Air Strikes Can’t Accomplish Much

In an effort to lower public expectations of the projected air campaign against Iraq, U.S. officials are now threatening only to “significantly reduce,” not eliminate, Iraq’s ability to use weapons of mass destruction. However, they are still promising more than their policy can deliver.

Air attacks certainly could inflict considerable damage on Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, but even a large reduction in that arsenal will have little political significance so long as substantial numbers of those weapons remain intact. Such an attack might disrupt Iraq’s ability to use weapons of mass destruction in the very near future, but the rate at which Iraqi capabilities have grown since the 1991 Gulf War suggests that replacing the losses would not be difficult.

Even after air strikes, U.N. inspectors would need to be deployed in Iraq, and this would require Baghdad’s consent. Bombing Iraq’s arsenal is unlikely to achieve this result. In effect, the West is threatening to destroy some of Saddam’s weapons of terror unless he agrees to let us destroy them all. If the United States actually hopes to alter Iraq’s behavior and not just the size of its stockpile, more persuasive measures will be required.

There are four ways in which air power might be used in an effort to change Iraq’s behavior. Unfortunately, none of them is very promising.

First, we could attack other important assets in the hope that Saddam will give up his mass destruction programs in order to preserve something he values more. However, it is not clear what that might be. Iraq’s most valuable economic assets, its oil fields and related facilities, have been rendered worthless for the present by U.N. trade sanctions.

A second possibility would be to attack Iraq’s ability to defend itself against invasion or to prevent Kurdish or Shiite secession by striking the Iraqi military. However, serious damage to Iraq’s military capabilities might reduce, not increase, Saddam’s willingness to give up his terror arsenal, for the less able Iraq is to defend its territorial integrity conventionally, the more valuable its unconventional weapons will become.

Many observers have suggested using air power to encourage a military coup or popular revolt against Saddam. Bombing might increase the Iraqi army’s or people’s desire for a new leader, but many in Iraq already want to see Saddam removed. The problem is that they are unwilling to risk almost certain death in an effort to depose him. Unless air strikes can make overthrowing Saddam practical and not just desirable, this approach is a poor bet.

Finally, air power could be used to target Saddam directly, either to kill him or to make him so fearful for his survival that he will give up his weapons of mass destruction in order to save his skin. Although limited efforts along this line in the 1991 war did not succeed, such strategy might conceivably work. However, killing an alerted enemy leader is extremely difficult, and although this appears to be the most promising way to employ air power in this case, it would still be a long shot.

If none of these air strategies offers much hope of success, what else can be done to deal with the Iraqi weapons threat? The most obvious solution would be invasion, in order to eliminate the arsenal without Saddam’s cooperation or to present him with a choice between compliance and conquest. However, this option is precluded by a lack of support from Iraq’s neighbors, as well as its potentially high human and political costs. Fomenting a civil war in Iraq by aiding regional secession movements is similarly unattractive to our Middle Eastern allies and would be very slow, although it might be more palatable at home. Nor is bribery likely to work, even if it were politically viable; Iraq could already reap great rewards in the form of an end to the crippling U.N. trade sanctions by permitting unimpeded U.N. inspections.

Barring invasion or the death of Saddam, we are left with the policy that the U.S., Britain and Israel have used to counter the Iraqi terror threat since before the Gulf War: deterrence. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction matter only if he is willing to use them, or if we believe that he is.

Although President Clinton “guarantees” that Iraq will use its weapons of mass destruction again unless it is disarmed, such fatalism is not well founded. Iraq’s chemical attacks against Iran and the Kurds in the 1980s are troubling, but Saddam has never used terror weapons when faced with the prospect of major retaliation. There is no reason to believe that this pattern will change.

As long as the United States and several of its allies are able and willing to retaliate overwhelmingly, even with conventional munitions, Saddam will have little incentive to make the president’s promise of catastrophe come true.

The Iraqi dictator may be a bloodthirsty tyrant of Stalinesque caliber, but if his annoying talent for self-preservation proves anything, it shows that he is not suicidal. If we obey President Clinton’s admonition to remember the past while imagining the future, this may be the one good reason for optimism about a problem that otherwise appears to defy solution.