Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1999, pages 14-17

Two Views

In Iraq, Whose Interests Are Served By Killing An Entire Nation By Starvation, and Threatening Still More Bombings?

Repeated U.S.-Iraq Confrontations Reflect Deep Mutual Misperceptions

By Richard H. Curtiss

“Any fair-minded observer anywhere in the world knows very well that Iraq is the aggrieved party in what’s been going on in the last seven and a half years.”

—Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Nov. 22, 1998.

“[Richard Butler’s] gone back to them and asked for further information...We would hope that they would respond positively and quickly.”

—White House National Security Adviser Samuel (Sandy) Berger, Nov. 22, 1998.

“We told [Butler] we cannot provide documents that do not exist. It’s quite provocative if you want to dig into the whole archive of the government of Iraq, which might take decades to investigate.”

—Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Nov. 22, 1998.

“It’s a very bad start, and it seems to me very clear that when the president returns home...we’d better be prepared for the military strike.”

—Senate Foreign Relations Committee Republican member Richard Lugar, Nov. 22, 1998.

The cacophony of totally conflicting statements quoted above, issued not over a long period but all on the same day by responsible U.S. and Iraqi officials, led to the conclusion that more U.S. military strikes were about to be launched against Iraq, perhaps on a more sustained basis than in recent years. That would have led to heavier “collateral damage,” meaning loss of lives and probably of infrastructure essential to the health of Iraq’s people. In turn this could have taken an even heavier future toll than the grim price Iraqis already have paid over the past seven years.

As to what causes such repeated clashes, perceptions in the U.S., in Iraq, and among its Arab neighbors could not be farther apart than they are now. There are some basic facts, however, upon which all can agree.

The sanctions were imposed upon Iraq in August 1990, four days after its military occupation of Kuwait. They remain, in the words of New York Times correspondent Philip Shenon, “among the toughest imposed on a nation in the modern age and are estimated to have cost Iraq more than $120 billion in oil revenues.”

After Iraqi troops were forced out of Kuwait, U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991 kept most of the economic sanctions in place, prohibiting all trade with Iraq except that involving such “essential human needs” as food and medicine. The resolution specified that the sanctions would remain until Iraq had revealed and destroyed its ballistic missiles and its capability to make nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The Security Council agreed to review Iraq’s compliance with the resolution every 60 days to determine when the sanctions could be lifted.

Since then most of the 20 million Iraqis have been left without adequate food, clean water, and medicine. Based upon statistics supplied by Iraq, the United Nations estimates that one million Iraqi children are malnourished and that 700,000 children have died from malnutrition and disease since 1990.

In August 1991, the Security Council offered to allow Iraq to sell up to $1.6 billion worth of oil every six months, with the proceeds to be used for reparations to victims of Iraq’s invasion and the purchase and distribution of food and medicine to the Iraqi people under U.N. supervision. Iraq refused the plan as a violation of its sovereignty.

In 1996, however, as evidence of a humanitarian disaster mounted, Iraq agreed to a similar arrangement which permitted it to sell $2 billion in oil every six months, with the money still to be divided between reparations and relief supplies. In February 1998 the figure was raised to $5.2 billion every six months, although this is more petroleum than Iraq can pump until basic repairs are completed in its production facilties. U.N. personnel have been supervising the distribution in Iraq of food and medicine purchased with the proceeds since 1997.

From the beginning, U.S. administrations have sought tougher conditions that would tie lifting of the sanctions to Saddam Hussain’s departure. President George Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, said in May 1991, “We are not interested in seeking a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam is in power.”

Initially President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, also tied lifting of the embargo to the Iraqi president’s departure. Subsequently the U.S. has dropped this language. Early in 1998, then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson instead tied the embargo to a strict interpretation of the U.N. resolution, saying “sanctions are going to stay forever—or until Iraq complies fully” with the U.N. resolution provisions.

The U.S. says these call upon Iraq to shut down programs for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, make full restitution to victims of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and account for more than 600 Kuwaiti prisoners missing since the end of the Gulf war.

British policy has supported the U.S. However, the other three permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, China, France and Russia, say the U.N. resolution allows the sanctions to be lifted as soon as the Security Council rules that Iraq has shut down the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. They would like to see this happen by the end of 1998.

For their part, the Iraqis charge that they can offer nothing more than they have already, since it is impossible to prove a negative—that they are not doing what the United States says they are doing.

As for Iraq’s neighbors, none trust Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. But, with the exception of Kuwait, all now publicly deplore the ghastly impact of the sanctions on the Iraqi people who, they believe, have no power to overthrow Saddam in any case. Some of the same Arab states of the Gulf who joined the coalition to liberate Kuwait now openly send food and medicine directly to the Iraqis, bypassing U.N. bureaucrats.

In the face of unyielding U.S. opposition to further lifting of the embargo, theories have grown up in the Middle East to explain U.S. intransigence. Most Arabs have long believed that the U.S. deliberately encouraged Saddam Hussain’s miscalculation that President Bush would not oppose his occupation of Kuwait. And they see the cycle of Iraqi provocations, and U.S. retaliations, as part of a grand American strategy to reintroduce American forces into the Gulf areas holding 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves, and then keep those U.S. forces stationed there.

They explain Saddam Hussain’s active participation in this scenario by saying that he needs the threats and turmoil provoked by his actions to force his people to rally around a leader who has brought disaster upon his country, and the entire Middle East.

Lending support to this theory, they say, are the Iraqi president’s most recent actions, recalling from their foreign posts his astute and experienced ambassador to the U.N., Nizar Hamdoon; Saddam’s own half-brother, Barzan al-Takriti, Iraq’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, and some 28 other ambassadors from Iraqi embassies abroad. Such mass transfers may indicate Saddam is far less concerned about the loss to Iraq of valuable diplomatic continuity during the current crisis than he is about the growth of direct ties between his ambassadors and representatives of countries opposed to his rule.

Most Americans draw totally different conclusions. They see Saddam’s initial invasion of Kuwait as the result of his misinterpretation of ambiguous remarks by a U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and State Department inattention.

They believe also that rather than withdrawing his outnumbered forces peacefully from Kuwait in late 1990 he allowed his army to be destroyed there because he was afraid that if it returned home intact it would overthrow him. They say his continued disputes with U.N. inspectors result from his determined attempts to keep them from finding remaining weapons of mass destruction in his arsenal.

And although most Americans sincerely deplore the human suffering caused by the embargo, they believe it eventually will be the catalyst for a coup that will bring down Saddam and enable Iraq to re-emerge as a constructive member of the family of nations. Finally, they believe that each time President Clinton sends U.S. forces to the Gulf and back again without taking action, it undermines U.S. credibility throughout the world. Therefore, at some point it could become politically impossible for Clinton not to strike, regardless of negative reaction within the Middle East itself.

The U.S. got itself into this untenable position because of a deep, but unacknowledged, fault line running right through the foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government. The traditional “Arabist” viewpoint was based upon supporting the existence of three power centers in the Gulf. These, in order of military power, were Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia supported by the other GCC states. Theoretically, if any one of these centers of power sought to dominate the region, the other two would combine to resist it, with the support of the U.S. Essential to this strategy, therefore, was support for the territorial integrity of Iraq.

Israel, however, pursues an opposite strategy. It traditionally has sought close alliances with the U.S. and non-Arab Iran, and has worked unceasingly to break Iraq into three separate Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shi’i Arab states. In conjunction with Iran in the 1960s, and in conjunction with Iran and the U.S. in the 1970s (during Henry Kissinger’s tenure as U.S. secretary of state), Israeli agents encouraged Kurdish rebellions in northern Iraq. Now, friends of Israel in the U.S. foreign policy establishment are doing so again.

This dichotomy within the State Department, the CIA, and in the White House, where Israeli influence is stronger and deeper than at any previous time in U.S. history, results in conflicting signals emanating from Washington.

On the surface, the U.S. is following its traditional policy in the Gulf. Just below the surface, however, there are friends of Israel in the U.S. government, strongly backed by friends of Israel in the American media, who resist any U.S. Middle East policy at odds with Israel.

It is they who are pursuing policies aimed at breaking up Iraq. Saddam Hussain’s menacing personal presence lends itself admirably to their needs, providing a demonized Arab leader and acclimating Americans to military confrontations with an Arab country.

There is no easy solution to this situation, at least so long as the Clinton administration is in power. But in shaping their own reactions to U.S. policies, it is important for Arab leaders first to understand their complexities.