A Coup Against Saddam--Then What?

Veteran U.S. national security officials have been calling on President Clinton to create and support an Iraqi opposition “government in exile” as a strategy to remove Saddam Hussein once and for all. Other strategists contend that the Iraqi opposition is simply too weak to present a credible challenge to Saddam. In reality, both sides have it wrong. While the Iraqi opposition could be aided to mount a serious challenge to Saddam, the likely consequences make such a move a terrible mistake for U.S. policy.

Those who reject the idea because the Iraqi opposition is too weak haven’t taken account of the potential of U.S. military assistance. As proponent Richard Perle has argued, the United States would “be prepared to give logistical support and military equipment to the opposition and to use air power to defend it in the territory it controls.” Moreover, the opposition would be given access to “frozen Iraqi assets,” surely earmarked for military hardware. As many of the proponents know from their experience in implementing the Reagan Doctrine in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua, even a modest amount of military hardware in the hands of “freedom fighters” can threaten a regime’s ability to maintain internal order. Indeed, today’s criticism of the Iraqi opposition sounds remarkably like that in 1980 writing off Afghanistan’s moujahedeen as “ragtag.”

If creating a serious opposition challenge is that easy, why not give it a try? The answer is Iraq’s latent instability. The country is an ethno-sectarian powder keg as a result of long-term Sunni Muslim suppression of the state’s Shiite Muslim majority and Kurdish minority. From outside, today’s Iraq may appear domestically quiescent, much like as Rwanda or Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. Iraq today suffers little overt violent repression because the disgruntled domestic opposition is too weak to mount a serious challenge to the central regime. The status quo may be unjust, but it is stable.

The opposition plan would disturb this equipoise by arming the Kurds and Shiites in the name of a provisional government to “represent the entire Iraqi people.” Ostensibly, large chunks of the Iraqi army would defect to this broad-based opposition. However, it is inconceivable that Iraq’s Sunni-dominated military would willingly hand over power to an opposition consisting largely of Kurds and Shiites. This was made clear in the spring of 1991, when Kurd and Shiite uprisings prompted a demoralized Iraqi military to rally behind Saddam Hussein to put them down, despite his having just led the army to defeat through his ill-conceived invasion of Kuwait.

Thus, even “successful” arming of Kurd and Shiite opposition groups could well produce a violent civil war in Iraq. For those concerned about the use of chemical and biological weapons, this should give pause. Saddam is most likely to use such weapons against domestic opponents, who lack the deterrent mass-destruction weapons of the United States or Israel.

Veteran strategists concerned mainly with the U.S. national interest may say, “Who cares if Iraq falls into civil war?” So long as Saddam is preoccupied with an internal war, he is less of a threat to his neighbors. Such a realpolitik view, which informed U. S. policy during the Cold War, may well be harbored by some of those who are advocating U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition. Just as Afghanistan could be sacrificed in the name of the Cold War, so now the Iraqi people are expendable in the U.S. national interest.

Such a view is shortsighted for several reasons. First, a strategy that compels Saddam to use unconventional weapons against his own people hurts us all. Each time the norm against such weapons is broken, the likelihood of their subsequent use increases. Second, civil wars often pull in neighboring states, especially where ethnic groups spill over borders. Iran is home to both Kurds and Shiite Muslims, and has aided factions of each in Iraq. Turkey, with its own Kurdish problem, already perceives sufficient threat to station troops miles inside Iraq. The prospect of international war, in a region filled with unconventional weapons and much of the world’s oil, is hardly in the U.S. interest. Third, a concerted U.S. effort to subvert the Baghdad regime would trigger increased resistance from France, Russia and China and further weaken the Western alliance, beginning to fray in the absence of a Cold War enemy.

America’s current strategy, which combines elements of deterrence, containment, coercion and strategic interdiction, certainly could stand some clarification as to ends and means. The insurgency scenario, however, would almost certainly be worse, not because of the weakness of the Iraqi opposition, as most critics contend, but because of its potential strength.