Plots on Iraq Won’t Do the Job

A growing chorus in Congress is calling for the United States to mount a program of subversion “to bring Saddam Hussein to his knees,” as one advocate put it. Demands for an extensive effort to undermine Hussein’s authority as a step toward his overthrow reflect the frustration felt over the political failure of the U.N. Security Council, along with many of America’s traditional allies, to respond vigorously to the threat seen emanating from Iraq. But frustration is a poor basis for policy.

The policy that Baghdad will have to listen to is the warning articulated by the U.N. Security Council Monday that it would suffer the “severest consequences” if it barred U.N. inspectors from sites suspected to harbor weapons of mass destruction.

Those who put their faith in covert action as an answer to the Hussein problem are misplacing their confidence. Worse, they are misleading the public.

The CIA has tried a number of times before to encourage conditions that would end Hussein’s tyrannical rule. These efforts have failed, for two main reasons. Iraqi opposition groups tend to be inherently mistrustful and bitterly divided over what a post-Hussein Iraq should look like. And Iraq’s enormous and apparently efficient internal security system, unrestrained by any legal tradition of due process, is ruthless in discovering real or imagined opposition. Other factors are the refusal of neighboring countries to let their territory be used in anti-Hussein efforts--a key to any hopes for success--and the outcry from the Arab world and elsewhere that would greet any measures that would make life harder for the average Iraqi. When all this is taken together, the magnitude of the challenge begins to emerge.

If Saddam Hussein is overthrown any time soon it will most likely be by a faction in his military or security services, probably acting out of motives no more noble than the lust for supreme power that put Hussein in command 19 years ago. How much the United States or any other outsider can do to facilitate that day is highly questionable. For members of Congress to suggest that this country can play a decisive role ignores regional realities as well as the reasons why earlier covert action failed.