on its ability to deal with the likely consequences of Hussein’s continued rule, one of the most significant of which has been the situation within Iraq itself.

Immediately after the Western coalition ended the Gulf War and saved Hussein from catastrophe, he turned his army against dissident elements within his country threatening to secede in the Shiite south and in the Kurdish north. The attack on the Kurds produced a flood of refugees into Turkey, which, already beset by pressures for autonomy from its own Kurdish minority, received them ambivalently, at best. The U.S. response to Iraqi pressures was to establish a Kurdish safe haven in northern Iraq.

The Clinton administration tried to use that safe haven as a base for overthrowing Hussein. But it failed to recognize that, without a political framework, the restrictions established by its predecessor would turn into wasting assets. As in Somalia, the administration revealed an inability to define a sustainable political objective and a lack of will to use the force requisite for success.

The Kurdish people’s passionate patriotism complicates the task of preserving the Kurds’ autonomy inside Iraq. An autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq without any formal political status creates a vacuum attracting the hostility of all neighbors that view Kurdish independence as a threat to their own territorial integrity. Turkey, Iran and even Syria tacitly support Hussein’s effort to reassert his domination over the Kurds.

The administration was thus building its covert anti-Hussein base on a shaky foundation as long as it had not reached some political understanding with Turkey that would induce it to cooperate with autonomy for northern Iraq. Instead, the administration glossed over the underlying political problem and maintained a status quo dependent more and more on a U.S. military response.

Another prerequisite for protecting the safe haven was unity among the Kurdish factions. This objective should have received Washington’s highest priority. When, partly as a result of U.S. neglect, the two major factions began fighting each other, the stage was set for Hussein’s reestablishment of preeminence.

The nature of the U.S. military response compounded the problem. U.S. strategic planning in the Gulf, concentrated as it is on the defense of Kuwait, illustrates the familiar adage that strategists tend to plan for the last, rather than the next, war. A direct attack on Kuwait is, in fact, the least likely contingency; the greatest current threat is Hussein’s strategy of showing up the administration’s inability to manage the political-military conflict with Iraq. The Kurdish safe haven, already precariously placed due to the absence of an adequate political structure, could only be protected by unity among the Kurds and a hair-trigger U.S. military response. Yet, when Hussein moved, the administration’s military riposte had the feel of an abstract staff study on air strategy. It was unrelated to the area being contested and overlaid with the excruciatingly academic theory of “signaling,” drawn from arms-control seminars.

Only a blow entailing consequences that Hussein was unwilling to endure could have prevented his reassertion of control over the Kurdish area. And it had to be done quickly enough to prevent a fait accompli. There was no substitute for attacking the forces and support system actually engaged in the aggression. Damaging or destroying Republican Guard divisions north of Baghdad would have certainly attracted Hussein’s attention; it would have weakened the forces operating in the safe haven and, even more important, the constituent elements of Hussein’s rule.

The reason for the administration’s restraint was its addiction to the “signaling theory,” which proved so pernicious in Vietnam. The key decision a president makes is whether or not to use force. But once having made it, he should not do so half-heartedly.

The signaling approach does the exact opposite: It selects military targets not decisive in themselves as a warning of more drastic measures to follow. But an adversary is more likely to interpret restraint as a reluctance to run risks, and so long as the military response is endurable, he has an incentive to wait for the next move. Such a pinprick approach usually generates incentives opposite to the intention; gradual escalation becomes more likely. When the smoke lifted in Iraq, it became apparent that the box into which we claimed to have put Hussein suddenly included the former safe haven.

U.S. Gulf policy requires careful rethinking. We need to rebuild confidence in our purposes and capabilities in the Gulf. We must define a policy toward Iraq that relates our declared objective of overthrowing Hussein to our equally explicit commitment to the territorial integrity of the country. And if we find these irreconcilable, we will have to make a choice. We must relate our policy of isolating Iran to our European allies’ reluctance to follow such a course.

In short, we must either elevate “dual containment” from a slogan into a strategy or define a strategy we are capable of implementing.