Doing It All Wrong in the Middle East: Iraq

When guided by logic and reason, the United States undertakes periodic examinations of its foreign policies. In the case of its policy toward Iraq, however, a serious review is long overdue and as desperately needed as it has been stubbornly resisted. For eleven years, Saddam Hussein has been the focus of unrelenting U.S. animosity, the man Americans love to hate. Three successive administrations, ably and eagerly assisted by a media that rarely misses the chance to echo and promote whatever happens to be in vogue, have managed to craft a situation that can be described only as a disaster for everyone involved--with the possible exception of Saddam. Neither Iraqis nor Americans, nor anyone else who matters, have benefited in any way from our dedicated pursuit of poorly conceived objectives by seriously flawed means. To the contrary, Iraqis have suffered horrendously, and Americans have repeatedly violated every principle for which they vociferously, belligerently, and incessantly insist they stand.

However defective it may have been, there was something resembling a policy for the first year or two. We were fixated on getting rid of Saddam, damn the consequences, and selected sanctions as the mechanism. They were to make life totally unbearable for the people, so that they would rise up and remove Saddam from power. For the first six years we kept Iraq from selling oil, its sole export, and from importing anything, from medicine to eyeglass frames.

Now, after eleven years, that approach, not merely unsuccessful but compellingly counterproductive, has taken on a life of its own. No administration has been able to drive a rational stake through its heart, despite the indisputable evidence that

1. Saddam's domestic position is stronger than ever, and we have made him a hero in Iraq, in the region, and in many other parts of the world;

2. we have ruthlessly punished a helpless, blameless people and shattered their economy; and

3. we appear inept, inhumane, irrational, and racist and have become isolated, feared, hated, and targeted, as a direct result.

The Current Approach: Getting Rid of Saddam

Getting rid of Saddam has been the cornerstone of our Iraq policy since his 1989 invasion of Kuwait, when he changed from good guy--who we helped defend, along with our oil interests, against Iran--to really bad guy. The basic errors in this approach are that overthrowing Saddam does not accord with our principles, particularly if it involves hundreds of thousands of lives, and that success would not necessarily be in our interests.

No one has given the United States the right to determine who rules Iraq. It is a sovereign member of the United Nations and is nine thousand miles from Washington. No one can oppose us, singly or in groups, but that does not mean there are no costs attached to our imperial behavior. Only one nation, Great Britain, supports our efforts to oust Saddam as if Iraq were our fiefdom.

Arming the "Opposition"

Many nations, the United States among them, undertake covert programs in other countries. We generally cover these operations with at least a fig leaf of deniability, but openly announcing efforts to overthrow Saddam makes a mockery of the rule of law that we loudly trumpet as the only basis for tomorrow's world. To cap the many times the executive branch publicly urged Saddam's removal, Congress appropriated $94 million to finance the Iraq Liberation Act, a classic example--if one more were really needed--of why the Founding Fathers gave the president the foreign policy portfolio.

It should have been highly instructive that only one so-called opposition group came forward. By accepting U.S. dollars, the Iraq National Congress (INC, described by the general in charge of the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf in singularly dismissive terms) instantly became Iraq's mercenary enemy and guaranteed that it could never play a role in any post-Saddam government. Congress insists that...