The Iraqi opposition comprises mainly the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Things can change, of course, but the INC that I got to know during my
time in government was an umbrella group of exiles with little internal
cohesion and no credibility anywhere in the U.S. government, or among
any of the governments in the Middle East. Its only real support resided
in the U.S. Congress with an influential faction that believed the INC's
claim that it represented a strong presence within Iraq and needed only
firm backing from the United States to topple Saddam's regime.
Notwithstanding the uniformly negative assessments of the State Department,
the Department of Defense, and the CIA, I believed that the opposition
might be developed into a useful external voice for liberation-but over
a period of time and with some intensive work. The idea that it could
organize inside Iraq to create the means to overthrow the regime never
seemed credible to me-and does not seem credible now. Saddam runs a ruthlessly
effective intelligence system, and there were good reasons to be pessimistic
about the INC's chances of creating an internal resistance that would
survive.
But let's say, for the sake of argument, that there is some kind of serious
opposition network inside Iraq. If the United States sets out to destroy
Saddam, failure will not be an option. We will be gambling wildly if we
assume that all it takes to do the job is this network and a relatively
light U.S. force. We will need a blocking force to make sure that Saddam
does not make a lunge into Kuwait. We will need everything it takes to
finish what we start, and that means a substantial military force in the
region and on call. It will not be possible to handle the preparations
for such a force, or its operations, without full support from at least
a few countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Such support was problematic even before the recent downward spiral of
events in the Middle East. Given the Bush administration's disastrous
management of U.S. policy there, it is even harder to imagine any regional
support for toppling Saddam. The administration's policies have changed
the subject in much of the world from how to defeat terrorism to how to
constrain the United States. This has helped Saddam take a giant step
toward rehabilitation in the Arab world, and it has certainly made it
extremely dangerous-lethal, might be more accurate-for any moderate Arab
government to overtly support the United States in a military effort to
remove Saddam. And if, despite the military handicap of acting alone,
the United States were to nevertheless make war on the Iraqi leader, it
would force such friends as we have in the Arab world to abandon us to
save themselves. If there were ever anything to be said for a quick thrust,
this option is no longer available to us. It is a casualty of the Israeli-Palestinian
crisis, which the Bush administration tried to treat as a marginal issue
until far too late.
So, what is to be done? Ten steps come to mind.
1. Ease the rhetoric about an early resort to force, but don't take that
option off the table.
2. Try to corner Saddam on weapons of mass destruction and international
inspections.
3. Use covert action to undermine Saddam's image of full control within
Iraq.
4. Keep looking for any likely Iraqi allies, and give them our help,
but without betting the farm on them.
5. Be prepared -- on any credible provocation -- to destroy as much military-industrial
infrastructure as we can in a powerful, if limited, raid.
6. Pay close attention to the survival of the Kurdish leadership.
7. See what can be done among the Shiites in Iraq's southern region.
8. Keep the economic clamps on Saddam through "smarter sanctions"
if we can get them, or the older sanctions if we can't.
9. Push for an international indictment of Saddam Hussein as a war criminal.
There is plenty of information available to do it. Troves of incriminating
documents removed from northern Iraq following the Persian Gulf War remain
unprocessed and unanalyzed in U.S. archives. A legal indictment would
be especially persuasive with our European allies.
10. Figure out now what we would be prepared to do inside Iraq after
Saddam goes, because we cannot accept the kind of dithering that the administration
is passing off as policy in post-Taliban Afghanistan. A post-Saddam Iraq
would require a major commitment from the United States. If the administration
isn't prepared for that, it should back off.
Above all, we have to keep our sights on the fact that terrorism does
not begin or end in Baghdad. Without in any way minimizing the threat
that Baghdad presents by way of its own state-operated terror apparatus,
or by way of the chance that it could place weapons of mass destruction
at the service of terrorism, the center of gravity of the threat lies
elsewhere. Sept. 11 was brought to us by a non-state terrorist network,
whose center was in Afghanistan, but which was widely dispersed as a global
network. One of the properties of this network is that it cannot be destroyed
as easily as a point target, even if the target is its entire establishment
in one country. The recent capture of an individual in Pakistan, said
to be capable of activating "sleeper cells" of the bin Laden
network, illustrates that the threat can survive decapitation and reconstitute
itself.
There was always a danger that in fixating on Iraq, the administration
would lose focus in pursuit of the terrorist network -- or that it might
distract other countries from that task, by hyping controversy about near-term
action against Iraq. Some believe that we could take on Saddam pretty
much alone, but almost no one thinks that the war against terror can be
won without sustained cooperation from dozens of countries. One of the
most pivotal of those countries is Pakistan, whose support depends upon
the survival in office of just one man. If an obsession with fast action
in Iraq were to cost us that man or his ability to support us, it would
be a very costly victory.
We should always have been preparing to play a long game with Saddam,
one in which we meticulously prepare the ground for action, while giving
him time to make the kind of fatal mistake that would deliver him to us.
Now, given the need for a more intense U.S. engagement in Afghanistan,
and in view of the state of affairs throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds,
there is even more reason to avoid confusing a lunge with a policy.
