Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 10, 104

Special Report

As Dust Settles From Iraq Crisis of 1997, Winner May Be Iraqi People and Loser Binyamin Netanyahu

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Of all the factors that diminish U.S. influence in the region, the one most on the mind of the Clinton administration is centered on Israel's relations with its neighbors."—Correspondent Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, Nov. 23, 1997

It's de rigueur for the media to pick winners and losers in every turn of events, such as the November crisis between Iraq and the United States. It would be a meaningless exercise except that historians later tend to be guided by those instant media assessments.

What's significant about the November events is that the long-term beneficiaries may be the Iraqi people, who have been the big losers in all of Iraqi President-for-Life Saddam Hussain's previous confrontations with his neighbors and the international community. And a likely long-term loser is Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who wasn't even in office during those previous events.

Initially, the Russians looked like the winners, since Foreign Minister Anatoly Primakov, a former KGB Arabist who functioned as a journalist while he lived and learned in the Middle East, brokered the end of the crisis. After a seven-year absence from Middle East affairs, Russia therefore resurfaced as a friend of the Arabs who, after all, have both the petroleum and the purchasing power in the Middle East, although they don't seem to realize it.

Primakov presumably prevailed upon Saddam Hussain to back down by warning him that the U.S. was prepared for another aerial blitz that might leave Iraq just as crippled as did the first one, but this time without the hidden cash reserves to recover in a hurry. Primakov hardly needed to remind the Iraqis that he had been in the process of engineering a voluntary evacuation of Kuwait by a foot-dragging Saddam in January 1991 when the coalition-imposed deadline expired and within hours the aerial war began. The Iraqi leader could hardly have forgotten the catastrophe that resulted from his previous procrastination as he searched for a face-saving climbdown from his Kuwait miscalculation.

Subsequently, however, Russia has been unable to obtain even an amelioration of the embargo to enable Iraq to sell more petroleum in order to feed its people, compensate victims of the 1990-91 events and, not incidently, start paying back its massive arms debts to the Russians. So Russia's principal gain was world acknowledgment that it is back in the geopolitics game—probably a positive development for all concerned, including the U.S., which hopes to see Russian moderates remain in power.

Israel presumably possesses all of the same weapons from which Iraq is barred.

Saddam Hussain's image as a menacing bungler remains unchanged. He invaded a revolution-weakened Iran in 1980 to regain Iraqi sovereignty over the Shatt-al-Arab, Iraq's principal outlet to the sea. However, his attack united Iran behind its Islamist government and condemned Iraq, with only 18 million inhabitants, to a bloody eight-year war with Iran, with a population of 60 million people.

Saddam's 1990 occupation of tiny Kuwait, which he sought to justify on the grounds that Kuwait had been separated from Iraq only by 19th-century colonialist maneuvers, had equally unforeseen consequences. It united a worldwide coalition against Iraq and resulted in the forcible ejection from Kuwait of Iraqi forces, with the loss of between 25,000 and 50,000 soldiers (in contrast to 146 American combat deaths) and the imposition of the present United Nations embargo on Iraq. Over the past seven years the war and embargo have caused the deaths of between half a million and one and a half million Iraqi civilians, more than half of them children.

Saddam's most recent push to take advantage of perceived world concern over those civilian deaths to force a loosening or lifting of U.N. sanctions had the opposite short-range effect, forcing even reluctant U.N. Security Council members to support their continuation. Nevertheless, Iraq's two highly effective spokesmen, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and Ambassador to the U.N. Nizar Hamdoon, made an eloquent case for Saddam's contention that U.S. insistence on continuing the U.N. embargo has little to do with Iraqi concealment of weapons of mass destruction, and instead is based upon a determination to keep the embargo in effect so long as Saddam Hussain remains in power.

An Unacceptable Policy

That policy, voiced at different times by both the administrations of George Bush and of Bill Clinton, is no longer acceptable to most of the rest of the world. To avoid further isolation in the U.N., the U.S. will have to abandon this policy as a result of the latest crisis.

Like Saddam, Clinton neither enhanced nor tarnished his already-established reputation in the United States. Democratic spinmasters hailed his calm under fire. They pointed out that he made it clear that he is not trigger-happy, but also is willing to use massive force if diplomacy fails. Republicans charged that the sudden eruption of the crisis illustrated, again, the lack of focus in the current U.S. administration, caused by Clinton's intellectual laziness and dangerous inattention to foreign policy.

It was media examination of the latter charge that struck the sudden and totally unexpected blows at Israel's prime minister in U.S. public opinion. Virtually all serious U.S. media commentators pointed out that Israel presumably possesses all of the same weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical and nuclear—and means of delivery from which Iraq is barred. Some journalists went so far as to comment that so long as Iraq feels threatened by such Israeli weapons, it will feel compelled to retain the ability to retaliate in kind.

Equally damaging to Israel was the acknowledgment by virtually all opinion makers in the U.S. that it was Clinton's unwillingness to challenge publicly Netanyahu's renunciation of the Middle East peace process that had destroyed any hope of support by Arab countries for the U.S. position against Iraq. It became clear that the Gulf states in which U.S. aircraft are based had ruled out any U.S. strikes from their soil, unless Iraq fired upon U-2 spyplanes flying over Iraq under United Nations auspices. Since even Saddam has not yet been foolish enough to fall into this trap,
the U.S. is limited to strategies based solely on strikes from aircraft carriers in the region and from far more distant Pacific and Indian Ocean bases.

If Arab leaders are interested in exploiting this sudden outbreak in candor about Israel in U.S. public discourse, they will follow it up with public appeals to the U.S. to adopt an evenhanded Middle Eastern policy in the interest of saving Middle East peace. There is little evidence that Arab leaders understand or pay attention to the role of public opinion in the U.S., however, writing it off as a lost cause because of the strong pro-Israel bias in the mainstream U.S. media.

Nevertheless, increased understanding of the U.N. embargo's catastrophic effect on Iraqi civilians has altered U.S. public opinion dramatically. A November visit to the Arab countries of the Gulf alerted the writer to the fact that some have for some time been sending food shipments to Iraq in defiance of the embargo. Now, for the first time, there is public discussion among Americans of the need for the United States to do the same.

A proposal to do just that in the Nov. 21 Washington Post by Dr. William Rugh, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen and to the United Arab Emirates, elicited a request for details from the White House on the same day it appeared. Rugh, who subsequently has been invited to explain the idea on major U.S. television programs, modestly attributes the proposal to Egyptian intellectual Saad Ibrahim, who recently visited Washington.

In his article Rugh, who now heads American-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST) in Washington, DC, said flatly:

"The United States and the United Nations should eschew military action and instead immediately announce a program to provide food and medicine directly to the Iraqi people, by establishing U.N.-controlled distribution centers throughout the country. That would demonstrate clearly that we care about the Iraqi people, countering the widespread belief in the Arab world and elsewhere that we don't care and that we use only force. It would, in one dramatic stroke, re-establish the United States as the humanitarian nation we know we are."

In fact, on a purely technical basis such a program would not be at all difficult to initiate. Most of the Iraqi people live in three major cities, Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, and a dozen minor ones, all but one situated along the country's two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Each of these primary cities and towns has its own provincial government, which could easily cooperate to secure equitable distribution to all of the country's needy.

Politically, Saddam Hussain's government certainly would oppose such a program under U.S. auspices, and perhaps under U.N. auspices as well. However, such a program, or programs, under Arab League or Islamic Conference Organization auspices would be difficult even for Saddam Hussain's authoritarian government to object to—since he could hardly expect to be taken seriously if he maintained that badly needed humanitarian programs under purely Arab or Islamic auspices were simply cover operations for espionage against Iraq.

Such direct food relief is a subject the U.S. government almost will certainly take up, despite the predictable opposition of the Israel lobby and its supporting media in the U.S. (Ironically, when Israel's American media supporters voice their opposition, based upon their goal of preventing any rapprochement between the American and Arab peoples, they will find themselves supporting Saddam Hussain, whose objective is the same.)

Far more effective for hungry and impoverished Iraqis, however, would be serious efforts by the Arab and Muslim countries to put direct relief efforts on a formal basis rather than on the semi-covert basis upon which they presently are conducted. If massive direct relief operations actually get underway, it will mean that the real winners in the November "Iraq crisis" will be the long-suffering Iraqi people. This, in turn, might make the most recent Iraq crisis the last one as well.