Time to Rethink: At Turn Of the Year U.S. Iraq Policy Cries Out for Re-evaluation

By Richard H. Curtiss

Not much happens in Washington during the last week of the calendar year. Since most people who live and work in the national capital originally are from somewhere else, many go back to wherever they came from to spend Christmas with their extended families, and don’t return until after New Year’s day.

My original home in California was a little too far away for frequent visits, so during some of my years with the U.S. government I was almost the only person in my Washington office during that week. Most other government offices also were down from 5 or 10 to 2 or 3 persons, and the results were marvelous to behold.

For one magic week whoever answered the telephone very likely was also the person in charge, or sitting right next to that person. As a result, everyone knew exactly what anyone else in the office was doing and could give yes or no answers to all questions. And, if I had an important directive or telegram to get out, the multiple clearances from other departments that might ordinarily take a week could be obtained in a morning.

It was an annual time of bureaucratic miracles and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. What’s more, then as now, Washington’s normally extremely heavy traffic was reduced by half.

This year was no different. Less than a week after the last of four nights of bombing Iraq, the vast parking lots at the Pentagon were nearly empty. And just days after impeaching a president for only the second time in American history the 435 members of the House of Representatives and thousands of their staff members had left to spend the Christmas holidays in the states they represent.

So had the 100 senators, but those with media smarts and presidential ambitions had left their telephone numbers with the networks for interviews on what they expected to do after Jan. 1, when the House bill of impeachment, which corresponded to an indictment, was to be turned over to the Senate for a trial on whether President Bill Clinton should or should not be removed from office.

His alleged crimes of lying under oath about an improper relationship with a young female White House intern, and abuse of power to cover it up, seemingly had nothing to do with the Middle East. But the president had ordered missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan last Aug. 19, only two days after intern Monica Lewinsky’s damning testimony before a grand jury was still reverberating in the press. And he ordered the air strikes on Iraq Dec. 16, the day before House impeachment hearings were to begin.

This prompted concerns that the military actions abroad were intended to distract from his impeachment problems at home. Nor did the cessation of strikes on Iraq only two or three hours after the House impeachment vote had been concluded alleviate such suspicions. Whether true or false, they demonstrated that there is no way to separate a president’s private life from his official duties.

The December airstrikes also threw a harsh spotlight on U.S. policy toward Iraq, setting in motion Iraq-related inquiries that attracted more Washington media attention than foreign affairs normally do. Correspondents from major U.S. newspapers sent to Iraq to cover the bombing ended up filing heart-rending reports of the devastating long-term effects of U.N. sanctions on the suffering Iraqi people. And, within the space of an otherwise sparse media week, three Iraq-related events took place at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

First, White House National Security Adviser Samuel Berger held a well-attended press conference Dec. 22 to refute suspicions that U.S. actions in Iraq were domestically driven and that in any case U.S. policy there has reached a dead-end. Only six days later, during a Press Club panel of four speakers sponsored by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), former career United Nations official Denis J. Halliday explained why he resigned in protest after serving for 13 months as head of U.N. relief efforts in Baghdad. And the next day, Dec. 29, “Voices in the Wilderness,” a U.S. humanitarian group dedicated to defying U.N. sanctions on Iraq, held a National Press Club conference to protest a $106,000 fine levied against the organization by the U.S. Treasury Department for exporting to Iraq, in the U.S. government’s own words, “donated goods, including medical supplies and toys.”

Negative Reflections

All of these events reflected negatively on U.S. Iraq policy, whether imposed collectively through a reluctant United Nations as in the case of the sanctions, or almost unilaterally as in the case of the U.S. and British airstrikes.

At the Berger press conference, an Arab-American journalist, Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy, accused the Clinton administration of “moving the goal posts” for lifting the U.N. sanctions on Iraq. Although Berger denied it, a compilation of administration statements distributed by Husseini to the audience illustrated that even in its public statements the U.S. has contradicted itself repeatedly.

For example, on March 26, 1997, in her first major address as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright said, “We do not agree with the nations that argue that if Iraq complies with its obligation concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions...and the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussain’s intentions will never be peaceful.”

On Sept. 15, 1998, however, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk said that “the Security Council resolutions provide in very specific terms for the lifting of sanctions when Iraq has fully complied with all the Security Council resolutions.”

Then on Nov. 10, 1998, State Department spokesman James Rubin said that sanctions would not be altered until after Iraq’s president complies with U.N. resolutions “including on Kuwaiti prisoners, Kuwaiti equipment, and, in short, demonstrating his peaceful intentions.” In the same press briefing, Rubin added that “the Security Council has set out a very simple path to resolve this situation. And all it requires is him doing what he agreed to do, cooperating with UNSCOM.”

Two days later, on Nov. 12, Albright said on a national television program, “This has been one of the clearest sanctions regimes with the clearest road maps that have ever existed in terms of how to get from point A to point B.”

In fact the Clinton administration has not articulated consistent or coherent policies. If the U.S. objective is to keep the sanctions on Iraq so long as Saddam Hussain remains in power, it might speed the lifting of sanctions by offering to grant him safe passage and protection in any foreign country that would offer him political asylum. If, on the other hand, the U.S. really would have no objection to lifting the sanctions when U.N. inspectors certify that Iraq no longer has programs to store or build chemical and biological weapons, as they already have in the case of nuclear programs, it should say so clearly, and thus smooth the way for completion of agreed inspection procedures by agreed dates.

Otherwise there is little reason to believe that the five members of the Security Council with veto power, the U.S. and Britain on the one hand and China, France and Russia on the other, can ever agree on lifting the inhuman sanctions that seemingly are not weakening Iraq’s president, but obviously are killing his helpless people.

An even more puzzling aspect of U.S. policy was highlighted by a Canadian journalist who pointed out that in his Press Club presentation Berger had not reiterated long-standing U.S. policy to support the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of Iraq. Although this has been the cornerstone of U.S. policy toward that country since it obtained its independence, it has been repeatedly undermined by a series of actions by Israel, in concert with Iran in the mid-1960s and in concert with both the U.S. and Iran in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger was U.S. secretary of state.

“Well, let me affirm that policy right here and now,” Berger said dismissively. But, in fact, the actions of the largely pro-Israel Middle East policymaking establishment in both the State Department and the White House have resulted in inconsistency, to put it charitably, between U.S. words and actions. This, in turn, has estranged U.S. policymakers from America’s European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern allies.

An illustration is provided by the U.S. broadcasts to both Iran, in Farsi, and Iraq, in Arabic, recently initiated from Prague by Radio Liberty. During the Cold War, Radio Liberty’s Russian-language broadcasts initially were funded covertly by the CIA and later overtly by direct congressional appropriations.

The new Middle East broadcasts also are funded openly by the U.S. Congress, which has budgeted $97 million to arm diverse Iraqi opposition groups to overthrow Saddam Hussain. Yet, a close look at the broadcasting effort reveals an almost inconceivable gaffe in terms of any credibility it might eventually develop. The broadcasting facilities are headed by Thomas Dine, who for many years before accepting a political appointment from the Clinton administration was the executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s largest Washington, DC lobby.

The fact that the former top-ranking paid lobbyist for Israel in the United States now is in charge of a U.S. government facility overseas charged with supporting American Middle East programs that are supposed to work at cross-purposes with long-standing clandestine Israeli policies is just one unfortunate symptom of the confusion permeating seemingly contradictory and demonstrably unsuccessful American policies toward Iraq as a new year begins.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.