Friday, February 13, 1998

Making Saddam a lower priority

By George Will

WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's promises are made of pie crust, so why use force to produce more of them? This question arises because America lacks a convincing connection between its political objective and the military assets - including national will - it has to achieve it.

Defense Secretary William Cohen recently said air attacks would be "directed toward limiting, curtailing, really preventing him from reconstituting his capability in the near future at least." The last six words heavily conditioned the preceding ones, and then President Clinton said the objective is to "substantially reduce or delay" Iraq's capacity to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction.

Even if that can be done, it may not be worth doing, because the achievement may be short-lived and costly in terms of complicating the U.S. position. Hence the importance of asking Admiral Yamamoto's question: "Then what?"

Asked if he could execute an effective surprise attack on U.S. naval forces, Yamamoto said yes, and I will then be unobstructed in the Pacific for perhaps a year. But then what?

When U.S. airstrikes end, the end will be explained with reference to some standard of sufficiency, presumably the "substantial" reduction or delay of Iraq's most dangerous capacities. Then what?

The assertion of sufficiency will be cited as justification for ending sanctions and inspections. The United States will have no grounds for using additional force "in the near future at least."

Like U.S. "nation-building" in Somalia and Haiti, the admonitory use of air power - to signal resolve, or to persuade - suggests central "lessons of Vietnam" remain unlearned. Regarding the use of air power to strip a determinedly outlaw regime of a military capacity as multiform, mobile and concealable as Iraq's chemical and biological capabilities, remember, the rationale for renewed air attacks is: In spite of five weeks of heavy attacks in 1991 and subsequent inspections, Iraq's capacity remains extremely menacing.

Which underscores the "tyranny of five guesses" governing disarmament by air power: Success requires the targets identified are pertinent; that almost all pertinent targets are identified; that all are hit; that all those hit are destroyed; that the destruction also cripples the enemy's capacity to, in Cohen's formulation, reconstitute his capability "in the near future."

Trying to hit most of his laboratories and missiles may be akin to using high-performance aircraft to bomb trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trail. If Saddam's arsenal is as dangerous as the administration's hot rhetoric asserts, and it may well be, that is because of his political character. Therefore the administration should be making the case for commensurate measures, meaning measures designed to remove him.

Such measures could include indicting him as a war criminal, recognizing a provisional government in exile and funding it with Iraq's frozen assets, stripping his regime of its U.N. seat and, most important, using ground forces to occupy sparsely populated southern Iraq, which includes the nation's largest oil field.

During four decades of Cold War, the United States, while waiting for the Soviet regime to change, largely deterred and contained that regime, which was potentially far more dangerous to the United States than Iraq is. Granted, Saddam's Iraq can be more regionally destabilizing than the Soviet Union was, and his chemical and biological weapons have terrorist applications that it is all too easy to imagine him countenancing. Still, Saddam was deterred from using such weapons during the Gulf War by U.S. threats of massive retaliation.

In their history of the Gulf War, Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor note that after the war, the Pentagon completed a report on Iraqi war crimes, including the murder by execution and torture of 1,082 Kuwaitis and the abuse of prisoners of war, with special attention to Jews. "But the Bush administration never released the Pentagon report, thus avoiding focusing attention on the fact that Saddam Hussein was still in power and that there was little Washington could do to bring him to justice."

We can do more than airstrikes; we can do less, and try to make Saddam less of a preoccupation. It may be easier to make a case for either course than for the military policy taking shape. If it is to be exclusively an air policy, the principle should be: the longer and heavier the better, to increase the chances, however slight, that somehow the regime will be a casualty.

Washington Post Writers Group