February 1999
Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein
By David Wurmser
The 1991 war with Iraq constituted the greatest direct military investment the United States has ever made in the Middle East. The objective was simple: to remove Saddam Hussein as a threat to the region. Eight years later, Saddam’s regime remains in place, his power has been enhanced, and his diplomatic position is improving. Moreover, the coalition devoted to containing Saddam has steadily dissipated.
In Tyranny’s Ally, David Wurmser argues that current U.S. policy will never lead to Saddam Hussein’s downfall because it targets only the tyrant, and not the institution of tyranny in Iraq and in the Middle East more generally. Mr. Wurmser therefore recommends a strategy of insurgency, rather than coups, to remove Saddam.
Mr. Wurmser is a research fellow at AEI.
Since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraqi nationals and the Bush and Clinton administrations have mounted efforts to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. By the summer of 1995, one of those efforts had endangered and nearly toppled Saddam’s regime. The threat of an insurgency led by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an umbrella opposition organization, brought Saddam closer to final defeat than he had been since the massive revolt of 1991, in which he lost control of 70 percent of his country.
But that effort and others like it have all failed, because U.S. policymakers have consistently regarded the Iraqi problem as a product of the ambitions of a single man who can be pressured or replaced. As a result, U.S. policy has at critical moments covertly pursued a coup rather than overtly supported an insurgency.
The Assumptions of Current Policy
The preference for a coup is rooted in the following assumptions:
• Only a strong, heavy-handed central government can hold Iraq together as a nation and provide an element of stability.
• Iraq’s external aggressiveness--toward both its neighbors and the United States--reflects Saddam’s nature rather than that of Ba’thism, which has been the ruling ideology in Iraq for three decades.
• A change in Iraq will be possible only if we encourage a rift among elements of the narrow Sunni clique surrounding Saddam.
• Broad internal pressure in Iraq against the current elites forces them to "circle the wagons" around Saddam.
The preference for a coup is consistent with a policy that emerged even before the gulf war, when the United States calibrated its moves to maintain the territorial cohesiveness of Iraq under a strong central government, even if such a government were significantly repressive. It explains why in March 1991 the United States allowed Saddam’s generals to crush an uprising that had spread throughout most of Iraq. It also explains why in 1995ÿ1996 the United States lost interest in maintaining a safe haven for Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, and why in early 1996 the United States supplied aid to the Wifaq, a collection of high-ranking Sunni, Ba’thist defectors, for a conspiracy that never materialized.
We focused narrowly on maintaining the centralized unity of Iraq; we dreaded the potential scenario that could result from a successfully protected safe haven, which would encourage centrifugal tendencies. In short, the United States assumed that the safe haven in northern Iraq and the INC’s insurgency plan endangered our own supreme objective for the region: stability.
The Real Problem in Iraq
Although the Iraq crisis goes well beyond the monstrosity of Saddam’s character, the United States has dealt with Iraq as it has traditionally dealt with the rest of the Middle East—by ignoring the bond between internal tyranny and external aggression. But to resolve the crisis effectively, we must challenge not just the tyrant but the institution of tyranny itself. Such a challenge requires a change in Iraq far broader than the removal of the head of state.
Arab society over the past millennium has been plagued by incessant tribal, familial, and clan violence and by infamous corruption. But the intensification of violence and the increased lethality of Arab politics in the twentieth century came not from the traditional aspects of Arab culture but rather from the influence of radical European trends, which when transplanted locally inspired a violent, long-running attack on the Arab world’s traditional elite.
The tension first surfaced with the Great Arab Revolt, led by the Hashemite Sherif Hussein of Mecca, against the Ottomans in World War I. Sherif Hussein, the ancestor of the current Jordanian ruling family, descended from the old Arabic feudal aristocracy. But his followers included a revolutionary group of Arab officers, many of whom were educated in the West or in Western schools. Around Sherif Hussein on the one hand and those officers on the other, two diametrically opposed Arab factions arose. After the war and the capitulation of Turkey, their common enemy, those factions turned against one another in a conflict that continues to the present day.
The rise within the Arab world of the revolutionary faction, which aims to wipe out all forms of traditional leadership and political decentralization, has introduced Arab nations to the brutal ideologies that informed communism, fascism, and other totalitarian movements. The most ambitious of the revolutionaries have acted to intensify age-old blood feuds and squabbles among families, factions, clans, and tribes--which were always present, but were hitherto maintained at a low boil. Now, however, the simmering hostilities have erupted in the use of poison gas and mass murder. As a result, the vast majority of violence in the Middle East is internal to Arab nations; the chief war is that waged by nations against their own citizens.
At the heart of totalitarianism is the centralization of power and the severing of the bands of civil society--those forms of authority that stand between the government and the individual. All vestiges of tradition, power, religion, identity, and culture that obstruct the radical transformation are attacked. If possible, they are expropriated by the state as an extension of its power; if not, they are eliminated. Those who resist enslavement are declared "enemies of the people" and engulfed by a policy of terror. Utopian movements of this description have devastated the Arab world.
The Ba’thist ideology that dominates Syria and Iraq is cut from this cloth. The constitution of the Ba’th Party, promulgated in Damascus in 1947, proclaimed the need to "overthrow the social and political system in the Arab world." After a revolution in Iraq ended Hashemite rule in 1958, the Ba’thists consolidated power over the next ten years and have held it ever since.
The Shaky Foundations of Current
U.S. Policy
U.S. policymakers viewing the Middle East have failed to recognize the inherent menace of totalitarian tyranny, whether cloaked in religious or in secular garb. Instead, they have tended to dismiss the violence and instability of the region as an unavoidable consequence of the backwardness of the Levant, and have looked to modernity, statism, and centralized power as a solution. The United States has long tolerated and even deferred to despotic Middle Eastern regimes for two reasons: first, to preserve "stability," and second, to assert our anti-imperialist credentials by displaying "sensitivity" to the most anti-revolutionary sentiments in the Arab world.
Western intellectuals and policymakers have accepted the propaganda of pan-Arabic nationalists, who claim that such radical statism is "progressive" and is necessary to modernize and homogenize the primordial loyalties of primitive, fractionalized peoples. More important, we consider radical statism to be the only path to development that brings stability. Thus U.S. policymakers ignore the links between violence, instability, and external aggression on the one hand and tyrants’ appeals to spuriously noble causes on the other. Despotic repression easily assumes sectarian or ethnic characteristics and tears asunder the tenuous cohesiveness of fragile nations, leading to the very chaos and national breakdowns we so wished to avert.
Moreover, a robust U.S. policy does not cause regional anti-American hostility; that animus emerges from the nature of totalitarian regimes. Encouraged by radical European movements such as Nazism and then communism earlier in this century, radical politicians seized power and exploited anti-Western demagoguery to justify their ambitious internal repression. They shrewdly appealed to the defense of a higher cause—the nation, the race, pan-Arabism, Communist revolution, and eventually pan-Islamism.
Once such men had secured power, excessive repression became a patriotic virtue in their societies—a noble resistance against the insidious threat of imperialism. The putative "anti-colonialism" decried by pan-Arabic nationalist and pan-Islamic fundamentalist movements echoed the "anti-imperialism" call of Lenin. Citizenship became synonymous with mobilization for the higher cause; treason, with any call for the diminution of centralized power; and justice, with regime-employed terror. Anti-Americanism came to be the battle cry of tyrants at war with their own people.
Regrettably, U.S. policy on Iraq—like U.S. policies applied more broadly toward the Middle East—reflects the effectiveness with which local pan-Arabic nationalist politicians have sold their narrowly factional, radical agenda. Our injudicious regional specialists—accepting the despots’ views of the region’s problems—have stooped to a self-deprecating attitude of embarrassment over Western ideas, culture, traditions, and power, along with a deferential effort to display our anti-colonial credentials. This encourages the very radicalism that has led elsewhere in the world to the deadliest century in human history. The United States has been eager to support statist centralization of power and the putatively progressive, though in fact despotic, attempts to transform Arab society. Along the way, we have consistently undermined our friends and betrayed our values in the Middle East.
The Failure of 1995
These ill-conceived ideas were behind the policy shift in the summer of 1995. The efforts of the Iraqi National Congress in the spring of 1995 delivered a grave blow not only to Saddam Hussein but also to the institution of Ba’thist tyranny. The INC had embarked on an initiative to restore Iraqi politics to an indigenous, traditional leadership that included the Shi’ites, who constitute a majority of the population. Neither Syria’s intrigues, nor Egypt’s disruptions, nor the PLO’s subversion, nor Saddam’s wily brutality succeeded in sabotaging the INC’s effort. Even the opposition of Russia, with its pro-Saddam foreign minister (and now prime minister) Yevgeny Primakov, failed to tip the balance. The damage was done by U.S. foreign policy.
From 1992 to 1995, the United States supported the INC and maintained a robust safe haven in northern Iraq, providing hopeful opportunities for the INC, King Hussein of Jordan, and ourselves. The successful efforts of the INC in 1995 had left Saddam with precious little at that critical juncture. But in mid-1995 the United States suddenly shifted policy toward pursuit of a coup. By early 1996, the tide of battle had turned in Saddam’s favor; by 1998, U.S. policy on Iraq was in free fall.
The Way Out
The United States, in order to achieve its objectives in Iraq, must embark on a far-reaching change in the way it relates to the Arab world. It must select allies from among those who seek to change the nature of Arab politics—not toward another radical utopian idea that aims to transform human nature and loyalties, but rather toward decentralization, utilizing traditional patterns of power and established loyalties, upon which stable societies can be built. The Iraqis themselves need to determine which elements of their traditions can serve as the reference points for change in the future.
At the center of the maelstrom is Ahmad Chalabi. He, his family, and the organization he created—the INC—represent an older Iraq and a traditional elite that have been battered, oppressed, and enslaved by pan-Arabic Iraqi nationalist governments for forty years. Even in the last years of Iraqi Hashemite rule, that older aristocracy was besieged. In the futile hope of appeasing their adversaries’ hostility, the Hashemites caved in too readily to the demands of pan-Arabic nationalists. The INC thus represents a means not only to rid Iraq of Saddam, but also to turn the tide of this century’s conflict away from the radical revolutionary impulse and toward a new sort of politics, along the lines of a conservative restoration.
Sadly, America has embarked on a policy of weakness in the Middle East, resigning ourselves to the immutability and resilience of pan-Arabic nationalist politics. We do not denounce the opponents of liberal democracy; we do not herald the anti-totalitarian ideas that led us to victory in World War II and in the cold war. Rather, we salvage the tyrants who peddle the politics of those whom we defeated. In doing so, we confound our friends with our enemies, and we persuade many in the region that it is deadly to be too closely allied with the United States.
U.S. policy toward Iraq should be based on ideas as well as on geostrategic considerations. The crisis over Iraq presents an urgent opportunity for the United States to signal a new policy message to the Middle East region: that despotism, the greatest, most irreconcilable threat the West can face, is unacceptable to us. To adopt such a policy, however, would represent a significant departure from our decades-long approach to the region. The purpose of this book is to illuminate the necessity for such a departure.
