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Al Gore and the Iraqi Democracy Question

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How carefully did Vice President Al Gore choose his words last month when he became the first Clinton administration official to apply the “d-word” to Iraq? In a one-page, Feb. 8 letter to Iraqi exiles based in London, Gore became the first high-level U.S. official ever to publicly promise to promote “democracy in Iraq.” Nothing would be more revolutionary for a place that, for centuries, has been dominated by a small social minority. Nothing would be more threatening for Saddam Hussein, who, for decades, has been the same ruling minority’s strongest leader.

Religious identity is what sets Saddam and his regime apart from most of the people in both Iraq and Iran. Saddam along with most of his military officers, ruling-party officers and elite combat personnel are ethnic Arabs who are members of the Sunni Muslim faith — just like most members of every Iraqi regime including the monarchy that was deposed in 1958. At the same time, at least 60{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Iraqis and 89{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Iranians (who are mainly ethnic Arabs and Persians, respectively) share allegiance to the Shia Muslim faith. Ethnic Kurds who also practice the Sunni faith comprise a third social group in Iraq. They comprise less than 20{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the country’s population and are as small as Iraq’s ruling Sunni Arab elite that, since 1979, has been led by Saddam.

The issue of democracy for Iraq is sensitive because any free elections there would probably lead to greater autonomy for Iraq’s long-disenfranchised Kurdish minority, and also finally bring representative power to the country’s long-disenfranchised Shia majority. To prevent either outcome, the United States has long maintained a de facto alliance with Iraq’s ruling Sunni minority led by Saddam. Today many U.S. officials still fear that without Sunni Arabs like Saddam in control, Iraqi Kurds would try and form their own state which would de-stabilize America’s regional NATO ally, Turkey, while Iraqi Shias would turn what is left of Iraq into another radical Islamic state allied with Iran.

An uneasy imbalance

The U.S. must back democratic reforms in the Persian Gulf selectively.

This perception is outdated. The Persian Gulf has changed in recent years. The winding down of a 15-year Kurdish guerrilla war in Turkey gives U.S. policymakers more opportunities to deal with Iraqi Kurds, and the unexpected rise of moderate Shia leaders in Iran through successive elections over the past three years turns the American notion that equates Shias with fundamentalists on its turban. To strengthen American interests in both Iraq and Iran, either President Clinton or his successor should finally state that the United States supports the eventual goal of democracy for Iraq, whenever Saddam finally falls — just as candidate Gore, however unwittingly, recently did.

Americans have tended to perceive all Persian Gulf Shias in a negative light since the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis that lasted until 1981. The United States has since sought to contain Shia political forces throughout the Persian Gulf. The Reagan administration backed Saddam and his Sunni-dominated regime throughout the Iran-Iraq War that finally ended in 1988.

Many Shias in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon share their own hatred for Saddam. Since 1998, three of Iraq’s Supreme Ayatollahs have been killed in the streets by unidentified gunmen after encouraging Shias to return to their mosques to receive daily prayers instead of receiving them from state television. A year ago after the third murder, Shias spontaneously demonstrated against Saddam. In Tehran, Iran’s most hard-line cleric, Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, immediately denounced the latest top-cleric murder.

The last time Shias worshiped freely in Iraq was right after the Gulf War during the period known as the intifada or “shaking off.” It began the evening after President George Bush urged Iraqis to remove Saddam. First Shia rebels in the south and then Kurdish guerrillas in the north overtook local army, air force and ruling-party bases. The Bush administration, however, never intended to provoke a popular insurrection and instead allied with Saudi Arabia in trying to provoke a palace coup against Saddam in order to keeps Iraq’s ruling Sunnis in power. As a result of U.S. inaction, Saddam quickly snuffed out the Shia/Kurdish intifada. President George Bush would later say that he ordered U.S. forces to stand by because he feared the intifada’s triumph might have destabilized the region.

The failure of current policy

The Persian Gulf remains unstable today because of Saddam and his regime. Few doubt that Iraq is actively rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction while its efforts are no longer being monitored. Russia, China and France recently forced the United Nations to appoint a relatively weak candidate, Hans Blix, to renew U.N. inspections. The new inspection regime that Blix is forming will no doubt be the weakest one since the Gulf War, granted Saddam’s regime even allows the inspections to resume at all.

The United States also goes on paying an ever-higher political price over U.N. sanctions against Iraq. The top two U.N. officials to administer the oil-for-food program that is designed to alleviate the suffering of Iraqi people resigned in February in protest of the program’s failure to do so. In January, 68 members of Congress wrote a letter to President Clinton demanding an end to the sanctions against Iraq — a program that the administration has already begun to weaken in the face of mounting international pressure.
Backing the notion of democracy for Iraq would represent nothing less than a strategic shift for U.S. policy. The change would finally dump the idea of backing a coup against Saddam that would preserve most of his Sunni Arab-dominated regime — an anti-democratic goal that both the Bush and Clinton administrations have separately pursued at one time or another.

The case for U.S. support of democracy in Iraq

Democracy, of course, is uncommon in the Middle East, and it may only be promoted in most nations slowly and with caution. Saudi Arabia is a monarchist dictatorship that is generations away from reform. Self-rule for Iraq would be even more threatening to another oil-producing giant, Bahrain, where, like in Iraq, another Sunni minority rules over a Shia majority. The United States must back democratic reforms in the Persian Gulf selectively in a way that preserves its economic and strategic interests.

But the presumption that America could never back democracy in Iraq is inconsistent with both American values and interests. America’s long-held view that only Sunni Arabs can maintain stability in Iraq is near-sighted. Whether he realizes yet or not, Al Gore has taken a radical stand in backing the simple goal of democracy for Iraq. Other presidential candidates should now be asked whether they back it there, too, while Gore should be asked when exactly he plans to engage in a dialogue with the men who represent Iraq’s Shia majority. Back in 1998, leaders of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution for Iraq based in Tehran said they wanted to work more closely with the United States. But Gore’s allies in the Clinton administration still keep them at arm’s length.

America must finally begin discussions with truly representative Iraqi groups about a future form of government that could keep Iraq together in a way that would protect both its people’s majority and minority rights. Of course, that would be a tall order, and every Iraqi frontline state, among others, would have legitimate concerns about the process. The effort would no doubt fail without leadership from the United States. But it could conceivably succeed. The unexpected continuation of Saddam’s regime in power has been a sobering experience for Iraqis, Iranians and Americans, among others, who share the burden of living with Saddam.

American backing of democracy for Iraq would involve more than risks. It would finally cast the United States in a favorable light in Iran. Shias from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean are sure to retain anti-American sentiments if they rightfully perceive that America is still trying to keep Shias down. But if America were to back democracy for Iraq, there would be no better way to influence Iran.

The policy change would be the most dangerous one imaginable for Saddam. Observers who think the United States could remove him if it wanted to generally are overly impressed with America’s technological advantage while failing to consider that America along with the rest of the West has little or no effective intelligence base today inside Iraq. Backing democracy for Iraq is not the same thing as backing Saddam’s ouster. Democracy presumes that not only will Saddam be forced to leave office but that one way or another Shias will eventually gain the representative power they deserve.

Self-determination is one reason why the Clinton administration went to war with Yugoslavia over its province of Kosovo, and it is the same principle upon which the Bush administration purportedly fought the Gulf War with Iraq to free Kuwait. Yet, America’s moral record is inconsistent. To serve its own interests, the United States needs to apply the same principle now to Iraq. Did Gore mean to use the “d-word” or not?

Frank Smyth, who covered the Gulf War and the intifada for The Economist, CBS News and the Village Voice, is a contributing editor for IntellectualCapital.com. He is also a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

Overstretched?

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Baghdad waited only three days last week before rejecting a British/Dutch proposal to finally lift economic sanctions against Iraq in exchange for new inspections into its ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. Thus the impasse between Iraq and other nations goes on. Few observers doubt that the regime led by Saddam Hussein has continued to try and produce chemical, nuclear and biological weapons, as U.N. inspectors, before Saddam expelled them, caught his regime doing time and again. Few doubt, either, that without comprehensive inspections to control his efforts they will eventually succeed.

Without inspections, the only levers to try and contain Iraq are economic sanctions and air strikes. Thus far, neither has proved to be an effective tool to curb Saddam’s development of weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States and its sole military ally in the campaign against Iraq, the United Kingdom, go on paying a high international political price for using both.

Saddam, for one, is confident that they will eventually grow tired and give up. “[T]he longer the arm stretches, the weaker it becomes,” he said this month in a speech to Iraqi military commanders. “We are close to the day when the enemy itself will declare that it has no other choice but to leave.”

Four days before Saddam’s speech in Baghdad, Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk said the opposite in Washington. “[A]s long as he is around, we will contain Saddam,” he told the House International Relations Committee.

But what no Clinton administration official can explain is how anyone plans to effectively control Saddam without inspections. The Clinton administration has made the removal of Saddam from power an explicit aim of the United States. Congress is in agreement, and has allocated at least $97 million for the Iraqi opposition. This plan in its present form, however, has little chance of success.
Will the allies give up on Hussein?

No trust

That is because the group within the Iraqi opposition that represents the most Iraqis and that has long posed the greatest threat to Saddam’s regime is now alienated from the United States.

Since 1968, Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath party regime, like previous Iraqi regimes including the monarchy, has been dominated by Sunni Arabs like Saddam, even though they comprise a minority of only about 17{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Iraq’s population. Meanwhile, Sunni Kurds, who comprise perhaps 20{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Iraqis, and Shi’a Arabs, who comprise at least 60{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Iraqis, have each long been excluded from power.

Indyk told Congress that the administration seeks “to change the regime in Iraq” to one that “can represent fairly the concerns of all of Iraq’s communities.” The dilemma no policy-maker will address, however, is how any representative government could continue excluding Iraq’s Shi’a majority from power — yet that seems to be what the United States is aiming to do.

Bayan Jabr, a representative of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told Reuters last week in Beirut that the West wants to use Shi’as only as “decorations” in the anti-Saddam coalition. Another Supreme Assembly representative, Hamid Al-Bayati, was noticeably absent from eight Iraqi opposition group representatives who traveled to Washington last month to meet officials including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The falling out between the United States and the Supreme Assembly comes less than one year after Supreme Assembly representatives made their first trip to Washington to meet with mid-level American officials. Now they clearly distrust each other.

The Shi’a question

How to deal with Iraq’s Shi’a majority is a key question that has so far been surprisingly absent from the Iraq policy debate. The fact is that most Iraqis are Shi’a Arabs, and the men who claim to represent them now seem to loathe Saddam only little more than they do the United States. Of course the fear is mutual, as the Supreme Assembly is a coalition of Shi’a clerics based in Tehran who have long been ambiguous about their intentions for Iraq.

The Clinton administration is already presuming the worst, as its liaison with the Iraqi opposition, Frank Ricciardone, seems to have reached out to every other Iraqi group but the Supreme Assembly. The problem is that most of these groups long have been based in exile in London or elsewhere in the West, and only a few of them have ever mounted any military activities back in Iraq. The Supreme Assembly has within it Islamic Action, the Awakening and other groups that have long waged armed struggle against Saddam’s regime.

Back in 1991, two days after the end of fighting in the Gulf War and the same day that George Bush urged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, Shi’a clerics throughout southern Iraq declared an intifada, sparking a month-long insurrection that eventually spread as well to the Kurdish-populated areas of Northern Iraq. But the Bush administration merely watched by satellites as Saddam’s forces decimated the insurgents everywhere with tanks, multiple-rocket-launchers and helicopter gunships.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis died fighting the regime, while thousands more perished far more painfully later in Saddam’s jails. Since the intifada, Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq have been too plagued by infighting to effectively challenge Saddam’s regime, while small groups in southern Iraq have enjoyed more success. In December 1996, the Awakening attacked Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, crippling him. In November 1998, unknown assailants made an unsuccessful attempt against Izat Ibrahim, who has long been vice president of the Revolutionary Council and Saddam’s second-in-command.

Iraqi Shi’as have good reason to loathe Saddam’s regime, as he has repeatedly squandered Shi’a men in battle. Saddam’s officer corps, like the ranks of his various elite troops, are dominated by Sunni Arabs who share a stake in maintaining the ethnic hegemony of his regime, while the vast majority of Iraq’s rank-and-file soldiers have long been Shi’as. They suffered Iraq’s highest casualties in both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War.

“Why do we kill? Why did we go to war with Iran?” one Shi’a soldier being held as a POW in Zakho by Kurdish rebels said on camera at the peak of the 1991 intifada, before he led fellow prisoners along with their Kurdish captors to chant, “Down with Saddam!”

Many Iraqi Shi’as are loyal instead to Iraq’s Shi’a clerics. While many revered clerics are already in exile in Tehran, others have struggled on in Southern Iraq. In February, unidentified assailants killed the Grand Ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq Al-Sadr, along with his two sons in a drive-by shooting, 100 miles south of Baghdad. He was the third Shi’a cleric over the past year to be so murdered. Shi’as spontaneously poured out into the streets protesting Saddam in not only Baghdad, but also in Beirut and in Tehran, where the Iranian hardliner, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blamed Saddam for Al-Sadr’s slaying, saying “the strangulation of Shi’a Muslims in that country has reached a climax.”

What about self-determination?

For the United States, the argument against backing groups like the Supreme Assembly is that they are likely to become fundamentalist allies of Iran if they come to power. But if the United States goes on excluding Iraq’s Shia majority from its plans for a post-Saddam Iraq, then that Iraq will certainly be anti-Western, and maybe fundamentalist as well, when and if they do govern the Tigris-Euphrates valley.

The final irony of the administration’s Iraq policy is that it is now unabashedly inconsistent with the administration’s moralist campaign in Yugoslavia, as it fails to apply its newly embraced principle of self-determination, not to mention democracy, to Iraq. Meanwhile, as Saddam says, our stretched arm only tires.

Frank Smyth covered the post-Gulf War Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq for The Economist, the Village Voice and CBS News before being captured by Iraqi Army Special Forces. His Voice story, “Tragedy in Iraq,” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

After the Shelling Stops: We Need More Than Missiles To Oust Saddam

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Who doesn’t want a new government in Baghdad? The Clinton administration’s sustained airstrikes against Iraq will cripple some of Saddam Hussein’s military capabilities, but few believe that unilateral bombing will, by itself, compel lasting change in Iraq. In fact, no real change is likely without a comprehensive political strategy that engages the full spectrum of Saddam Hussein’s domestic opponents and reaches out to other regional powers, including perhaps even Iran.

Last month, Congress pushed President Clinton to provide various Iraqi opposition groups with $97 million in aid, leaving it up to the administration to decide how to distribute it. Clinton responded with his first public assertion that removing the current government in Baghdad was the only long-term solution to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Clinton’s words were quickly matched by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose government hosted a two-day meeting of exiled Iraqi opposition leaders in London.

But what one might call the Clinton-Blair plan has little chance of success. Pursuing Saddam Hussein’s ouster in earnest requires nothing less than a new geopolitical strategy, even though it would be based upon an old concept–the same one over which the Gulf War ostensibly was fought. In directing his Iraq policy, Clinton has up to now followed that of President Bush, who briefly sought to oust Saddam Hussein after the ground campaign in the Gulf War ended. But the Bush administration’s effort failed because it chose to seek out allies among the roughly 20 percent of the Iraqi population who are, like Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs, while ignoring the nearly 80 percent of the Iraqi people who are either Sunni Kurds or Shiite Arabs.

The United States and its allies fought the Gulf War over the principle of self-determination, but applied it in practice only to Kuwait. Now, to develop a serious effort toward toppling Saddam Hussein, the Clinton administration must apply it to Iraq. Instead of trying to inspire a coup against Saddam Hussein by Sunni Arabs relatively close to him–as the Bush administration tried and failed to do–the Clinton administration needs to nurture resistance among the country’s two other main ethnic groups, the minority Kurds and majority Shiites, whom Saddam Hussein has long excluded from power. So far, the administration has only lent a hand to the Kurds, and it just recently extended one to the Shiites. In announcing his decision to launch new air attacks against Iraq, Clinton said on Wednesday that the United States “will strengthen [its] engagement with the full range of Iraqi opposition forces.” But administration officials only met Iraq’s Shiite leaders, in Washington, for the first time four months ago. To have any chance of ousting Saddam Hussein, the administration must embrace them fully.

This is easier said than done. For decades, the United States and its allies have sought to contain Shiite expansionism as well as Kurdish nationalism in the region. Iraqi Kurds share an ethnic identity with Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran, while Iraqi Shiites share their religion with the Iranian people and government in Iran. America and its friends (not to mention some enemies) still worry that an insurrection in Iraq might lead to either the secession of Iraq’s northern region by Kurds, thereby encouraging Kurdish demands for greater autonomy in Turkey and elsewhere, or to a Shiite government in Baghdad allied with Tehran, thereby spreading the influence of radical Islamic forces in the region.

Bush admitted–but only after he left office–that this fear was why he abandoned the Kurdish and Shiite rebels shortly after the Gulf War, when everyone but Saddam Hussein expected the Iraqi leader to be deposed. Bush literally begged for a coup. Two days after the Gulf War ended, he called on Iraqis to “force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside,” and to bring Iraq “back into the family of peace-loving nations.” No one close to Saddam Hussein took up the cause.

But the same day that Bush issued his call, Shiite clerics in southern Iraq called for insurrection and, within days, rebels were holding ground in every city in southern Iraq. Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq followed suit en masse two weeks later. By then, rebel newspapers in the south were calling the uprising an intifada, equating their rebellion with the popular insurrection by Palestinians against Israel. In the north at the time, I saw Kurds holding hands and dancing and singing in the streets as they celebrated being clear of Saddam Hussein’s eye for the first time in decades. The days were so heady that some Kurdish couples named their newborns “Bush.”

Within weeks, many of these children were dying of exposure in the safe haven that the Bush administration established for the Kurds in northern Iraq. The intifada had been quickly snuffed out. Everyone under-estimated Saddam Hussein, who had ingeniously saved from harm during the war entire divisions of his army’s special forces along with the Republican Guards, as well as a surprising array of artillery, tanks, multiple-rocket launchers, light helicopters and heavier gunships. While downing his planes, the Gulf War cease-fire agreement had allowed Saddam Hussein to fly helicopters, purportedly to ferry his officers to negotiations and transport his wounded to hospitals. Instead, he used them to put down the rebellion with brutal force.

I was in Kirkuk, the first Kurdish city to fall. The Iraqi counter-offensive began after dawn on March 28. Incoming artillery and tank shells shook the ground, killing a young girl on her bicycle. “This is Saddam Hussein!” yelled one man who knew her. “Mr. Bush must know.” By noon, as Iraqi tanks were closing in on the town, Iraqi helicopters firing machine guns were joined by four or five helicopter gunships. Glistening like angry hornets, they unloaded seemingly endless volleys of exploding rockets. Kurds were dying all around. Several multiple-rocket launchers dropped a blanket of fire on fleeing guerrillas and civilians. The battle for Kirkuk was over in about seven hours. The Kurdish uprising was extinguished in four days.

To convince any Iraqis to again risk their lives will require global leadership and conviction from President Clinton, and a sustained commitment from the American people. Wishing for a new government in Baghdad is not enough. Clinton will have to take a step Bush never made and commit the U.S. military to backing up Iraqi opposition forces in the field. The route toward a wider American military role may have been eased by the bombing attacks over the past few days on Saddam Hussein’s special forces and intelligence services. Options include imposing a “no-fly” zone across all of Iraq and working to find front-line states willing to provide sanctuaries for various rebel forces. And, yes, the options would include arming the rebel forces sufficiently. U.S. air power could check Saddam Hussein’s aircraft and armor, while U.S. ground forces–conceivably with the help of forces from Britain and other allies–could help carve out and protect sanctuaries that could be stocked with food and medicine for general distribution by opposition groups.

The premise behind such a plan already exists, namely that the Iraqi dictator is an intolerable menace who continues to threaten his own people and regional stability. But the opposition is weak, in some cases bitterly divided, and largely inactive inside Iraq. Far more resistance will be required to successfully execute the plan. In the mid-1990s, the CIA backed a coalition of exile groups called the Iraqi National Congress in northern Iraq. The joint goal was to unite two feuding Kurdish factions that have long differed over clan-based identification as well as ideology. But the effort collapsed in August 1996 when one of the Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani, invited Saddam Hussein to join forces with him against Iraq’s other main Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani. Saddam Hussein’s forces moved in on the CIA-baked operation, capturing and killing many. By then, the CIA was also backing the Iraqi National Accord, a group led by former officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime who hope to inspire a coup via anti-regime radio broadcasts from Amman, Jordan.

Independent groups, however, have launched attacks against the regime inside Iraq. In December 1996, a group identifying itself as Al-Nahdad, or the Awakening, ambushed Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, in Baghdad. The attack left Uday, who was notorious for torturing suspected dissidents, badly crippled. Just last month, 60 miles south of Baghdad in Karbala, unidentified assailants hurled two hand grenades at Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam Hussein’s second-in-command. While he escaped unharmed, it was the first known anti-government attack in southern Iraq since the intifada. The most important Shiite opposition group is the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, which is represented within the London-based Iraqi National Congress even though the Supreme Assembly’s leaders have long been based in Tehran. To resurrect a viable opposition, the United States has no choice now but to somehow work with Iran. For 19 years, Americans have equated Iran’s Shiite-led government (nine out of 10 Iranians are Shiite) with radical Islamic fundamentalism. But the biggest sponsors of Islamic terrorism today are Sudan and Afghanistan. Both countries have Sunni Islamic regimes that have harbored Osama bin Laden, a Sunni, whom the United States has accused of being the mastermind behind last summer’s bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

A real policy to oust Saddam Hussein would mark a strategic break with past U.S. efforts to contain Iran, which last year finally began showing signs of change. In Tehran moderate leaders have been challenging radical ones for the first time since the 1979 revolution. The position of those Iranians advocating change remains precarious and may still slip without warning. But one thing is certain. New and old Iranian leaders alike remember that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons, including mustard gas, at least three times against Iran in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

The United States must choose its Iraqi allies more wisely as well. One reason the Bush administration failed during the post-Gulf War uprising was that it placed too great a stake in a group of Sunni Iraqi exiles, many of whom are ex-monarchists, based in London. Though they played no role in the rebellion, by the time it was crushed they were already planning to proclaim themselves representatives of a government-in-exile based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Now even the smallest of Iraqi opposition groups expect to receive millions in U.S. aid. The United States stands to benefit more if it backs groups proportionately, based upon their representativeness and military potential inside Iraq.

Many fear that CIA and other U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition now might come back to haunt the United States much like the CIA’s support for the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s contributed to that country’s recent takeover by the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban movement. Of course, there would be no guarantee that whoever replaces Saddam Hussein would be to anyone’s particular liking. But wouldn’t the world be better off, in any case, without him in power?

Any effort toward removing Saddam Hussein would also be risky and unpredictable, and it would threaten to upset America’s regional alliances. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, to name just three front-line states, would all have legitimate concerns. Nonetheless, Saddam Hussein’s ouster would be welcomed by many Arabs as well as Iranians.

Some argue, too, that any U.S. effort to overthrow a sovereign government is an intrinsically imperialist act. But one should keep in mind that, inside Iraq, the 1991 uprising united groups as diverse as the Supreme Assembly and the Communist Party. U.S. support for a truly representative coalition now would be more consistent with the principles of democracy and self-determination than any previous policy. The effort would be further legitimized if Saddam Hussein were finally indicted as a war criminal over, among other things, his 1988 gassing of Iraqi Kurds, as Human Rights Watch has documented based on Iraqi documents captured in the Gulf War.

Saddam Hussein knows better than anyone that he is already surrounded by hostile groups and states. To encourage an effective armed rebellion, the Clinton administration must develop a sustained, comprehensive plan–and commit to it. The diplomacy required would be challenging and complex, as potential participants and allies alike were recruited and reassured. This would demand consistent, high-level attention, probably for years. But if enough people inside Iraq thought that enough people outside Iraq were serious about them, then maybe some people, or many, might act. The last time they tasted hope, Iraqis rose up en masse. Unlike us, they suffer Saddam Hussein daily, and he no doubt has earned more enemies than friends.

Toppling Saddam: Clinton Wants a New Government in Baghdad, but He and the Iraqi Opposition Are Unlikely to Be Up to the Task

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WASHINGTON — President Clinton is committed to backing Iraqi opposition forces toward eventually forming a new government in Baghdad, say Clinton administration officials. But they acknowledge that risky strategy could take years to bear fruit.

“You can’t work this precipitously,” says one White House official. “What we don’t want is an ill-conceived, poorly prepared effort that will only cost innocent people their lives.” Instead, he adds, the administration’s long-term objective is “to build the opposition into a viable alternative to the current regime.”

President Clinton on Sunday modified his own Iraq policy and moved closer to a Republican-led plan. Late last week, critics like Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., along with former Bush administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz, had urged the Clinton administration to adopt a long-run strategy toward ousting Saddam Hussein. On Sunday Clinton said that while the United States will continue its policy of containing Saddam by working to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction, “over the long-term the best way to address that threat is through a government in Baghdad — a new government — that is committed to represent and respect its people, not repress them; that is committed to peace in the region.”

The last time any U.S. president talked like that was shortly after the Gulf War, when President George Bush called upon Iraqis to “force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside” and bring Iraq “back into the family of peace-loving nations.” Though Bush’s call quickly inspired mass insurrection in northern as well as in southern Iraq, the Bush administration merely stood by as Saddam crushed the insurrectionists with superior firepower that he had ingeniously saved from harm during the Gulf War.

“They were slaughtered,” says Wolfowitz, now the dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, who, during the Bush administration, was a senior Pentagon planner. “I got chewed out by [Gen. Colin] Powell for fighting the decision [not to back them] even after it had been made,” he adds. “It was wrong morally and we’re paying for it now.”

Clinton administration officials say they have no intention of repeating past mistakes. Instead, their policy is designed “so the next time this set of circumstances present themselves the results will be different,” says the White House official.

For nearly six years, the Clinton administration followed Bush’s lead of not getting too close to the Iraqi opposition. Last February, during the last dramatic showdown with Saddam, Clinton snubbed Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, when he came to Washington to solicit the administration’s backing on behalf of a loose coalition of opposition groups that make the INC.

Critics both within and outside the administration have long argued that the Iraqi opposition is too spent a force to play any effective role. In March, Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration national security advisor, told the Senate Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs that the Iraqi opposition was “weak and divided.” He added: “Building a strong, united opposition is an uncertain proposition that at a minimum would take years.”

But that didn’t stop the Republican-led Congress from authorizing Clinton to provide the Iraqi opposition with $97 million in U.S. assistance. Though the president signed the bill two weeks ago, he did not encourage the legislation. “The administration has opposed any serious effort to help the Iraqi opposition in recent years,” says Zalmay Khalizad, a Rand Corporation analyst who, during the Bush administration, was also a Defense Department planner. “The question now is, does he have a plan, a strategy, a will for moving forward?”

The Clinton administration began to rethink its Iraq policy back in February, U.S. officials say, when it became clear that Saddam’s constant thwarting of the U.N. inspection team might render it an ineffective way to curb his ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. “If it hasn’t worked for eight to 10 months,” says another White House official, “then why would it work now?” So officials at the National Security Council and the State Department began reconsidering their options. “But you only have so many tools in your toolbox,” says a State Department official.

The administration’s three main tools have been U.N. inspections to monitor Saddam’s ability to make weapons of mass destruction, unilateral bombing to enforce his compliance with the U.N. inspection team and multilateral economic and trade sanctions to maintain pressure on Saddam and his regime. Newsweek reported last week that in the face of Saddam’s constant thwarting this year of the U.N. inspections, the administration had decided that sanctions, backed up by bombing, would be the best way to contain Saddam in the long term.

“We were not getting anything with the inspections,” explains Andrew C. Winner, a former State Department political/military planner who is now with the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “So sanctions were seen as the best lever.”

Until Sunday, there was little indication that the administration was even considering another tool: the option of seriously backing the Iraqi opposition to eventually replace Saddam in power. Now, however, Clinton has flagged that goal as a stated objective of U.S. policy, though critics still complain that he fails to move toward it. “I see [Clinton’s statement] as inching in the right direction,” says ex-Bush planner Wolfowitz. “But what I think is needed is a very clear statement that we are committed to [Saddam’s] removal.”

Instead, the Clinton administration has said exactly the opposite. After Clinton stepped off the White House podium on Sunday, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Secretary of Defense William Cohen fielded questions from the press. In response to one journalist’s query about whether the president’s unusually strong language suggested that he was seeking to oust Saddam, Cohen said: “He was not calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. What he was saying is that we are prepared and will work with opposition forces or groups to try and bring about, at some future time, a more democratic type of regime.”

Clinton administration officials deny that there is any inconsistency between longing for a new Iraqi government in the future and stopping short of calling for Saddam’s overthrow now. “We are intensifying our efforts” in the support of the opposition, says the White House official. “There will be an effort to work with them more in earnest,” he adds, choosing language that seems like an admission of the administration’s failure to earnestly support the opposition before. Earlier this year, many State Department diplomats and other U.S. officials had privately dismissed the idea of backing the Iraqi opposition because, they said, it was ineffective. This week a few of the same officials who were reached for comment declined to discuss the matter. Others failed to return a reporter’s calls.

Most of America’s allies have yet to formally respond to the president’s new words of encouragement for the Iraqi opposition. But during the standoff with Saddam last February, Saudi Arabia refused to allow American bombers to launch from its soil, fearing that the attacks might be perceived as taking a heavier toll on Iraq’s civilians than its leaders. Now Arab diplomats say they are cautious about the administration’s plan to back the Iraqi opposition.

Many of the front-line states around Iraq, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have long opposed any plan for Iraq that could potentially divide the country. U.S. officials have also long feared the same result. Though about one in five Iraqis are Sunni Arabs like Saddam Hussein, three out of five Iraqis are Shi’a Arabs who share their religion with the vast majority of Persian people along with the government in neighboring Iran. Nearly one more out of five Iraqis are Sunni Kurds who, to some degree, share an ethnic identity with Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran. Says one Arab diplomat, “We [have long] opposed any plan that could lead to the break-up of Iraq.”

The Clinton administration now seeks to bring America’s regional allies on board with the opposition. “We know we don’t have it yet,” says the White House official. “But we want to work with a broad range of [Iraqi] groups and build a base of support for them with countries in the region.” But first the administration must convince its Arab allies, along with others, that the Iraqi opposition could be resurrected into a viable force. “After years of repression by Saddam Hussein, there is no recognizable Iraqi opposition out there yet,” says the Arab official.

There was once. Back after the Gulf War, on March 1, 1991, the very day that Bush made his call for Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, Shi’a clerics in southern Iraq called for insurrection, and within days, rebel forces had taken the Iraqi town of Basra near the Saudi border, while fighting had broken out as well in nearly every city in southern Iraq. On March 14, Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq followed suit by launching their own offensive. In less than a week, they liberated every town with a Kurdish-speaking population in northern Iraq. Journalists in northern Iraq at the time interviewed Iraqi army prisoners-of-war who expressed only contempt for Saddam, and they saw Kurds holding hands and singing and dancing in the streets.

This was the moment that the Bush administration chose to ignore. “We should have at least taken out [Saddam’s] gunships,” says Wolfowitz, adding that without the protection of helicopters his tanks would have found it riskier to advance. Instead, Bush officials did nothing as first Shi’a rebels in the south and then Kurdish guerrillas in the north were decimated. In As-Samawah in southern Iraq, fleeing witnesses reported that Iraqi troops shot Shi’a men on sight as they advanced behind a shield of captured Shia women. Outside Kirkuk in northern Iraq, journalists saw Iraqi forces drop a blanket of fire on fleeing guerrillas and civilians. Tanks only overran Kirkuk after multiple rocket launchers had softened the ground and rocket-firing gunships, along with smaller choppers, had destroyed most fixed targets.

There has been only weak and sporadic armed opposition to Saddam and his regime since. Most of it has been concentrated in northern Iraq, where the CIA, in the mid-’90s, provided at least $15 million in covert aid to the Iraqi National Congress. The INC’s main goal was to unite two feuding Kurdish factions that have long differed over clan-based identification as well as ideology. But the effort collapsed in August 1996, when one of the Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani, invited Saddam to join forces with him against Iraq’s other main Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabini. Saddam’s forces moved in to destroy the CIA-backed operation, reportedly killing many detainees after capture.

Baghdad is the only other place where any significant military action against the Iraqi regime has occurred since the spring of 1991. In December 1996, a group identifying itself as Al-Nahdad, or the Awakening, attacked Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, who was notorious for torturing suspected dissidents, leaving him a paraplegic. Meanwhile, in southern Iraq, though some fighting has occurred among its remote marshlands, no known urban confrontations have taken place since the 1991 revolt, known throughout Iraq as the intifada.

The impact of its demise — throughout Iraq and the region — is something that the Clinton administration now seeks to overcome. To be successful, says Wolfowitz, Clinton “would have to finish George Bush’s war.” But he and other observers doubt whether Clinton is any more committed to the task. “We would have to show people that we were serious about this, and reassure them,” says Winner of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “And that is a tall order.”

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

The Holy Warrior: Is This the Man Behind the Bombings?

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Original article can be found here.

Osama Bin Ladin is not an easy man to find, and he plans on keeping it that way. A multi-millionaire from Saudi Arabia, he is considered by the U.S. government to be “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.” Law enforcement officials from a half-dozen nations would like to question him about his possible role in at least nine terrorist conspiracies. More recently, bin Ladin’s name has surfaced in connection with last week’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He is “high on the list” of suspects, says one White House official. So maybe it’s not surprising that, since 1996, bin Ladin has taken refuge in one of the most inaccessible regions in the world: southern Afghanistan.

If you wish to meet with him, as one of us did for an interview that aired on CNN back in May of 1997, you must first get hold of an intermediary–like Khaled al-Fauwaz, a spokesman for a Saudi opposition group, called the Advice and Reformation Committee. Al-Fauwaz lives far from the tumult of the Middle East, in the quiet North London suburb of Neasden. Serving flavored coffee and a plate of dates in his modest 1940s Tudor-style home, he is at pains to make clear that he does not work for Bin Ladin. Nor does he necessarily condone all of Bin Ladin’s views. But, if you can assure him that you are not an agent of the CIA, well, then he may find a way to put you in touch with the shadowy Saudi.

And so the journey begins. Al-Fauwaz directs you to Peshawar, Pakistan, where you are to await further notice. Several days after your arrival, one of Bin Ladin’s followers makes contact and instructs you to make your way across the winding Khyber Pass into neighboring Afghanistan. You arrive in the border town of Jalalabad and settle into a rundown hotel. And then you wait.

A week passes. Finally, late one afternoon, a curtained van arrives. You are bundled inside and the van sets off toward the mountains, along the Kabul road. Suddenly the van stops, and you are given blindfold-like dark glasses to wear as you change to a four-wheel-drive vehicle for the drive up rough mountain tracks. Several times during the journey, heavily armed men emerge from the darkness shouting for your convoy to stop. At one point you are told that, if you are carrying any type of tracking device, now is the time to say so. Later discovery of such a device, it is suggested, will not be pleasant for you. At the final checkpoint the guards run a beeping scanner over you and your bags to make sure you’ve been telling the truth.

At long last, your vehicle pulls into a rock-strewn valley about 5,000 feet above sea level — just below the snow line. It is near midnight. The air has a cold bite to it, and the ground crunches underfoot as you are led to a small mud hut lined with blankets. At one o’clock in the morning, Bin Ladin enters the room. You are told you have an hour to speak with him before he moves on. He does not like to remain in the same place for very long.

At first glance, Bin Ladin does not look like a master terrorist with a core of several thousand committed followers at his command and up to $250 million in his bank account. He is dressed simply — wearing a white turban and robe under a camouflage jacket and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle across his shoulder. But he is a tall man with an aquiline nose and an aristocratic demeanor. His followers treat him with the utmost deference, which he seems to take as his due. And, though he speaks in a near whisper, his talk is of bitter injustice and merciless revenge. The United States, he said in that CNN interview, “has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal” by supporting Israel and imposing sanctions on Iraq. But it is the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca and Medina, “the holiest place of the Muslims,” that most outrages Bin Ladin — this, he says, is why he has declared a jihad on the United States.

Is this the man behind the carnage in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam? So far, no evidence links Bin Ladin to the bombings. And there are plenty of other possible suspects to consider — including a Somali and a handful of Sudanese and Iraqis recently rounded up for questioning in Tanzania. However, the coordination with which the two attacks were carried out suggests a well-financed and experienced group — the kind often connected to the Middle East.

And, among those with such connections, Bin Ladin is certainly a credible suspect. Last February, as the United States seemed primed to launch strikes against Iraq, Bin Ladin joined with several other leading Islamist radicals, speaking on behalf of the World Islamic Front, in calling on Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies–civilian and military.” Significantly, the CIA Counterterrorist Center issued a statement saying: “These fatwas are the first from these groups that explicitly justify attacks on American civilians anywhere in the world … this is the first religious ruling sanctifying such attacks.”

Then, on May 26, Bin Ladin held a press conference that, in the words of a State Department advisory, implied “that some type of terrorist action could be mounted within the next several weeks.” And on June 21, according to Abdul-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, members of the groups that signed the fatwa met in Peshawar, Pakistan, to set upon an undisclosed plan of action. In a June advisory on the fatwa, the State Department affirmed that “we take these threats seriously, and the U.S. is increasing security at many U.S. government facilities in the Middle East and South Asia.” Africa was not mentioned.

That Bin Ladin’s call to holy war is greeted with such gravity is a measure of his unique status in the world of terrorism. His was a privileged youth — the kind you would expect for the seventeenth of 52 children born to the founder of the Bin Ladin’s Group, a Saudi Arabian construction company worth an estimated $5 billion. Though by the tender age of 16, Bin Ladin had already become involved with Islamist political groups in his native Saudi Arabia, it was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that radicalized him. Only days after it began, Bin Ladin, then in his early twenties, flew to Afghanistan to help organize the first Islamist guerrilla fighters — young idealists like himself who flocked to the war from all over the Muslim world.

Bin Ladin eventually became a key leader of these “Afghan Arabs,” whose numbers reached about 20,000. He financed housing for them in Peshawar, Pakistan. He bankrolled the Ma’sadat Al-Ansar military camp in Afghanistan, which trained both local and international volunteers. And Bin Ladin himself fought in many battles, including the 1989 siege of Jalalabad — a key contest with the Soviets. The USSR’s subsequent withdrawal from Afghanistan made a profound impression: as Bin Ladin said in the CNN interview, “In this jihad the biggest benefit was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed.”

Bin Ladin returned to Saudi Arabia a hero. But he quickly became disillusioned with the ruling House of Saud, which he characterizes as spendthrift, corrupt, insufficiently Islamic, and — most objectionable of all — subordinate to the United States. Soon he was at odds with the authorities, and in 1991 he and his immediate family — that is, his four wives and an unknown number of children — left for Sudan.

Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) gave Bin Ladin a warm welcome, but it never quite trusted him, assigning military intelligence agents to keep tabs on their Saudi guest. Ironically, after working closely with Bin Ladin for four years, one of these agents — who has since left his post — became an admirer. According to the ex-agent, for a time Bin Ladin and the NIF “had a convergence of interest.” The NIF has tried to expand the reach of political Islam into black Africa, and it has backed Islamist and even Christian extremist groups against the neighboring states of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda.

Bin Ladin, however, may have even bigger aspirations. According to the ex-Sudanese agent, “his strategy is to form an international organization to head toward what he calls the Khalifa.” An important concept in Islam, the Khalifa refers to a leader chosen by the most knowledgeable Muslims to lead the umma, or worldwide Muslim community. A Bin Ladin associate suggests it’s unlikely that Bin Ladin aspires to be the Khalifa himself. Instead, he hopes to create the conditions for the Khalifa to emerge by uniting the most radical Islamist forces.

Toward this end, beginning in 1990, even before his own arrival, Bin Ladin brought hundreds of veterans from the Afghan war to Sudan. These holy warriors first came to help the NIF fight non-Muslim rebels in southern Sudan. Later they made up Bin Ladin’s personal security force. According to the State Department, they also helped run at least three military training camps that Bin Ladin created and financed.

Bin Ladin’s Sudanese camps soon became important centers for international terrorists. According to the ex-Sudanese agent, groups came to train there from Algeria, Tunisia, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Somalia. In his CNN interview, Bin Ladin said that he has also dispatched his own followers to equally far-flung places — Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, and Somalia — while financing extremist groups in Algeria and Egypt.

The first successful attack on Americans that Bin Ladin is believed to have been involved in came in Somalia in 1993 — where a total of 30 U.S. soldiers were killed in several incidents. In his interview with CNN, Bin Ladin said that some of the men involved in at least one of those operations were “Arab holy warriors who were in Afghanistan” — men who looked to him as a leader. The ex-Sudanese intelligence agent confirms this account, adding that the men had been trained at Bin Ladin’s Sudanese camps and that “they set up a base in Somalia and smuggled weapons to it from Ethiopia.” Does the United States believe bin Ladin was responsible? Philip Wilcox, the State Department’s then-chief counter-terrorism official, has said, “We take him at his word.” And Wilcox has added that there is solid evidence that bin Ladin forces also attempted to bomb U.S. servicemen in Yemen while they were on their way to the Somalia operation. A State Department report even claims bin Ladin admitted to the bombing, which killed two people but no U.S. soldiers.

U.S. officials also have circumstantial evidence tying bin Ladin to another famous act of anti-American terrorism: the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center. After that attack, its mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he lived in a house for Islamic radicals that bin Ladin funded. In 1996, Yousef was convicted of a separate plot to blow up several U.S. passenger planes. U.S. officials say Yousef’s convicted conspirator in that plot, Wali Khan Amin Shah, served under Bin Ladin in Afghanistan.

In his CNN interview, Bin Ladin said he had “no connection” to the World Trade Center bombing but did say that Sheik Rahman is a widely respected Muslim cleric against whom the United States “fabricated” what he called “a baseless case.” Bin Ladin also insisted he had nothing to do with the bombing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia at Riyadh in 1995 and Dhahran in 1996 — though, again, he expressed admiration for those who carried out the attacks. All the same, U.S. officials would like to talk to Bin Ladin about both of these incidents as well.

Of course, at the moment it is the African bombings that are uppermost in the minds of U.S. officials. And one key reason to take a close look at Bin Ladin is that his followers are no strangers to either Kenya or Tanzania. According to a source within the Saudi opposition movement, for the past three years Bin Ladin has had a “significant presence” in both nations. What’s more, this source says, two years ago one of Bin Ladin’s key lieutenants drowned in Lake Victoria — which lies within the borders of both Kenya and Tanzania. That account is confirmed by a U.S. official who says that Bin Ladin’s “head military guy” died there in a ferry accident in May 1996. The U.S. official says that the man, a former Egyptian army officer who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Abaida al Panjshiri, gained combat experience in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

To be sure, it’s highly possible that, even if Bin Ladin is the behind the embassy bombings, he may do no more than express his “admiration” for the operation — not out of modesty but out of necessity. In 1996, the Sudanese government, under heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia and the United States, finally expelled Bin Ladin. Afghanistan, which is largely ruled by the Taliban, a movement of religious-students-turned-warriors who share Bin Ladin’s extreme interpretations of Islam, may be his last refuge. And the Taliban, who are hoping for international recognition for their regime, know that enthusiastic support for Bin Ladin will only hurt their cause. So they have cut a deal with Bin Ladin: he can stay, but only so long as he promises not to participate in “political” activities in other countries.

But, although Bin Ladin has so far remained silent on the African bombings, his name has already emerged in connection with other, less circumspect groups. One organization that has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombing, the Liberation Army for the Islamic Sanctuaries, has cited the same objective that motivates Bin Ladin: namely, the desire to drive the United States from all Muslim lands, especially in the Arabian peninsula. The group explicitly told the Cairo Arabic daily al-Hayat that it was partly inspired by Bin Ladin. (Of course, all claims of responsibility in such cases should be greeted with a grain of salt.)

Bin Ladin is also associated with the one group that gave warning of attacks before the bombings. A week prior to the blasts, Egypt’s Islamic Jihad told an Arabic newspaper in London that it would strike back at the United States in retaliation for compelling Albania to extradite three Egyptian Islamic volunteers back to Egypt. The Islamic Jihad organization is one of the groups that Bin Ladin helped train in Sudan. And it joined with his organization in both the fatwa calling for retaliation against the United States last May and the meeting to discuss a more concrete plan of action last June.

Ultimately, it may turn out that Bin Ladin served not as a direct organizer of the African embassy bombings but as the inspiration for them. Bin Ladin’s message and example are reverberating throughout the Arab world. As Al-Quds Al Arabi editor Abdul-Bari Atwan explained it in a CNN interview, “Younger generations, especially those Islamic fundamentalists, are looking for a hero, and Mr. Bin Ladin fits the bill.”

Our Missiles Won’t Crush This Terrorist

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At least one suspect in the two U.S. embassy bombings on Aug. 7 has reportedly implicated a wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Ladin. Finally U.S. prosecutors might now have a chance to indict bin Ladin, who was linked to but never charged with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But the Clinton administration’s unilateral cruise-missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan last Thursday have only made it harder to bring him to trial.

When it comes to making incriminating statements, bin Ladin is his own worst enemy. Unlike other radicals who tend to hide in the dark, bin Ladin threatens his enemies, namely the United States, in the glare of publicity. Just last May, he told, ABC News, “America will see many youths who will follow Ramzi Yousef” — the convicted mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing. (He fled afterwards to a safe house funded by bin Ladin in Peshawar, Pakistan.) Bin Ladin further warned, “We predict a black day for America. . . [which] will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America, God willing.”

Bin Ladin issued an even more ominous threat in February, when he and other Islamic fundamentalist radicals signed a declaration of holy war against the United States. Calling themselves the World Islamic Front, they declared that killing “Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim.” The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center noted that this was the first such religious decree to justify attacks against civilians.

Though bin Ladin has a steadfast following among radical fundamentalists in many countries, he is only part of a fringe element within the Islamic community worldwide. “He does not represent the values that we hold to be true,” said Salah Obdidallah of the Islamic Center of Passaic County in New Jersey. How can he “take human life with such a cavalier attitude and hide behind a beautiful religion?”

But however marginal he may be to Islam, bin Ladin is serious about attacking the United States. In many interviews, he paints a dangerously simple portrait: Muslims are struggling against non-Muslims worldwide, and he and his followers must do everything they can to support their brethren.

Bin Ladin, for one, has long done his best. It was the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan that radicalized him. Along with up to 20,000 other young idealists, bin Ladin joined the anti-Soviet resistance, which soon became known as the mujahedeen.

And he put his money where his mouth was. The 17th of 52 sons born to Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest construction magnate, Osama bin Ladin himself has about $250 million. He built roads, tunnels and training camps for the mujahedeen. Ironically, he did it alongside another (then) anti-Soviet group — the CIA, which is now trying to find him.

Bin Ladin was not content to merely finance the resistance. He himself fought in many battles, including the 1989 siege of Jalalabad — a key contest near the Khyber pass that helped compel the Soviets to finally leave Afghanistan. It left a big impression on him. “[The biggest benefit,” he told CNN last year, “was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed.” Bin Ladin, incidentally, credits the mujahedeen, not President Ronald Reagan, for crippling the Soviet Union enough to make it collapse. Now he forthrightly claims that his followers will prevail against the United States. Bin Ladin’s main demand is that the United States withdraw from all Muslim lands, especially from the Arabian peninsula. Saudi Arabia is the home of Mecca and Medina, the two most revered places within Islam, and many Saudis and other Muslims feel the same way he does. It is perhaps no coincidence that the two embassy bombings detonated on the eighth anniversary — to the day — of the first U.S. troop deployment in Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm.

Before last Thursday’s Tomahawk missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan, authorities in Pakistan were already cooperating with the U.S.-led investigation. Sudan offered to assist the investigation as well, and there was a sense that the United States might even persuade Afghanistan’s ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime, which seeks international recognition, to expel bin Laden.

All these joint efforts, however, are now in doubt. According to all reports, bin Ladin and nearly all of his followers survived the Tomahawk attacks. And the backlash that they have produced among key Muslim countries only makes it less likely that they will help us catch him now.

Fresh Approach Needed in Seeking Saddam’s Demise

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Modern military history will record Saddam Hussein uniquely. In the 1990-91 Gulf War, he cynically inverted the conventional concepts of tactical and strategic thinking. Saddam never planned on defeating US-led coalition forces, so he needlessly sacrificed tens of thousands of largely inexperienced troops while saving both much tactical firepower and his best ground combatants. These later became strategic assets in putting down the domestic insurgents which he predicted would follow.

Saddam alone thought he could survive all the above. He outsmarted everyone by lowering the bar to a point beneath which only he could crawl. Although UN Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered an agreement in February with Saddam, few people have much faith in it. The world still begs the question: ‘What should be done about him?’

A change of posture

While some US observers (notably Richard N. Haas, a former Bush administration national security advisor, and James A. Baker III, the same administration’s secretary of state) advocate staying the course and relying on bombing as the main military lever, other observers (from Edward G Shirley, the pseudonym for a former CIA case officer in Iran, to Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state) have begun to rethink their presumptions about Saddam and his neighbours.

Some Clinton administration officials, too, are now re-examining their outlook on Southwest Asia. The Clinton administration’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, who had previously negotiated the 1981 release of US diplomats held hostage by Iran, never overcame his own personal hostility toward Tehran. Similarly, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright has lambasted Iran for being a ‘rogue’ sponsor of terrorism, but now the administration, led by National Security Council advisor Bruce Riedel, is cautiously warming to Iran following several positive overtures from its newly elected president.

One question that remains in developing any new policy toward the region is what role would be played by the CIA. Since the Gulf War, all the agency’s anti-Saddam efforts have failed. The agency suffered another embarrassment in late February. During the Clinton administration’s stand-off with Saddam, a 36-year-old CIA Inspector General’s report about the 1961 Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion was finally released. The report accused the CIA of: unmitigated and almost willful bumbling and disaster: and concluded that future covert operations should be conducted by the US DoD. Some officials say the recommendation remains relevant.

Regardless of which institution should carry out covert operations, many observers say US policy may change. The strategy of simultaneously trying to contain both Iraq and Iran has been driving Western military thinking in the Gulf since at least 1988 and the end of the Iran-Iraq war. It has failed to control Iraq, however, while Iran has begun to moderate according to its own dynamic. Iran’s internal situation, of course, remains too volatile to call. Nonetheless, President Khatami was elected by a younger generation of people demanding more freedom. A direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed, Khatami also advocates a foreign policy which, while consistent with Islamic religious views, does not necessarily seek Islamist political expansion.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader who was chosen by the country’s highest Islamic clerics, still commands respect from fundamentalists of all ages. Another descendant of Mohammed, Ayatollah Khamenei continues to call the USA ‘The Great Satan’ and opposes relaxing the state’s strict imposition of Shari’a law. He and his followers are responsible for Iran’s backing of Islamist rebels in Israeli-occupied territories and Lebanon, Islamist movements in Bahrain and other Gulf states and Islamist regimes as far away as Khartoum. (Iraq, too, backs Sudan’s regime.) The old guard has also been driving Iran’s effort to acquire ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

What is new in Iran is that diverse opinions are being expressed daily in the press and sometimes, too, in the streets. Western leaders should watch the debate closely; they need to avoid taking action that might tip it in favour of the old guard. One thing Iranians agree about en masse is that they oppose any more bombing of Iraq, although at the same time they want Saddam to comply with the UN verification mission. Iran knows Saddam might use weapons of mass destruction if he had them. He has already used chemical weapons, including mustard gas, three times against Iran, from 1983 to 1987. In 1988, Saddam also gassed Iraqi Kurds.

A united front

If one were to form any new multi-lateral coalition against Saddam it would be rooted in realpolitik: everyone who truly knows Saddam — including his neighbours and his own people — hate him more than they hate anybody else. The underlying flaw in the Clinton administration’s current strategy is narrow-mindedness. President Clinton needs a long-term strategy, even though it might outlast him. The USA needs to acknowledge that its own experience with bombing, from Vietnam to El Salvador, demonstrates mainly hubris, and everyone interested in countering Saddam needs to be mindful that effective military strategies often involve many actors and options.

One option might be a tactical alliance with Iran, which shares a 600-mile-long border with Iraq. An objective might be to enlist Iran’s help in trying to revive what is left of the Iraqi opposition. The notion, of course, is fraught with caveats (not to mention the ghosts of the past) but while the world cautiously watches Iran, it is not too early to reassess the military balance, how Saddam has managed to survive for so long and how a tactical alliance with Iran might matter.

Optimistic assumptions

Heady days followed the Gulf War after Saddam had been driven out of Kuwait. All President Bush thought he needed to do was suggest that Saddam be gone and, like magic, he was supposed to vanish. General Norman Schwarzkopf negotiated the terms of a cease-fire as if it didn’t matter. The US field commander was worried about coalition forces. He grounded Saddam’s fixed-wing aircraft, but allowed him to continue flying helicopters. He did so after Saddam said he needed them to transport his wounded to hospitals and his representatives to the ongoing talks.

The USA still wanted Saddam out of power, even though the US-led coalition never had authority to remove him, so President Bush tried to provoke a coup. On 1 March 1991, two days after Saddam had yielded in the Gulf War, President Bush urged the Iraqi people “to put him aside” and bring Iraq “back into the family of peace-loving nations”. The people Bush had in mind were officials close to Saddam, mainly Arab Sunnis like him in Baghdad in the ruling Ba’ath party and the military, but they failed to act. Instead, many Kurds in the north and Arab Shi’ites in the south revolted. Some Kurds, especially, were so hopeful that many couples gave the first name ‘Bush’ to their newborn children.

Indeed, on 1 March Islamist Shi’ite clerics in southern Iraq called for insurrection. Within days, Shi’ite rebels had taken Basra near the Kuwaiti border and fighting had broken out in nearly every southern city. Soon rebels controlled An-Nasiriyah, Al-Amarah, An-Najaf and Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad. By 11 March, when exiled Iraqi opposition leaders gathered in Lebanon with Saudi financing and under Syrian guard, the rebels had already lost Karbala and An-Najaf but were still holding ground in those cities and others, said Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim in Beirut, a rebel courier fresh from Tehran. “The intifada even has its own newspapers”: Al-Hurrija (Freedom) and Al-Nida (the Call).

A unique Iraqi exile opposition conference took place in West Beirut’s Bristol Hotel over three days. Everyone presumed Saddam would be overthrown; opposition leaders and foreign intelligence liaisons competed for influence. The CIA, along with Saudi Arabia, was then backing the Free Iraqi Council (FIC) led by Saad A. Jaber. Like him, most FIC members were both Sunnis and ex-monarchists who had lived for decades in London. Meanwhile, Iran was backing Shi’ites led by Islamic clerics, while Syria and Iran were each helping the Kurds. Although the FIC fielded no military force, its members were already planning to form a government-in-exile by themselves in Riyadh.

However, while they squabbled, many Shi’ites and Kurds fought. On 14 March Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq launched what they, too, called the intifada, or ‘shaking off’. For a brief time, both of Iraq’s main Kurdish factions, along with the smaller Kurdish wing of the Iraqi Communist Party, were united along a broad front. Regular Iraqi forces, after several days of heavy fighting, collapsed entirely. Days before the intifada soldiers began abandoning their posts by the dozens. Once it began, 100-man units began surrendering together. Within a week, the joint Kurdish forces had liberated Iraq’s Kurdish-speaking areas and held all of northern Iraq except for the predominantly Arab town of Mosul.

By then, however, the Shi’ite rebellion in the sough had already been snuffed out, although word of it only trickled north slowly. In the south, Saddam’s army special forces and Republican Guards had surrounded each rebel-occupied city and then attacked them one by one. Some Iraqi units had reportedly been backed by helicopter gunships By 20 March, the last city still under rebel control, As-Samawah, fell. Survivors said that in the battle’s final hours Saddam’s units advanced behind a human shield of captured Shi’ite women.

Kurdish control over the north went unchallenged for one more week until 28 March in Kirkuk, where Saddam Began his northern counter-offensive. Everything changed after dawn. Thousands of Kurds, guerrillas and civilians, were still in the city. Incoming artillery and tank shells shook the ground, first claiming the life of a young girl on her bicycle. “This is Saddam Hussein,” yelled one man who knew her. “Mr. Bush must know.” Soon several small helicopters broke the sky. They opened up with machine buns as the guerrillas returned fire with anti-aircraft guns. Kurdish guerrillas pulled out just two SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, the only such weapons at their disposal. The shells were now becoming more accurate and tanks were closing in on the town. By about noon, the smaller helicopters were joined by four or five Mi-24 ‘Hind’ helicopter gunships. Glistening like angry hornets, they fired machine guns and unloaded seemingly endless volleys of exploding rockets. The gunships provided crucial air cover for dozens of advancing tanks. Meanwhile, Kurds were dying all around. Several Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers dropped a blanket of fire on feeing guerrillas and civilians. It was a bright, sunny day; the Bush administration was watching via satellite.

Kirkuk was taken by 2:00 pm, not by Republican guards but by Saddam’s army special forces. It took them both only three more days to crush the rest of the Kurdish rebellion as thousands of Kurds fled into the mountains bordering Turkey and Iran. They panicked as rumours spread that Saddam was using chemical weapons. He didn’t use them this time, although racism has always been part of his equation. “These dirty people “is how one army special forces’ commander angrily described Kurds to captured journalists. During the Kurdish exodus, many ‘Bush’ babies died of exposure. The Bush administration began Operation ‘Provide Comfort’ in northern Iraq to protect civilians as well as guerrillas. Nothing changed for years.

Another opposition

The CIA, having already failed once, eventually tried again to manipulate the opposition. By 1992 the FIC had been replaced by the Iraqi National Congress (INC). It was still dominated by London exiles, but was this time led by another one: Ahmed Chalabi, a moderate Shi’ite. The CIA gave $ 15 million in covert aid to the INC, which used part of it to establish a headquarters in Irbil within the US-protected ‘comfort zone’. However, the INC never fielded any force either; Chalabi claims the agency ordered the INC not to engage in any combat but instead to try and unite feuding Kurdish guerrilla factions.

Although they had been allied during the intifada, rival Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani have never trusted each. (Barzani leads the democratic Party of Kurdistan, while Talabani leads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.) Since the intifada, they have clashed over contraband as well as politics. Tension had flared so much by August 1996 that they went to war. To enhance his strength, Barzani, a clan-based leader who inherited the role from his father, made a deal with Saddam, who promptly joined forces with him against Talabani. Thus swung open the door for Saddam into the ‘comfort zone’. In addition to fighting Talabani’s men, he quickly dismantled the INC’s headquarters and hunted down, tortured and later killed any of its associates who didn’t escape.

The CIA has since cut off support to the INC, although the agency continues to back another group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), led by Ayad Alawi (see JIR, October 1997). Although Alawi, like the INC’s Chalabi, is a moderate Shi’ite, the majority of the people he represents are Sunnis. Most are also former Ba’ath party loyalists who were once close to Saddam. Since 1996, they have broadcast an anti-Saddam radio into Iraq from Amman, thus hoping to provoke a coup, but Saddam has long guarded against this contingency and has regularly purged his ranks to retain power. In fact, Saddam purged many of the same people now in the INA from the Ba’ath party years ago to avoid a coup. To further deter one, he recently created a new security force; it is overseen by his youngest son, Qusay.

None of these groups has executed any significant military action against Saddam since the intifada. One opposition group in Baghdad, however, has attacked. Al-Nahdah (The Awakening) was formed back in 1991 by underground students who, according to The Independence, joined forces years later with one of Saddam’s distant relatives, Ra’ad al-Hazaa. He turned against Saddam over the murder of his uncle, General Omar al-Hazaa; back in 1990, Saddam killed the uncle, after cutting out his tongue, for criticising him. In revenge, Ra’ad, six years later, gave Al-Nahdah details about the arrival of Saddam’s son Uday at a ‘girls’ party’. Al-Nahdah’s December 1996 assault left Uday a paraplegic.

This incident shows that at least some Iraqis still independently seek to oust Saddam. Nonetheless, the opposition could hardly be more divided. Take the INC: its members are spread out, with Chalabi in London, Kurdish leader Talabani in northern Iraq and Akram al-Hakim are each still receiving help from Iran. Although together they aspire to revive the opposition, the INC today has no viable plan.

Meanwhile, Barzani, Turkey and Saddam now comprise a strange, new military axis. Turkey’s main concern in northern Iraq relates to its own separatist Kurdish guerrillas in the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK); since 1995, Turkey has inflicted great losses on the PKK and has largely driven it out of Turkey into northern Iraq. In pursuing the PKK, Turkey has made an alliance with Iraqi Kurdish leader Barzani, who has also been allied with Saddam. The PKK, Barzani’s Kurdish rival Talabani and Iran comprise the contrary axis.

Saddam also faces less hostility elsewhere in the region. Although Jordan has moved from being sympathetic to Saddam during the Gulf War to hosting an anti-Saddam radio today, most of Iraq’s other neighbours have grown warmer toward Baghdad. After hosting US-led coalition forces during the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia in February refused the US request to bomb Iraq from its territory. Similarly, Syria, which backed various Kurdish factions during the intifada, re-opened trade and contacts with Iraq last year over many factors, including joint military exercises between Turkey and Israel.

Mastering the art of ‘divide and conquer’

Saddam survives less from military prowess than from political mastery of the ‘divide and conquer’ game. One question that many both within and outside the Clinton administration are now asking is whether to try and reverse that game. Nearly all of Saddam’s neighbours would prefer an Iraq without him. If the intifada is any indication, so would most Iraqis. Any clear, concrete plan to oust Saddam would attract the interest of many groups and states.

Notwithstanding the political obstacles yet to be overcome, Iran could offer several advantages to any insurgency campaign. Iran and Iraq have a common Shi’ite population linked through mountain passes south of the Iranian city of Ilam into Iraq’s Tigris river valley. Similarly, Iran has long had influence over northeastern Iraq around the mountain city of Sulaymaniyah. Iraq’s own demographics, too, work against Saddam. About two-thirds of Iraqis are Arab Shi’ites concentrated in southern Iraq; about a fifth of Iraqis are Kurdish Sunnis, who identify themselves first as Kurdish, in northern Iraq. Together, they comprise four-fifths of Iraq’s population.

However, the USA and many other states still fear the consequences of either of Iraq’s main ethnic groups coming to power. Turkey, Iran and Syria each also have disenfranchised Kurds who might be tempted to secede from their states should any independent Kurdish entity anywhere ever be established. Turkey, in particular, opposes any more autonomy in northern Iraq by Kurds. Similarly, the USA, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other states would all oppose any government in Baghdad backed by Iran, still fearing Iranian-backed Islamist expansion throughout the region.

Of course, Iran’s participation in any US-supported movement against Saddam would be contingent upon its further moderation, but Iran has already taken positive steps: President Khatami was elected last May; in November Iran ratified a US-backed treaty banning chemical weapons; and in December Iran hosted a conference of Islamic nations that resulted in a joint communiqué additionally called for “the eradication of all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle east”. In January, speaking to CNN, President Khatami expressed regret for the 1979 US Embassy siege in Tehran and said he hoped that the door could be opened to cultural and sports exchanges with the USA. A month later, the American flag was raised in Tehran for the first time in 19 years without catching fire when five US wrestlers there were enthusiastically cheered. More recently, Iran has begun cracking down on the smuggling of Iraqi diesel fuel into Iran in violation of the UN embargo.

A broadening of options and allies

Any future plans to bomb Iraq would only strengthen Iran’s old guard. Similarly, the policy of relying on bombing as the only potential military lever against Saddam has only strengthened him — politically — so far. It has also drawn harsh criticism form France, Russia and Saudi Arabia among others. Even Iraqi opposition leaders question any unilateral plan to bomb. Instead, Al-Hakim and other leaders want the Clinton administration to co-ordinate its military efforts with indigenous opposition forces. Unless the USA and others are willing to live with Saddam indefinitely, the US administration must broaden its options as well as its allies. Of all the issues facing both countries, the desire for an Iraq without Saddam is what Iran and the USA have most in common. Both want Saddam to comply with the UN verification mission. If Saddam fails to comply, Americans, Iranians and Iraqis alike may together need to find a way to respond.