Was This War Necessary?

The Wall Street Journal | 3/24/3 | By ROBERT L. BARTLEY

[WaveThatFlag]

By now my enthusiasm for the liberation of Iraq is clear enough, I hope, that I can take a day to rain on the parade. As impressive as the current campaign is, American policy in dealing with Saddam Hussein has been a bipartisan chamber of horrors.

Consider for example the Clinton administration low point, extensively described in Robert Baer's CIA memoir, "See No Evil." Mr. Baer headed a small CIA team in Northern Iraq in 1995, in contact with the two Kurdish factions as well as with Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and a defecting Iraqi general, Wafiq Smarrai, who carried plans from other Iraqi military men for a coup in Baghdad.

The action was to start with a Kurdish attack on Saddam's army, but at the very last moment Clinton national security adviser Tony Lake sent a pre-emptory telegram which, as Mr. Baer puts it, "pulled the plug without warning or a decent explanation."

U.S. POLICY ON IRAQ

A bipartisan record of appeasement

1995 Undercut revolt by Kurds and Iraqi National Congress in North

1991 Undercut revolts in North and South by letting Saddam fly helicopters after cease-fire

1991 Stopped Gulf War with Saddam still in power

1984 Tilted toward Iraq in war with Iran. Continued to improve relations with Iraq between end of war in 1988 and invasion of Kuwait in 1990

1981 Condemned Israel's destruction of Osirak nuclear reactor

The INC and PUK (Talibani-led Kurds) went ahead without U.S. support, with initial battlefield success as Iraqi troops surrendered, but the KDP (or Barzani-led Kurds) undercut the offensive. Mr. Lake had Mr. Baer return to Washington to face an FBI investigation of trying to assassinate a foreign leader, namely Saddam Hussein. The following year Saddam invaded the north and wiped out INC and CIA assets.

The Clinton administration repeatedly sounded an uncertain trumpet, for example shooting up an empty intelligence building after Saddam tried to assassinate former President Bush during a 1993 visit to Kuwait. Little wonder the CIA failed on September 11. The scope of the attack was indeed hard to imagine, Mr. Baer writes, "The point is, though, that we didn't even try to find out what was headed our way."

Republicans were also culpable. During the 1991 Gulf War, the first President Bush gave a speech saying, "There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." Both Shiites in the South and Kurds in the north responded with widespread insurrections. But U.S. aircraft controlling the skies let the Iraqis fly combat helicopters to suppress the revolts.

During cease-fire negotiations, General Norman Schwarzkopf had agreed to let the Iraqi military fly helicopters because bridges and roads were damaged. "That seemed like a reasonable request," he told David Frost, "And within my charter, I felt it was something that it was perfectly all right to grant." But even after the helicopters dropped sulfuric acid and napalm on civilians, the Bush administration let this decision stand; the president's press secretary reported "We do not intend to involve ourselves in the internal conflicts in Iraq."

This followed the logic of stopping the Gulf War offensive at the border with Kuwait, indeed returning captured territory to Saddam. Given an opportunity to press on toward Baghdad and "regime change," administration decision-makers, in particular Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, worried about press coverage depicting the retreating Iraqi troops trapped on a "highway of death." As the insurrections developed, the U.S. eventually provided some protection with "no-fly" zones in both the north and the south, periodically exchanging fire with Iraqi air defense for the last dozen years.

Controversy still swirls, too, around what message the U.S. conveyed to Saddam before his invasion of Kuwait. An Iraqi transcript showed U.S. ambassador April Glaspie telling him eight days before the 1990 invasion, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." She later testified that the Iraqis left out a warning insisting that such disputes be settled in "a non-violent manner."

Ambassador Glaspie's testimony, however, graphically displayed the State Department "mindset" about Iraq. Though Saddam had already gassed the Kurds and would execute any opposition leader who saw her, policy was directed at turning him into a moderate.

This notion took root during the Iraq-Iran war, and continued after its end in 1988. After the hostage-taking at the American embassy, the U.S. saw Iran as the greater threat, and sought a balance of power in the Gulf. In the five years before the invasion of Kuwait, the House Government Operations Committee found, the U.S. approved 771 export licenses to sell Saddam some $1.5 billion in equipment with military uses, including some that would help develop weapons of mass destruction. The result of the balance was to make enemies of both sides.

Even the hawks of the Reagan administration got into the act when the Israelis bombed Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor, thus aborting his then-current nuclear program. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick joined the United Nations vote condemning Israel. The Israelis had of course used American-built planes, with a new delivery impending. The Americans did delay the delivery for a time, but in his memoirs President Reagan says he agreed Saddam would use the reactor to build a bomb.

The lesson of this second Iraqi war is that the U.S. cannot afford an on-again, off-again attention span, whether from fear of "quagmires" or notions of realpolitik. Withdrawal of American power creates a vacuum into which forces of instability flow. History has thrust the U.S. into peacekeeping; its elites now have to learn to do it without having to bust up the same real estate every dozen years or so.

[SunStar]

This article correctly demonstrates that we should no longer elect appeasement-oriented leaders. God speed, President Bush.

[WaveThatFlag]

Give Bush41 a little credit. Removing a head of state was unthinkable in 1991.

[WhiskeyPapa]

This is what I've been saying all along. It's never been hidden from view. A -lot- of our current problems go right back to George Bush, Sr.

Walt

[Experiment 6-2-6]

Withdrawal of American power creates a vacuum into which forces of instability flow.

Aristotle once said, "Evil prevails when good men do nothing". And in 1992, when the LAPD withdrew from the ghettos after the Rodney King verdict, it allowed thugs and gangsters to loot and murder.

Hopefully this exercise will be finished without undue casualties and obtain the desired result..

[IncPen]

Clinton-era ping

[txzman]

Bingo. Elect men who understand the reality of politics in today's world, who are dedicated to upholding the constitution, defending the interests of the United States and protecting its people.

[WaveThatFlag]

Um, the Journal has just about the most conservative editorial staff in all of journalism. When was the last time you actually read it?

[Search4Truth]

(Yawn)

[Mr. Bird]

In my opinion, the world has changed much too dramatically over the past 15-20 years to criticize wholly the manner in which the U.S. has treated Iraq. The American people could wrap their brains around ousting an invader of a sovereign nation in '91. Assuming they would support regime change at that time is no small wager.

Once again, we find otherwise intelligent people marveling at how simple the world could be if only we could have seen history coming.

[WaveThatFlag]

OK, then I don't understand your point. Do you think the Journal is too conservative? You can't think they are too liberal. This is the editorial staff who recruited the Coalition of The Willing two months ago.

[JohnGalt]

I think it goes to the end of the Cold War and the failure of the CIA to extinguish certain assets like Saddam and Osama amongst dozens of others.

[onedoug]

Good analogy.

I'm sorry you feel your time in the Navy was "wasted". Thank you for that service.

[Ditto]

But U.S. aircraft controlling the skies let the Iraqis fly combat helicopters to suppress the revolts.

Not true Walt. Storm'n Norman got snookered at first and agreed to allow chopper flights since all the roads and bridges between Baghdad and the south were out. But he also ordered them shot down after they started blasting the hell out of the Marsh Arabs.

There is a lot of myth surrounding the events post Gulf I, and this is but one of them. The fact is that we did not know at the time if any of the competing anti-Saddam factions would have been a better deal than leaving a weakened Saddam left in power. What would a Kurd leadership have done to the Sunni population? Would Turkey be forced to act to control their own Kurds? Would a Shiite dominated Iraq have merged with the crazy Mullahs in Tehran? We still don't know the answer to those questions. What we did know at the time was that there was no way we could stay there for very long to help sort things out. What we do know today is that we will be there for a long time.

[WhiskeyPapa]

You are correct, as usual. The war could have been avoided altogether.

We DID leave the insurgents hanging. That will hurt us now.

Walt

[Ditto]

We DID leave the insurgents hanging. That will hurt us now.

You are correct as well. It has happened before. I think of those frantic pleas from Budapest in 1956. But it was not in our best interest, or even within our ability, to do anything about either situation.

[4CJ]

A -lot- of our current problems go right back to George Bush, Sr.

Nonsense - the problems were there long before. A lot of problems can be traced to conquests at varous times and nations, especially by England in her colonial heyday. Many conquered nations consider us - the US of A - to be equivalent targets, and responsible for the "sins" of the British.

Bush the Elder should have contained (you know what I mean) Saddam, just as Clinton should have done. By failing to act, Clinton just passed the buck on to W. Just as if W had failed to act, the responsibilty would fall to his sucessor.

Personally, I think George Washington was correct, that we should avoid entangling alliances.