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The Chance to Cry

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“The Chance to Cry,” by Frank Smyth, in Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills, editor Yael Danieli, forward by U.N. Secretary General Kofi A. Annan, Baywood Publishing Company, Inc, on behalf of the United Nations, 2002.

The Oscar-winning film, Life is Beautiful, compels its audience to identify with a man who confronts the evil of a Nazi concentration camp and replaces it with the hope of a fantasy world. He is an Italian Jew played by the film’s director, Roberto Benigni, who loves his wife and son. While the couple are separated and detained to be used as slave labor, the man manages to save his son from harm by hiding him in his own bunk bed from the prison guards.

Like many people, I loved the film and said so to my date as we left a Washington, D.C. theater. But soon in a nearby bar I began to sweat. Before I finished my first beer the beads were pouring down so much I wondered if any other patrons besides my date noticed as they began to drip from first my forehead onto our table and then from my chin onto the cement floor when I leaned back in my chair. I was taking short breaths but could still not seem to get enough air. The toes of my right foot were curling and soon my entire right leg began to pump. Blood turned my cheeks red. I told my date I hated the film. Wouldn’t the guards have found the boy? Although a tune from a live jazz band filled the basement café, in my head I heard the high-pitched cries of an Iraqi boy named Jaffer.

Exposure to trauma affects all first responders including police, fire, and ambulance employees. What separates them from journalists? Their respective professions recognize the predictable impact that repeated interaction with tragedies may have on their staff, while journalism as a profession by and large does not. Entities from the U.S. Secret Service to the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross now provide routine counseling services to their people. How many newsrooms do? At least one does now, although its learning curve was slow.

The Daily Oklahoman offered counseling to reporters after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but not many reporters went. “What I really needed was time with fellow journalists who went through the trauma with me to talk about all the things that happened?you know, the stuff you can’t put in the paper because it is too gruesome or too out there or whatever,” said feature writer Penny Owen. “(But) by the time we slowed down, everyone was so tired of the bombing that we never really got (to) have that big hashing out session.” Four years later, however, after the Oklahoma City area was hit by a tornado, managing editor Joe Hight ordered “(e)veryone involved in the actual coverage” to attend at least one debriefing session with a trained counselor.

Reporters are no different from cops or emergency crews in that most are more comfortable opening up before peers than a stranger. A coffee shop or a bar may provide colleagues with an invaluable venue in which to talk and perhaps debrief each other about the emotions of their work. Honest debriefings, however, require no showmanship, something that the anthropologist, Mark Pedelty, says is ingrained in journalists’ “machista” culture [1]. What is required to compel anyone to open up is an environment that makes one feel safe enough to reveal among other things what Pedelty calls “the nagging doubts, fears, and lies of press work.”

The “lies” are perhaps better described as contradictions. For unlike other first responders who rush to tragedies to help, we run in to record. The ethics of our profession mandate that we not intervene, although I admit I once used my four-by-four with TV written in masking tape on its windows to evacuate civilians from a parish under fire. Rarely do journalists experience immediate gratification; rather we interact with evolving tragedies more like vultures who pick at the scene.

Recognizing the need for debriefing or the opportunity to articulate emotions in the aftermath, for example, of a school-yard massacre is not a sign of weakness, as too many journalists and others still seem to think. Instead, when done success-fully, debriefing fosters strength. The act of articulation?writing, drawing, painting, talking, or crying?seems to change the way a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, as if it somehow moves the memory from one part of the hard drive to another. Child survivors, for example, from Guatemala to Bosnia have begun to heal by drawing or coloring out images of attacks. Especially when the act is coupled with the opportunity to grieve, articulation often provides a release of the emotions associated with the event that leaves its author able to recall the memory in the future with less or no pain.

If not, the emotions may remain bottled up in a way that can spill over. Sounds and smells, especially, can pop the cork. I was imprisoned with Jaffer and others in 1991 after the Gulf War in Iraq, where another young Western stringer, Alain Buu, and I were detained for over two weeks. Although Jaffer’s cries remain etched in my mind, I did not hear anything that sounded like the outburst he repeatedly made in an Iraq prison back in 1991 until nine years later back home on a warm winter day. I was in a D.C. park talking on my cell phone and not watching my golden retriever, Marty, when she cried out after she was bitten through the nose by a Rottweiler.

The Iraqi boy named Jaffer was at most 16. In the first cellblock of a large Iraqi prison, I only glimpsed him once or twice during daylight, although I saw and heard him a lot at night. It was spring in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and in the wake of Desert Storm millions of ethnic Shi’a and Kurdish Iraqis had risen up in an “intifada” or an attempted “shaking off” of Saddam’s regime. Alain Buu and I had been traveling with Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq when we were captured and we soon found ourselves alone among dozens of cells in a two-story block made of cement a large open floor.

Nearly every prisoner in the block was accused of sedition for having played a role in the just-crushed intifada, including us as well as Jaffer. He was the only boy in the block and he was singled out like many war victims for his ethnicityA non-political prisoner told me that Jaffer was from the south and he was a Shia.

From the second-floor cell that Alain and I were sharing, we could see almost the entire floor. There was a ping-pong table as well as some smaller tables with chairs where guards played dominoes. Every night, for several nights in a row, the guards chased Jaffer around the cellblock floor in a pack as they beat him with rubber hoses. This went on for hours for at least three nights in a row.

The trauma of torture is often associated with memory loss. The Ursuline nun, Dianna Ortiz, from New Mexico was tortured by Guatemalan guards only to be saved by a man she said spoke American English. She lost the memory of her own personal past including her dearest friends and family, as if her brain shut down that part of her mind to protect her from the pain of cigarette burns. Neither Alain Buu nor I were ever physically harmed while in Iraqi custody. But we stood accused of being spies and Iraq was holding us incognito and we were missing.

I began to recall the faces, but not the names, of dear friends, as if parts of my mind, in anticipation of possible torture, were shutting down like large steel garage doors slamming down on rollers hard enough to crack cement. Alain and I both once heard a man audibly undergoing a severe form of sustained pain coming from deeper within the prison. Our block was a holding tank, and most Iraqi prisoners in it were later released. I do not remember dreaming at all while I was detained, although I had vivid nightmares thereafter.

Looking at Jaffer’s gaunt face with his large eyes open wide like his mouth, while listening to his repeated cries, I was glad not to be the one being tortured. A moment later, I felt guilty for not volunteering to change places with him or any other tortured prisoner. The emotions clashed in my mind as I listened to Iraqis being tortured for hours including Jaffer who cried out like Marty at every stroke.

Not all my prison memories are bad. Nearly every reporter who has covered a blood-and-guts beat knows that trauma can also bring out the best in people. I do not know the name of my hero and I am not even sure what he looked like. But like Jaffer’s, I will never forget his voice. This man was quietly taken out of our cellblock some days before Jaffer arrived, but he was there the first day Alain and I were brought to the prison.

That night, after the last domino fell, the guards began what for one night shift would become a daily routine. They were still discussing the domino match as they rose to walk about and (in most cases) randomly choose a victim to bring to a large open area by the stairwell of the second floor at the Eastern end of the block. Only with the first light of dawn did I see that the man who was the victim was standing with his arms over his head as if his wrists were tied to the ceiling. From before midnight to almost dawn, the guards beat him to encourage him to properly imitate a barnyard animal. I thought they were trying to make him bleat like a sheep, as he seemed to be going, “Ba-ha-ha, ba-ha-ha.”

One guard at a time stood behind the man, and, at the encouragement of other guards, swung at him with a long flat board to hit what sounded like his bare buttocks. The guards took turns and each one swung whenever he or one of his peers judged one of the man’s animal noises to be somehow inadequate. Some guards were more merciless than others. I was wrong about the noise and I realized it around dawn when a rooster crowed in a field somewhere outside the prison. It took a moment before the guards collectively broke into laughter. I heard several guffaws.

It was hours before, during the same torture game, that my hero suddenly began to sing. He was across the atrium and a few cells nearer to the victim than we were. By then I was wondering whether the guards would end up killing the victim. The singer had waited for hours until he was no longer crowing loudly and clearly enough to avoid receiving endless swings. Once the singer began it soon became apparent that he was vocalizing in solidarity with the victim. He sang in solidarity with every nightly torture victim the four or five days he was there, and he seemed to get away with it because he may have been a Shia cleric and his songs were filled with
references to Allah.

The first night Alain and I were there the singer prayed on for hours as the guards went on as well with the crowing game. One guard began to beat the victim more fiercely once the singer started, but two other guards walked away from the group to go downstairs and play ping-pong. The sounds of pain, prayer, and the bouncing ball echoed in the dark throughout the damp block.

Smells can be even more intense, and the olfactory gland itself is hard-wired to the emotional part of the brain. One smell I inhaled in Iraq was so powerful that I forgot about it for seven-and-a-half years. Alain and I had been traveling with two other young men, Gad Gross, a Newsweek photographer, and Bakhtiar Abdel al-Rahman, an economics student at the University of Baghdad, who was now an armed Kurdish rebel and our guide. We last saw the two of them in the afternoon on March 28, 1991 just north of Kirkuk in northern Iraq as together they ran under fire toward a cluster of small cinder block houses, as Alain and I were diving into a ditch. An Iraqi tank later parked on the other side of a long dirt mound between us and a road.

The next morning at around eight we heard a commotion coming from the nearby houses, as if the soldiers had captured two people. Minutes later we heard a burst from an automatic rifle. Maybe another minute passed before we heard a loud, sustained scream that was cut short by another burst. Looking over the ditch’s edge, Alain and I minutes later both saw a soldier walking away with Gad’s camera bag in his hand. I suppressed my desire to grieve, as Alain and I were still hiding from the same soldiers. We were spotted while hiding in the ditch an hour later and soldiers were about to kill us too when an intelligence officer, who seemed to be newly arrived at the scene, argued that we be saved for interrogation. Alain and I were released eighteen days later on Saddam’s order.

I forgot one thing about the ditch, although it sometimes manifested itself anyway. About five years after being imprisoned in Iraq I began working on a novel, one of those unpublished manuscripts that more than a few journalists have lying around. In one scene, prison guards torture a young captured Salvadoran guerrilla in the cell next to an imprisoned journalist, and they do so whenever the journalist’s needs are met. For example, after the journalist is allowed to relieve himself in a bucket, the guards bring the bucket to the boy and force in his head. At one point, the guards take the boy around the corner of the cellblock out of sight of the journalist, who then hears a gunshot. (He never sees the boy again.) Several moments later, he inhales burnt gunpowder.

I thought I had made up the smell after a few shooting sessions at an indoor pistol range in Hoboken, New Jersey.

About two more years later I was working on a non-fiction version of the Iraqi event and I wrote for days, day and night, trying to recall the details, however painful some were. I brushed in more color and layered on more texture on the part where Alain and I heard the capture of Gad and Bakhtiar. I always remembered having an emotional reaction not long after hearing the gunshots, and shrinking in my mind like a little boy who was too big for his britches and who had really messed up. But I forgot what had triggered this sensation.

There was a slight breeze that day, and it took a few minutes for the smell of burnt gunpowder to travel over the ground to our ditch. It was sweet and I remembered it for the first time. I thought about the memory before I tapped the words into my keyboard. I made a few changes to the paragraph that included my feeling like a little boy in need of a savior. I walked to my bed, collapsed into a fetal position, and began to moan, shake and tear and did so nearly loud enough for the neighbors to hear for what seemed like an hour. A friend held me as I wailed for Gad and Bakhtiar seven years after Alain and I heard them die.

Journalists are people who, like almost everyone else who is exposed to pain, feel it whether it is their’s or not. Keeping it bottled up may lead to drinking, smoking, philandering, working, or doing something else in a compulsive way that provides a distraction, but not release. The need to articulate feelings after exposure to trauma is obvious, and it is more likely to happen sooner than later if a counselor who is paid to listen is on hand. Once I finally faced up to it, I paid for a counselor out of my pocket. I took the chance to cry.

REFERENCE
1. M. Pedelty, War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents, Routledge Press, New
York, 1995.”

Saddam’s Real Opponents

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Three years ago, the influential journal Foreign Affairs published an article on Iraq entitled “The Rollback Fantasy.” It was a typically long and sober piece, challenging the thinking of those who were arguing for a United States role in toppling Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein. But unfortunately, the article contained its own odd piece of fantasy: In referring to “Iraq’s Sunni majority,” it managed to get one of the most basic pieces of demographic information about Iraq exactly backward. There is no Sunni majority. In proclaiming that the United States should back this alleged majority in a post-Saddam Iraq, while opposing either “Kurdish or Shi’ite bids for hegemony over the Sunnis,” the magazine garbled its analysis. The Sunni Arabs who now govern Iraq make up no more than 17 percent of the population. As Foreign Affairs’ editors noted two issues later: “Most Iraqis are Shi’ites. Our apologies.”

In fact, as a quick look at a good almanac will tell you, Shi’ite Muslims make up at least 60 percent of Iraq’s population, while Sunni Muslims (including Sunni Kurds and Sunni Arabs) are no more than 37 percent. These are important distinctions — perhaps the most crucial facts to know about Iraq if one is speculating about a post-Saddam future for the country, as much of official Washington is these days.

Yet here was Henry Kissinger popping up on the op-ed page of The Washington Post in January referring to “the Sunni majority, which now dominates Iraq” and, for good measure, adding an observation about “the Shi’ite minority in the south.” It seems to be a mistake that has staying power. A Washington Post editorial last spring also made mention of “minority Shi’ites from the south.” And last month, New York Times reporter Todd S. Purdum worried in print “that a change in regime could leave Iraq’s Shi’ite minority more empowered.”

Neither the Post nor the Times has corrected the mistake, so we can surely expect to see more references in the U.S. press to a Shi’ite minority that does not exist — not in the south of Iraq, not in the north, not in the country as a whole. Most Iraqis are Shi’ites. And it matters. For all the plans that are now being hotly discussed about turning U.S. military might against the Iraqi regime, there is widespread confusion about what political outcome is desirable and what is realistic. If Saddam were removed from power, would the United States feel compelled to prevent the majority Shi’ites from forming a new Islamic state? What kind of “axis of evil” would the Bush administration face if both Iran and Iraq were controlled by Shi’ite clerics? What are the alternatives?

The same U.S. newspapers that are misguided about Iraq’s demographics have been calling the Iraqi National Congress “the Iraqi opposition.” But the INC is the active opposition’s least-significant part: It has not mounted any military efforts in Iraq since September 1996. The group is based in London and is made up mostly of families who fled Iraq after the fall of the British-imposed monarchy in 1958. They are mainly Sunni Arabs – just like much of Saddam’s regime — and thus are not representative of the Iraqi majority.

Meanwhile, it’s been Shi’ite rebel groups in southern Iraq that have attempted to attack the “pillars” of Saddam’s regime. In December 1996, a group calling itself al-Nahda (Renaissance) wounded Saddam’s eldest son and security chief, Uday, a notorious enforcer who is credibly accused of using torture against suspected dissidents. In 1998, Shi’ite rebels farther south threw hand grenades at Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s second-in command in the Baath Party’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council (The grenades missed their target).

In fact, a quiet war has been under way between Saddam’s security forces and Shi’ite clerics in southern Iraq. In a bloody crackdown from April 1998 to February 1999, three grand ayatollahs were killed in gangland-style assassinations. In each case, the cleric had been handpicked by Saddam to lead Iraq’s Shi’ites. But each one had defied Saddam by encouraging Shi’ite Muslims to return to their local mosques to receive prayers instead of receiving them through Iraqi state television. The clerics had also asked
Saddam to release other religious leaders from imprisonment.

After Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr was gunned down with his two sons on the road to Najaf, Shi’ites from Beirut to Tehran marched in the streets denouncing Saddam. Inside Iraq, some brave Shiites took to the streets, even in cities as far north as “Saddam City,” a Shi’ite slum on the [outskirts] of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces opened fire there, reportedly killing 54 people.

The Shi’ites could be Saddam’s Achilles’ heel, but what will U.S. policy be toward the enemies of our enemy? Policy makers and pundits have voiced concern about whether the instability and “fragmentation” that might follow Saddam’s overthrow would be worse than Saddam’s continued rule. Neighboring Turkey fears the possibility that Iraqi Kurds in the north might attempt to secede, thus fomenting Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. The United States is concerned with the specter of Iraq’s Shiites turning either all or most of Iraq into a pro-Iranian Islamic state. Yet as long as the United States remains distant from Shi’ite opposition groups, the opposition to Saddam will remain divided — and insignificant.

If only those troublesome Shiites really were a minority, as Henry Kissinger and some in the press would have us believe, the answers might be simpler. But hasn’t Kissinger always insisted on “realism” in foreign
policy? Or did he mean magical realism?

OK, It’s a Smoking Gun, but for Whom?

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Yesterday, the Bush administration finally released the homemade movie that officials say U.S. military forces discovered in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. If one believes the tape is real, as I do, it implicates Osama bin Laden in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

The tape is consistent with bin Laden’s press interviews before Sept. 11, as he has long promised that he and his followers would attack the United States. While the radical Saudi did not become a household name in America until this fall, he has been our most-wanted man since the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998.

Unfortunately, however, what we Americans see clearly on our TV sets as a smoking gun will look like no more than a smokescreen to countless others abroad, and the Bush administration’s media policies are no small reason why. Top administration officials tried to control the on-screen images that not only we have seen but that non-Americans, too, have seen around the world. But, instead of enhancing our security, these heavy- handed efforts have only undermined the best evidence we now have against our principal enemy.

Propaganda is a factor in most wars, and bin Laden scored a coup when his face appeared on Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite network, only hours after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. The White House panicked. First, administration officials pressured the Emir of Qatar to censor Al-Jazeera, before they rushed one official after another, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, on Al- Jazeera to make the administration’s case through translators into Arabic. And the Bush administration took no chances at home, either, as Rice asked American television network executives to be wary of bin Laden’s messages and to avoid running his videos.

Censorship is often subtle, but the fist that imposes it is usually transparent — and afterward, few trust the news or what they see on TV. By intervening against the press both here and overseas, the United States squandered the opportunity to be believed now that U.S. forces have seized the videotape. For no matter how Americans perceive the tape, how many non-Americans will agree? Those who already see bin Laden as vile no doubt still will, probably even more so, while too many of those who have defended him will maintain he is not responsible for 9/11.

The price of censorship is credibility, and America is the loser in this case.

We also wear blinders here in the United States. The many videos produced and distributed by bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organization provide insight into not only his plans but how he wants to be perceived in a Muslim world that extends way beyond the Mideast. Take the 90-minute-plus recruitment video that al-Qaida released to Al-Jazeera this summer. Much of it has the feel of a U.S. Marines TV commercial, with men dressed in black running obstacle courses. We cannot afford to discount the depth of bin Laden’s appeal in many quarters.

Destroying known Al-Qaeda operatives is one U.S. goal. But cooling the feverish climate that their deadly networks thrive in is another. Why do “they” hate us so much? It has less to do with the fact of our power than the arrogant way we tend to use it, serving our immediate interests while being callous about others. The world sees how the so-called defenders of democracy censor when they feel it is needed. By suppressing bin Laden’s publicity, we have unwittingly provided a way for him and his countless supporters to claim that the movie, with its poor soundtrack, was somehow doctored by us.

America needs both military and political tools to disarm terrorism, and our quick success in Afghanistan is as limited as the many strings of Al-Qaeda are long. While most of the September hijackers came from either Saudi Arabia or Egypt, Al-Qaeda networks are found in countries including Algeria, Tunisia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, Syria, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia and Indonesia, as well as the United States.

No one expected the top terrorist to be so cocky as to allow a confidant to film him incriminating himself in the 9/11 attacks. The tape leaves no doubt as to his culpability in my mind and probably yours. But to countless others elsewhere, our censorship only protects him like a screen from his own captured image.

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.