We had a crucial but limited objective in the gulf war: to reverse Iraqi aggression, and to cripple Saddam’s offensive military capabilities. The international coalition that President Bush put together to fight the gulf war was based on this carefully defined goal. We certainly hoped that Iraq’s defeat would lead to Saddam’s collapse, but we viewed that prospect as a potentially beneficial byproduct of our victory.
If we had made Saddam’s overthrow part of the objective, there would have been no international coalition: even during Desert Storm, our Arab allies stopped their troops at Iraq’s border because they wanted no part of an attack on Iraqi territory. If we had continued to prosecute the gulf war after we achieved our stated objectives, we would have destroyed the coalition and squandered much of what our victory had achieved.
So if we had pressed on to Baghdad in 1991, we would have been on our own. And if we had succeeded in overthrowing Saddam, we would have confronted a choice between occupying Iraq with thousands of American troops for the indefinite future and creating a gaping power vacuum in the Persian Gulf for Iran to fill. There was no support among the American people for the first alternative in 1991, and even less so today. The second alternative would have put our vital national-security interests in jeopardy.
Put simply, we recognized that the seemingly attractive goal of getting rid of Saddam would not solve our problems, or even necessarily serve our interests, any more than the overthrow of Diem was a silver bullet to the conundrum of Vietnam. So we pursued the kind of inelegant, messy alternative that is all too often the only one available in the real world. Having driven Saddam out of Kuwait and destroyed much of his offensive military capabilities, we concentrated on keeping the pressure on Iraq so that it could not and would not once again threaten its neighbors. This is the policy that the Clinton administration inherited. Saddam may have made his move into northern Iraq two weeks ago because he thought that with a presidential campaign underway in the United States, we would not respond. Not for the first time, Saddam miscalculated. We were right to strike back, but we did so in a way that did no lasting military damage to him and inflicted significant collateral political damage on us. The cruise-missile attack was quick, clean and easy. But it may have sent Saddam the wrong message–that he would only pay the price of a pinprick. When the smoke cleared, it looked to most political leaders around the world as though Saddam was better off and the United States was worse off than before the current crisis began.
A far more effective military response, though a more dangerous one, would have targeted the Republican Guard units that moved into northern Iraq. An air attack on those forces would have put Saddam on notice that he must pay a real price for his deffiance. It also would have put on notice Iraqi soldiers–on whom Saddam depends to remain in power–that any time they march out on Saddam’s orders, they will be subject to devastating aerial bombardment.
Now we are into the next round. Saddam has fired missiles at our aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones. In return, we have threatened a further ““disproportionate’’ response and are ostentatiously augmenting our military forces in the area.
The next time we hit Saddam, we should hit him hard, and where it hurts him most, so that he cannot mistake our message. Airstrikes will have to focus tightly on Iraq’s military machine, making it clear that we intend to punish Saddam, not harm the Iraqi people. The Republican Guard is an obvious target.
The key point, however, is that the ““Iraq problem’’ is not susceptible to quick fixes. Dealing with Iraq will continue to require patience and persistence, leadership and skill. For the foreseeable future, a successful and sustainable–if unsatisfying–policy is likely to share the same objectives as the one we have followed since the end of the gulf war: relegating Saddam to the category of a nuisance and preventing him from re-emerging as a threat to his neighbors or our vital interests.
