Posted on 02/15/2003 10:33:29 AM PST by knighthawk
It is not often recalled, but there was very nearly a second Gulf War. It was 1994, three years after the first, and Saddam Hussein was growing impatient. The sanctions regime, which he had anticipated would be but a temporary nuisance -- indeed, it had been intended as such by the first Bush administration, in the belief that Saddam, after such an inglorious defeat, would soon be gone -- was still in effect.
The inspections were no trouble to him: A few early discoveries had been enough to fool the inspectors into believing they'd found all there was to find. But with his economy in decline, and internal unrest growing, Saddam began demanding an immediate end to sanctions. When that did not yield results, Saddam sent several armoured divisions of the Republican Guard south toward Kuwait. By October there were 80,000 Iraqi troops within striking distance of the border.
In response, the United States quickly launched Operation Vigilant Warrior, reinforcing its own armed presence in the region. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 949, demanding Iraq withdraw. His bluff called, Saddam backed down.
I recite all this history to make a point: The past 12 years have not been, as some seem to think, a period of quiescence in the Gulf, in which a beaten Saddam meekly submitted to the combined indignities of sanctions and inspections. To the contrary, the Iraqi dictator has constantly pushed and probed against the limits of his tethers, harassing and obstructing the inspectors at every turn, while exploiting divisions within the international community to weaken the sanctions.
By the time the inspectors were finally forced to withdraw in 1998, Saddam was able to sell about as much oil as he wanted -- legally, through the so-called "oil for food" program, and illegally, through a massive international smuggling operation. And as oil poured out through the widening holes in the sanctions regime, so imports of contraband material poured in.
"Containment," in other words, the massive international effort to bottle up Saddam since the Gulf War, can be pronounced a failure, done in by a combination of Saddam's own relentless efforts to rebuild and the unwillingness of other countries to pay the price of making containment stick -- even if that price was no more than doing without their share of Iraqi oil revenues. The more we know about what Saddam has been up to, and how much of his arsenals of mass destruction he has retained, the more we learn how little we knew before, even with the inspectors in place. And it's been four years since they left. The whole country's one big death machine.
So it is a little mystifying to hear it suggested, even now, that it is not necessary to remove Saddam, or even to disarm him; that, rather than use force, it is enough merely to contain him. Leave aside the predictable failure of the current round of inspections, Hans Blix and his team patiently inspecting the sites it occurs to them to inspect, while Saddam's laboratories of death are hidden deep underground or whisked about the country inside container trucks. And leave aside the near total collapse of sanctions, without which even a successful inspections regime is futile.
Suppose it were possible to locate all of Saddam's lethal inventory. And suppose he could be prevented from acquiring more from abroad. The inspectors are only in the country in the first place because of the American decision to send 150,000 troops to the region. Are they to remain there indefinitely? For the minute they go home, Saddam kicks out the inspectors. Or he simply does what he did before, and blocks the inspectors from certain sites, or prevents them from leaving with what they had found.
I know: We can send in thousands of UN peacekeepers to accompany them, as briefly proposed by the French (and, more recently, by Lloyd Axworthy, who apparently was once our foreign minister). First problem: If there was any likelihood of this working, why would Saddam agree to it? Because we threaten to go to war if he doesn't? But the only reason we're sending in the peacekeepers is because we are unwilling to go to war.
Second problem: It won't work. There is no reason to think Saddam would be persuaded to yield anything he was determined to keep by the presence of a few blue helmets, any more than he was by the inspectors themselves. What are they going to do? Shoot it out with the Republican Guard? Ah, but then we send in the troops -- to find that Saddam has taken the peacekeepers hostage, or tied them to military installations. Did we learn nothing from Bosnia?
What all these schemes fail to reckon with is the nature of Saddam himself: his vast, unquenchable ambition; his determination, at all costs, to get and keep weapons of mass destruction; his willingness to risk war to get what he wants; and his habitual miscalculation of those risks. He cannot be contained, not forever. He can only be destroyed.
And guess where the contraband came from? France, Germany and Russia. That's why they oppose action - we'll find out all the stuff they've been selling to Iraq "illegally".
And now we have a repetition of the 94 pattern!
Let's Roll!
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Oh, but it is an option! A very good option!
You see, they have these things called "cremation urns" that hold the ashes of the departed. I believe one would be just perfect to "contain" Saddam!
It has been very interesting listening to Eagleberger, and he is right!
Bump to you, knighthawk...
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