Alleviating Iraqi Suffering Would Hurt, Not Help Saddam Hussain

By Richard H. Curtiss

“President Saddam Hussain, in my eyes, is responsible for all the miseries of the Iraqi people. [But] the more the population suffers, the more it rallies to Saddam Hussain and strengthens him.”—French President Jacques Chirac, Feb. 15, 1999.

It’s easy to describe what’s wrong with present U.S. Iraq policy, but not so easy to suggest feasible alternatives, in view of the realities described by French President Jacques Chirac in the quotation above. It’s best to start with beginnings in the case of Iraq, since that is where both writing, and human civilization, meaning the ability to build cities and then live in them peacefully, seemingly began.

From the beginning, Mesopotamia (the Greek name for “the land between the rivers”) has been a major power center in the Middle East. Present-day Iraq consists of three distinct zones: These are the rain-watered northern uplands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which rise in Turkey’s Anatolian plateau, break through the Taurus mountains; the central irrigated plains through which flow the two rivers, which over the millennia humans have connected with a gridwork of canals; and the marshy delta that formed where the two rivers join in the south and through which their waters flow into the Arabian/Persian Gulf.

Today the uplands are inhabited by Kurds, who also live in the adjacent mountainous areas of Syria, Turkey and Iran. The central plains are inhabited by Sunni Muslim Arabs who, during and since Ottoman Turkish times, have dominated Iraq. South of Baghdad the plains and marshlands are largely inhabited by Shi’i Muslim Arabs, who share their brand of Islam with the neighboring non-Arab Iranians, but share the Arabic language and culture with their neighbors in central Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Kuwait.

Modern Iraq was molded by the British from these three disparate population groups after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. But since time immemorial Mesopotamia/Iraq has been a recognizable geographic entity. Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and Abbasid Arab dynasties have ruled vast empires from capital cities situated along the banks of its two major rivers.

Since the end of World War II, American policy has been to preserve Iraqi national unity and territorial integrity from external threats and internal fissures. This is a cornerstone of an overall U.S. strategy for dealing with the entire Gulf area, which contains about 60 percent of the world’s proven petroleum reserves, and a similar percentage of the world’s natural gas.

The breakup of Iraq is a long-time Israeli goal.

This U.S. strategy is to prevent the Gulf from falling under the control of any one regime or empire by supporting the independence and territorial integrity of all three major population centers bordering the Gulf. These are Iran, with a present-day population of more than 60 million; Iraq with a population of more than 20 million; and Saudi Arabia and the Arab emirates of the Gulf with a combined citizenry of 15 to 20 million.

The rationale for this policy is that if any one of the three regional power centers seeks to dominate the Gulf, the other two will unite to resist it, secure in the knowledge that, if needed, they will receive support from outside powers, including the U.S. When the U.S. deviated from this policy, as it did for a time in the 1970s when it began building up the shah’s Iran as the hegemon, or policeman, of the Gulf, America failed conspicuously, as in the fall of the shah’s government to a combination of internal popular forces.

In carrying out its traditional policy in the 1980s, the U.S. supported President Saddam Hussain’s Iraq when it seemed in danger of being overwhelmed by Iran toward the end of their 1980 to 1988 war. Then, in August, 1990, when the Iraqi president sought to capitalize on what he expected to be continued U.S. support, or at least non-interference, by suddenly invading Kuwait to settle long-standing conflicting claims, the U.S. joined with Saudi Arabia and other nations to expel the Iraqi occupiers in the spring of 1991.

Events since then have led to the present impasse. Ostensibly to strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. led the United Nations in imposing sanctions on Iraqi exports and imports. Unfortunately, however, officials of both the Bush and Clinton administrations said clearly, from time to time, that no matter what Iraq does to comply with the U.N. ban on weapons of mass destruction, the embargo will remain in effect so long as Saddam Hussain rules Iraq. This, of course, removed incentives for Saddam to comply with U.N. sanctions, which finally resulted in his barring of UNSCOM weapons inspectors from Iraq entirely, and the current punitive U.S. and U.K. airstrikes.

What to do about Saddam Hussain now divides U.S. policymakers. Foreign policy professionals agree that any attempt to overthrow him that ended up fracturing Iraq would be a cure even worse than the disease. However, under the influence of Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby, members of Congress have appropriated some $97 million to be used for all manner of opposition groups, even Kurdish and Shi’i groups whose ultimate agenda may be the breakup of Iraq, a long-time Israeli goal, rather than the overthrow of Iraq’s present government.

Sympathy and Resentment

Meanwhile Iraq’s appalling rates of infant mortality and malnutrition have enlisted world sympathy, and particularly that of the other Arab states, for the plight of the Iraqi people. This sympathy has been accompanied by resentment of a seemingly implacable U.S. policy of maintaining the sanctions, regardless of the human costs. Particularly shocking was U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s off-the-cuff remark to a television interviewer some years ago that the sanctions “are worth the cost” in human deaths and suffering.

It should be self-evident that no policy is worth such a toll in human lives. It may be argued that Saddam Hussain has deliberately manipulated the situation, making little effort to see that available food is distributed more equitably, or that domestic food production is dramatically increased in a land that before socialist experimentation began in 1958 was to a large extent agriculturally self-sufficient. It can even be argued that Saddam Hussain welcomes the sanctions and airstrikes to force his people to rally around him. But assessing blame will not feed and heal people.

To do this, a Russian proposal before the Security Council would end sanctions altogether, while a French alternative would lift sanctions but retain controls on some Iraqi imports. Meanwhile the U.N. now permits Iraq to sell up to $5.25 billion worth of crude oil every six months to finance the import of food and medicines. This, in fact, is far more petroleum than Iraq can produce, given the falling price of oil and the delapidated state of its oil fields.

To solve its immediate problems, most people would agree that all restrictions on Iraq’s imports of food and medicine should be removed and Iraq should be allowed to import whatever equipment it needs to repair and restore its petroleum production, to restore its water pumping and water purification capability, and to increase agricultural production, even when such equipment falls into “dual use” categories, meaning that it could also conceivably be used for the production of weapons of mass destruction.

The proposals above, however, do not address those weapons. Further, Saddam Hussain has halted, seemingly for good, U.N. inspections to seek out any such weapons remaining in Iraqi hands, or the facilities to manufacture them.

On the other hand, other countries in the region—notably Israel and possibly Iran, Egypt and Syria—also possess such weapons or the capability to manufacture them, and they are not subject to such inspections. The U.S.-U.N. rationale for this double standard is that Saddam Hussain’s government has demonstrated its aggressive intentions and the others have not.

Whatever the merits of this rationale, the solution in Iraq is to continue the sanctions on import by Iraq of all weapons or equipment clearly designed to manufacture them, and also to continue the surcharge that reserves some 30 percent of Iraqi petroleum revenues to payment of reparations to victims of Iraq’s 1990 aggression, and the costs of maintaining U.N. relief supervisors in Iraq. Their job is to see that the food and medicine Iraq imports goes into general distribution, and is not manipulated to concentrate still more power in the hands of Saddam’s regime.

Thus food, medicine, petroleum production, water purification and agricultural productivity, the lack of which is causing the present misery, are freed from political policy. What would and should remain until Saddam complies with U.N. requirements is the surcharge on petroleum revenues and the ban on facilities to make or use weapons of mass destruction.

The U.N. might also make clear that there would be no interference if Saddam chooses to step down and accept political asylum in some foreign country, following the precedent of Ugandan dictator and accused mass murderer Idi Amin, who lives unmolested under a kind of house arrest in Jeddah, but is banned from leaving Saudi Arabia. Thus, while Saddam Hussain contemplates whether finally to comply with the ban on weapons of mass destruction and whether finally to account for persons missing from Kuwait since the Iraqi occupation in order to free his country of the surcharge on its oil revenues, his people would receive unhindered access to the humanitarian supplies and equipment necessary to recover from their present nightmare.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.