A Fading Coalition on Iraq

Here we go again.

2,896 days after President George Bush launched the first U.S. air strikes against Saddam Hussein, an embattled President Bill Clinton sent U.S. forces against Iraq one more time.

Operation Desert Fox is Clinton’s third attack on Iraq since he took office and, so far, it looks like deja vu all over again. In other words, the U.S. is headed for the same ol’ result with Iraq: military triumph followed by diplomatic frustration.

“Saddam Hussein’s still got his job,” said a Democratic bumper sticker widely seen in the 1992 presidential campaign. “Do you?” Hussein’s uncanny ability to bounce back from defeat has frustrated two U.S. presidents and kept U.S. foreign policy off balance since the end of the Gulf War. Now, the damage is spreading; the United States’ problems with Iraq are increasingly leading to problems with other countries.

When it comes to Hussein, the United States is like Gulliver in Lilliput: an irresistible giant restrained by 10,000 tiny threads. It isn’t Hussein who is responsible for America’s paralysis; what keeps the United States from roaring into Baghdad and settling scores with Hussein, once and for all, is a web of U.S. interests in a tangle more complicated and harder to cut than the Gordian knot.

Oil, of course, is at the heart of the tangle. It is our need for oil that involves the United States so intimately in all the twists and turns of the Middle East. What India was to the British Empire, oil is to us: simultaneously a cornerstone of U.S. power and the Achilles’ heel of America’s global position.

In particular, U.S. power is bound up with the fate of the oil-rich, people-poor kingdoms and sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. The United States must protect these countries from powerful and sometimes predatory neighbors like Iran and Iraq, and this responsibility commits the United States inescapably to a network of bases, treaty commitments, political relationships and forced-upon deployments throughout and beyond the Middle East.

Those relationships and commitments aren’t easy to juggle. The U.S. relationship with Israel, for example, brings us immense advantages but also vastly complicates America’s task of building relationships with moderate Arab countries. Especially when the United States uses force against a Muslim Arab country like Iraq, it must show sensitivity to such popular causes in the Arab world as the Palestinian drive for self-determination. That need often puts the United States at cross-purposes with Israel--and Israeli policies can sometimes undermine U.S. standing in the Arab world as well.

There’s also Turkey, a longtime ally of the United States that in recent years has moved much closer to Israel. Turkey is fighting a bloody civil war against Kurdish rebels, and that complicates U.S. policy toward Iraq.

If Washington is serious about getting rid of Hussein, it must work with the Kurdish minority in Iraq, one of the major building blocks of any serious opposition movement. But the idea of U.S. support for Kurdish rebels in Iraq creates huge problems for the Turks who fear, not without reason, that Kurds in Iraq will share weapons and money with their friends and relations in eastern Turkey.

All this makes it tough for the United States to work with Hussein’s internal opposition to overthrow him from within. With separatist Kurds at one end of Iraq and restive Shiite Muslims at the other, U.S. efforts to get rid of Hussein are undermined by fears that Iraq would break up if Hussein were overthrown by his separatist opponents. An Iraqi breakup would make Iran the undisputed regional power and leave the U.S. with, potentially, an even worse headache than the one it has now.

Both Bush and Clinton struggled with these miserable and vexing problems; both presidents used military force against Iraq but neither was able to find either a military or a political solution to the Hussein problem. Unfortunately, the longer the problem festers, the more trouble it creates. Domestically, it gets harder and harder for presidents to justify a policy of endless crisis with no final victory in sight.

Internationally, the “Hussein problem” leaves Washington facing an erosion of international support for its policy and helps support a dangerous international reaction aimed at weakening U.S. ability to provide global leadership.

While most Americans and many others around the world regard U.S. leadership as the indispensable prop of world peace, some look on American power and prestige with jealousy and resentment. China suspects that the United States will use its power to thwart China’s drive for superpower status in the 21st century. Russia bitterly contrasts the ruins of its own power with U.S. success, and more and more Russian leaders think that opposing the United States is the best way to mend Russian prestige.

Finally, France, still lusting after great-power status, dreams of turning the European Union into a political and economic rival of the United States.

Unable to challenge the United States directly, these states and others are engaged in a poisonous whispering campaign against U.S. leadership. The U.S., they whisper, is unpredictable and trigger-happy. It’s a poor global citizen: too unilateral, too violent, not a team player. Who says “no” to global efforts to control greenhouse gases? Who doesn’t support or rather who opposes the International Criminal Court? Who doesn’t pay its U.N. dues while trying to bully the Security Council?

Every new confrontation with Iraq brings new opportunities for obstructing U.S. leadership, new chances to argue that the U.S. is a reckless practitioner of cowboy diplomacy. If we had only waited another week, whisper the critics, or allowed yet another no-hope peace pilgrimage by U.N. Secretary Gen. Kofi Annan, or one more fact-finding mission by a former Scandinavian cabinet minister to drag on a bit longer, maybe some peaceful solution could have been found.

The whispers matter. From Desert Storm to Desert Fox, the United States has watched the broad international coalition behind its Iraqi policy melt away until only Britain stands firmly at our side. Moreover, France, Russia and China are moving closer to the day when, individually or collectively, they will use their vetoes on a Security Council to block vital U.S. initiatives.

Unless either God or an Iraqi colonel does the United States a favor by taking Hussein out of the picture soon, the United States will be reduced to two ugly choices. It can decide to take Hussein out, risking the breakup of Iraq, turmoil in the Gulf and bitter international criticism; or it will have to end the confrontation with Hussein and accept the dismantling of sanctions against his regime.

Ugly choices. Unfortunately, there is no option “c”: “None of the above.”*