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October 3, 1998/in Jane's Intelligence Review/by Frank Smyth

Although East Africa was the site of three out of the four major attacks exchanged since 7 August between US and apparently pan-Islamist forces, the region itself has been painted as merely being a battleground of opportunity for anti-US bombers. However, even before President Clinton’s decision to strike targets in Sudan as well as in Afghanistan, the USA and Osama Bin Ladin, the wealthy Saudi whom Clinton administration officials blame for the twin bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, have been backing different warring sides in East Africa.

Sudan contains the headwaters of the Blue and White Nile rivers, which run north from nearly the Great Lakes to the Great Sahara. Islamic groups have long followed their valleys south into black Africa. More recently, Sudan’s National Islamic Front (NIF) government has tried to expand Islam toward the Great Lakes and the Horn. NIF leaders do not believe they can survive alone, so they have backed radical Islamist and even fundamentalist Christian groups against most of their neighbours. At the same time, the NIF has collaborated with bin Laden to provide sanctuary as well as training to radical Islamist groups operating worldwide. According to one former Sudanese military intelligence agent interviewed last year in the region, trainees came from as far away as the Philippines. Meanwhile, Iran and Iraq have each also backed the NIF.

The USA, along with its East African allies, has sought to check the influence of Sudan and its allies. The Kenyan capital of Nairobi, the site of one of the embassy bombings, has become the locus of US activity in the region. The US embassy there, besides providing offices for diplomats assigned to the Clinton administration’s mission to Kenya, has also supported diplomats and other personnel assigned to the US mission to Sudan. The administration closed its embassy in Khartoum in February 1996 because officials feared that it might be a target for Islamist groups. Three months later the NIF finally expelled bin Laden in response to Saudi as well as US pressure, but the NIF continued to back radical Islamist groups and others against its neighbours.

Nairobi has also become the site of the largest CIA station in East Africa. Soon after withdrawing with other US personnel from Khartoum, officers from the CIA and other US intelligence agencies began establishing sophisticated eavesdropping posts around Sudan with the co-operation of many bordering countries. By then, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda had formed a coalition of front-line states against the NIF. Eritrea invited the leaders of the Sudanese opposition to take over the Sudanese embassy in Asmara, while Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda each stepped up their support for Sudanese rebels, providing sanctuary as well as arms.

Escalation, not initiation

Although it has received scant attention anywhere, partly because the debate has been held almost entirely behind closed doors within the Washington beltway, the Clinton administration for at least the past two years, has been trying to undermine if not overthrow the NIF regime. “We want to compel change in how Sudan is governed,” said one White House advisor flatly just months before East Africa’s twin bombings. “To be more relevant in achieving our objective,” the advisor added, the administration has been backing the entire anti-NIF coalition. Last year, the Clinton administration promised the coalition’s front-line states US$20 million in non-lethal aid in what stands as the largest military aid package to Africa since the Cold War. This April, according to one high-level participant, the administration sent an interagency team to Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda to explore more anti-NIF “humanitarian, development, political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence options”.

Last year, during the rainy season, the author travelled north from Uganda into southern Sudan, much of which has long been controlled by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Journalists were told not to photograph hundreds of new green wooden crates. A few open ones contained rocket-propelled grenades. Each crate had stencilled white letters saying that they had been shipped to the Ugandan Defence Ministry via the Tanzanian port at Dar es Salaam. [The author made this trip in part for the Human Rights Watch Arms Division. Its newly released report on Sudan is available at www.hrw.org, although the author alone is responsible for this JIR report.

Rogue state

Although only 70 percent of Sudan’s population are (Sunni) Muslims, the NIF, after it seized power through a 1989 military coup, imposed Shari’a law nationwide. Besides bin Laden, the NIF’s closest foreign allies have been those erstwhile adversaries, Iran and Iraq. Tehran sent mainly political advisors, while Baghdad sent mainly military specialists, according to former Sudanese military officers who defected to the guerrillas.

Iran’s role peaked in 1992 when Tehran sent thousands of advisors who helped restructure Sudan’s army, police and civil service. To better control dissent, they encouraged the NIF to purge more than 78,000 personnel from these services’ collective ranks. Iranian advisors also provided the formative training for the NIF’s Popular Defence Forces: lightly armed militia that are now active in Khartoum and many areas throughout the country.

Iraq’s role is far more ongoing. Up to 60 Iraqi military experts rotate into Khartoum about every six months, according to one of the former officers, an army captain. “About 20 of them were air force specialists including mechanics and pilots,” he said. Others were military technicians involved in some kind of “munitions development” at the Military Industries Complex in Khartoum.

The Clinton administration has just recently begun to claim that these Iraqis have been helping the NIF develop chemical weapons (CW). Journalists first started hearing such allegations from the Sudanese opposition in Asmara, the base for a loose coalition of leaders known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). For years, NDA leaders said that Iraqi technicians were working on such a project at the Military Industrial Complex in Khartoum and that Sudan was already storing CW for Iraq at the Yarmouk Military Manufacturing Complex in Sheggera, south of Khartoum. The same opposition leaders also claimed that Sudan had already used CW against rebel forces in the Nuba mountains and elsewhere in the southern half of the country. Opposition leaders even alleged that a group of Iraqis who hijacked an aircraft from Khartoum to London in 1996 were involved in Sudan’s CW project. These Iraqis, however (who were later convicted of the hijacking), were draft dodgers who feared deportation back to Baghdad; they had nothing to do with any Iraqi Government effort. In fact, no evidence to support any of the above claims has ever appeared.

Nowhere in their discussions or “fact sheets” did the opposition mention the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory north of Khartoum: the one recently demolished by US cruise missiles. The USA destroyed the El Shifa plant, along with alleged bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan, on 20 August, claiming that a soil sample clandestinely taken from near the El-Shifa plant showed traces of a rare chemical, O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid (Empta), used to make VX nerve agent. However, US officials have yet to make their evidence public.

So far no other evidence has appeared to substantiate their claim, although some independent observers have already rejected it. A British engineer, Tom Carnaffin, who helped oversee construction of the plant as a technical manager until its opening in 1996, told The Observer that it “just does not lend itself to the manufacture of chemical weapons.” Similarly, three Jordanian engineers who worked at the El Shifa plant until mid-1997 agree. “The factory was designed to make medicines,” said engineer Mohammad Abdul-Wahed at an Amman press conference. “It is impossible to change it to produce any other substance.”

Bin Ladin meets the Sudanese

Whatever the nature of Iraq’s as well as Iran’s support for Khartoum, Osama bin Laden, too, has been one of the NlF’s main backers. He built new roads for the regime, connecting the capital for the first time with the northern part of the country and, to the east, with Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Bin Laden has also collaborated with the NIF on several joint military endeavours. “It was Iranian diplomats who first introduced him to NIF leaders,” said the ex-Sudanese military intelligence agent. Although the NIF gave bin Laden a warm welcome when he arrived in Khartoum shortly after the Gulf War in 1991, its leaders never entirely trusted him. They instructed military intelligence agents, whose ostensible task was to cater for his needs, to keep an eye on him. Apparently, NIF leaders feared that bin Laden’s brand of Islamist radicalism was so extreme that it might even become a threat to them. Ironically, after monitoring bin Laden closely for four years, one of the NIF agents instead became an admirer.

Shortly after bin Laden left Khartoum, the ex-agent left the country too.

Bin Ladin’s own time in Khartoum, from 1991 to 1996, has only been part of a longer journey. The 17th of 52 children of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families, bin Laden, like many revolutionaries, was born into a world of privilege. His father, a construction magnate who founded the bin Laden group, acquired over $5 billion in assets building offices, homes and mosques for the royal House of Saud. Osama Bin Ladin’s own fortune today is estimated to be worth over $250 million.

Although Bin Ladin was just 16 when he first got involved with radical Islamist politics in Riyadh, it was the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan that radicalised him. Only days after it began, bin Laden, then 22, flew there to help organise the first Islamist guerrilla fighters, who later became known as the mojahedin. From around the world, young Muslim idealists like himself flocked to Afghanistan to join them. The number of foreign volunteers eventually grew to up to 20,000. Bin Ladin financed housing for them in Peshawar, Pakistan, just across the Khyber Pass. Inside Afghanistan, he bankrolled the Ma’sadat Al-Ansar military training camp, which trained both local and international volunteers.

Bin Ladin was not the mojahedin’s only foreign patron. The CIA, then directed by President Ronald Reagan, sought to “roll back” the Soviets out of Afghanistan, so it financed and armed the mojahedin throughout the 10-year conflict. Although Bin Ladin himself, according to all accounts, never had any direct relationship with the agency, he was a key leader of a broad movement that the CIA was firmly behind. Even the training camps that the Clinton administration claims to have recently destroyed in Afghanistan were, according to many reports, first established under the Reagan administration by the CLA.

Not content to merely help underwrite the movement, Bin Ladin personally fought in many battles, including the 1989 siege of Jalalabad: a key contest with the Soviets. Only months later the foreign communist forces withdrew in defeat. Bin Ladin still draws inspiration from this experience today. “The biggest benefit [of that campaign],” he told CNN in an interview from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan last year, “was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed.” Bin Ladin, incidentally, credits the mojahedin, as opposed to the Reagan administration, for crippling the Soviet Union enough to make it collapse. Regarding that other superpower, the United States, Bin Ladin frequently expresses confidence that he and his followers will repeat their giant-slaying.

After the Afghan war, Bin Ladin returned to Saudi Arabia a hero, but he quickly became disillusioned with the royal family. Like many Saudis, bin Laden complained that the House of Saud was economically corrupt and morally bankrupt. He fumed, especially, at what he saw as their subservience to the United States. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the House of Saud allowed the US troops to deploy on its soil for Operation “Desert Storm.” The first US soldiers arrived on 7 August, 1990 — eight years before to the day that the two US embassies in East Africa were bombed. The US deployments outraged Bin Ladin. Saudi Arabia is the home of Mecca and Medina: the two most revered places within Islam. Today, over 4,000 US troops remain in Saudi Arabia: their ongoing presence remains a source of angst for many Saudis and other Muslims worldwide. To Islamist radicals, as was evidenced by the bombing of the US barracks at Khobar Towers on 25 June 1996, they are a target.

Building the camps

Shortly after the Gulf War, Bin Ladin moved with his four wives and an unknown number of children to Khartoum. In 1990, a year before he even arrived, according to the ex-intelligence agent, bin Laden began bringing mojahedin veterans to Khartoum. He later brought hundreds more. Many, comprised the core of his personal security force. Others became instructors at training camps he financed.

The largest camp was near Soba, 10 km south of Khartoum along the Blue Nile, said the ex-Sudanese military agent, who added that it was a highly restricted area of about 20 square acres. He added that Iranians who were previously based in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley were among the trainers, while the trainees came from Algeria, Tunisia, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Somalia.

Some of these groups have been especially active. Egypt’s Islamic Jihad Organisation is suspected of being behind the 1995 attempted assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. The Organisation’s leader, al-Zawahri, recently called a newspaper in Pakistan to give a statement on bin Laden’s behalf; he is currently believed to be holding up with him in Afghanistan. Other groups like Eritrea’s Islamic Jihad have attacked civilians. This Organisation’s most comnon tactic is planting anti-tank mines, which have destroyed several passenger buses. Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army is another group that has terrorised civilians, and it frequently press-gangs even adolescent children. All of these groups have been armed by Sudan. Last year, plastic anti-tank mines discovered in Eritrea were identical in design and markings to anti-tank mines captured from NIF stocks just north of the Ugandan border.

These groups and others have trained at camps financed by bin Laden on Sudanese territory. According to the ex-Sudanese military intelligence agent, the instruction focused on three major areas. One was the fabrication of travel documents. The second was low-tech covert communications, from basic encryption to use of invisible ink. In light of recent events, however, it is the third area that may be among the most interesting: the use of small arms and explosives. The ex-agent said that bin Laden spent $15 million on one shipment of arms. It included Chinese and Iranian weapons, as well as Czechoslovakian explosives, which he was unable to identify further (Semtex, a Czech plastic explosive, is suspected of being used in at least the US embassy bombing in Nairobi).

The ex-agent also said that bin Laden, while in Khartoum. had formed a shadowy, pan-Islamist coalition involving many groups. He established an “advisory council” involving at least 43 separate Islamist groups from around the world. They included Egypt’s Islamic Group, Ethiopia’s Oromo Islamic Front, Eritrea’s Islamic Jihad, Uganda’s Islamic forces of Sheikh Abdullah. Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front and the Philippines’ Moro Liberation Front, according to the ex-agent. Bin Laden himself admits to playing an international role, claiming in interviews to have sent Islamist combatants to Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan and Somalia.

This Khartoum-based “advisory council” seems like a precursor to a smaller coalition of like-minded Islamist organisations which formed the World Islamic Front in February 1998. In announcing their formation, members of the World Islamic Front, including bin Laden, signed a religious decree, or fatwa, calling on Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies — civilian and military”. Observers back in Langley, Virginia, at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center noted that this was the first such fatwa to justify killing US civilians.

Bin Ladin admits his and his followers’ role in previously killing US soldiers. He told CNN in March 1997 that “Afghan Arabs” loyal to him played a role in 1983 attacks against US troops in Somalia, where a total of 30 US soldiers were killed. The ex-Sudanese agent confirmed this account, saying that bin Laden’s men “set up a base in Somalia and smuggled weapons to it from Ethiopia.” One US official who was in Somalia at the time says that it remains unclear whether US helicopters there were shot down with surface-to-air missiles or just rocket-propelled grenades.

The current climate in Khartoum

Sudan finally expelled Osama Bin Ladin in May 1996 in response to US and Saudi pressure. He has since gone to Afghanistan, which is now controlled by the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime — perhaps bin Laden’s only remaining refuge. What kind of ties Sudan and others still have with bin Laden remains in question. The NIF has tried to distance itself from him, although he still has investments and other commercial interests in Khartoum (yet there is no evidence that he has any connection to the recently destroyed El-Shifa pharmaceutical factory as Clinton administration officials have claimed).

While the NIF has continued to back various Islamist groups from Africa and elsewhere, its leaders have also recently begun to express interest in negotiating with both the USA and anti-NIF Sudanese rebel leaders. It is worth noting, too, that before the Clinton administration attacked the El-Shifa plant in Khartoum, along with targets in Afghanistan, Sudan had denounced the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as unacceptable terrorist acts. Sudan even offered to help US investigators find the bombers. Even after the US strike on Khartoum, the NIF leader and Parliament speaker Hassan Turabi predicted that, despite their recent history of animosity, relations between Sudan and the USA were likely to improve. “I don’t think it will take too long,” he added.

Iran has also begun to tone down much of its anti-US rhetoric. Its leaders quickly denounced the US embassy bombings, although they have since denounced the US strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan as well. While Iran remains on the US State Department’s list of countries which sponsor terrorism, the country has at least begun to change since the election of the moderate President Mohammad Khatami last year. And although Iran had a strong presence in Khartoum throughout the early 1990s, its role in recent years has clearly diminished.

Iraq, however, maintains strong ties with Sudan, and NIF leaders apparently no longer care who knows it. The day after the Clinton administration attacked the El-Shifa plant in Khartoum. Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, flew to Baghdad for consultations.

Silent Struggle

September 14, 1998/in The New Republic/by Frank Smyth

Original article can be found here.

Last week’s missile attack against Sudan also struck Americans like a bolt from the blue. Who knew where Sudan was on the map, let alone that it was a bitter enemy of the U.S.? Actually, the strikes were the culmination of a long struggle within the Clinton administration about how to deal with that nation’s radical regime.

Part of the problem is that the National Islamic Front (NIF), which took over Sudan in a 1989 coup, is insecure about its hold on power. To bolster its position, the NIF has tried to expand Islam regionally, backing radical Islamist (and even fundamentalist Christian) groups against most of its neighbors. At the same time, the NIF has collaborated with Osama Bin Ladin to provide sanctuary as well as training to radical Islamist groups operating worldwide.

In 1993, the Clinton administration put Sudan on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism. Since then, though, officials have quarreled over how much more they should do. Career State Department officials, led by Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering, have argued that dialogue and diplomacy are the best way to change the NIF. But political appointees, led by Assistant Secretary of State Susan E. Rice (formerly with the National Security Council), have countered that the NIF will only respond to force.

Even before the East Africa bombings, the administration was moving toward Rice’s line. After Sudan had expelled Bin Ladin in May 1996, in response to Saudi and American pressure, Pickering argued that it was time to re-open the American Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan (The embassy had been closed since February 1996 because of terrorism fears). But NSC officials, including Rice, thought it should stay shut. In September 1997, while Rice was on maternity leave, Pickering tried what one diplomat calls a “squeeze play.” Without White House authorization, Pickering told his subordinates to leak to the press that the administration would soon reopen the embassy. But a week later, after the news had been reported in both The Washington Post and The New York Times, Rice’s allies at the NSC got the announcement over-ruled. “Albright called Pickering and told him to call the reporters back,” recounts another seventh-floor official.

So the U.S. mission to Sudan remained in Nairobi — bin Laden’s eventual target. And it soon became the site of the largest CIA station in East Africa — a station that coordinates a sophisticated eavesdropping network aimed at Sudan with the cooperation of bordering countries like Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda, which form a coalition of frontline states against the NIF.

The United States’ goal has not merely been to gather information. For at least two years, the Clinton administration has been trying to undermine, if not overthrow, the NIF regime. ‘We want to compel change in how Sudan is governed,” one White House adviser told me in May. Toward that end, the adviser added, last year, the administration promised the anti-NIF states $20 million in nonlethal aid. According to a high level participant, the administration recently sent an interagency team to Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda to explore “humanitarian, development, political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence options.”

The United States’ interest in undermining the NIF is due to more than the regime’s support of Bin Ladin. One of the NIF’s closest foreign allies has been Iraq. According to a former Sudanese army captain who defected to rebel forces, up to 60 Iraqi military specialists rotate through Sudan every six months.

Why is this significant? The ex-captain said some of the Iraqis were involved in some kind of munitions development at the Military Industries Corporation in Khartoum. And Sudanese opposition leaders have long claimed Iraq was helping Sudan develop chemical weapons at installations in Khartoum. They further charge that Sudan has stored chemical weapons for Iraq at a military complex south of Khartoum.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials say soil samples collected outside the pharmaceutical factory targeted in the strike contained traces of a chemical that is an ingredient of VX nerve agent and lacks any known industrial application. Furthermore, The New York Times reported that Iraq bought medicines from the factory and that, according to U.S. officials, one of the leaders of Iraq’s chemical weapons program had close ties to senior Sudanese officials there. Finally, non-American officials told the Times that Iraqi technicians frequently visited another, more heavily guarded factory in Khartoum also suspected of producing chemical weapons.

Of course, these are still allegations. Some of the Sudanese opposition’s other claims — like the story that Iraqis who hijacked a plane to London in 1996 were involved in the chemical weapons program — are clearly preposterous; the hijackers were draft-dodgers. Nor is the evidence cited by U.S. officials necessarily irrefutable. For instance, a British engineer who, until 1996, worked as a manager at the factory targeted in the strike recently told the London Observer that the factory “just does not lend itself to the manufacture of chemical weapons.”

Still, Iraq and Sudan are clearly up to something. Just consider the Sudanese foreign minister’s first reaction to the U.S. strikes: he flew to Baghdad. ”

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

August 31, 1998/in The New Republic/by Peter Bergen & Frank Smyth

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

August 23, 1998/in Newsday/by Frank Smyth

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.

One Man’s Private Jihad

August 18, 1998/in The Village Voice/by Frank Smyth & Jason Vest

He became a potentially hostile blip on the U.S. intelligence radar screen as early as 1991, when he arrived in Sudan. He said he had come to build roads, but according to a former Sudanese intelligence agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity, he also set up pan-Islamist camps where recruits from countries like Bosnia, Chechnya, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Somalia were given military training.

His blip intensified in the early 1990s, when his name came up in the international manhunt for Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani who shot up the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. It grew stronger still in 1996, during the probe of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. He would call the perpetrators of that act ”heroes.”

Though both CNN and ABC have interviewed him in the past 17 months, it’s only in the wake of the August 7 East African embassy bombings that the name Osama bin Laden has become widely known to Americans. In the worldwide Muslim community, however, bin Ladin has been a controversial figure for several years. Some, like his followers, now venerate him with the title ”sheik,” even though he is not a cleric. Others, like Salah Obdidallah of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, consider him a criminal who kills and ”hides behind a beautiful religion.” (The New York office of the FBI tends toward Obdidallah’s view; according to reports, Gotham-based agents are arguing they should direct the Kenya and Tanzania cases based on substantial but uncorroborated information tying bin Ladin to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as the thwarted plan to blow up other city buildings and tunnels.)

Though the government and the fourth estate have a notorious history of jumping the gun when it comes to blaming ”Middle East radicals” for big explosions (recall Oklahoma City and TWA Flight 800), fingering bin Ladin for a role in the embassy bombings is by no means unreasonable — and not just because one of the reportedly confessed bombers has admitted to being a follower. Not only does bin Laden have the motive, means, and opportunity, but in light of his personal jihad, the bombings are thoroughly understandable. While bin Ladin is neither a mainstream Muslim nor the paragon of sanity (one consulting CIA psychologist’s assessment holds that he is a ”malignant narcissist” who views people as objects either to be killed or protected), if he is responsible for the bombings, it’s imperative, Middle East experts say, that his actions and motivations be examined not just in terms of a terrorist threat, but in the context of current Arabian politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Islamic theology.

”If this was done by bin Ladin — who is definitely a fringe character — part of what we should be focusing on is what the bombings are reflective of in the Islamic world vis-a-vis the U.S. right now,” says Sam Husseini, former spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. ”I think these bombings will cost him many people’s sympathies. But before August 7, I think he was beginning to achieve folk-hero status in some parts of the Middle East, because he’s doing what no one else is — standing up to the U.S. over some very legitimate grievances.” And the fact that bin Ladin has successfully stood up to and beat another superpower — the USSR, in Afghanistan — gives him a resolve not necessarily found in other terrorists.

One cannot understand bin Ladin without understanding his relationship to his native Saudi Arabia — arguably the center of a concentric circle of Islamist angst. In various interviews, bin Laden has described himself not as a terrorist, but as a defender of the true faith against a corrupt Saudi monarchy that has committed sacrilege by allowing an (infidel) U.S. army presence in sacred Muslim land. ”After the Americans entered the Holy Land, many emotions were roused in the Muslim world — more than we have seen before,” bin Ladin recently told ABC News. Indeed, it has not been lost on terrorist experts — and Bin Laden watchers in particular — that the bombings came on the anniversary of the first U.S. Desert Shield troop deployment inside Saudi Arabia.

While many secular Saudis don’t necessarily share bin Ladin’s angry zeal, they do simmer with resentment at the Saudi elite’s hypocrisy and the American presence, says Scott Armstrong, a national security expert who has conversed with figures sympathetic to bin Ladin. And they have a point. As one former State Department foreign service officer candidly characterized the situation in a 1996 interview, ”The role of the U.S. military presence there is to make sure the Saudis can defend themselves in a pinch, but still be reliant on us for real defense. [Saudi Arabia] is a strategic position we don’t want to withdraw from.” The officer also said that, despite public pronouncements, many Saudi elites privately flout Islamic rules against indulging in Western vices such as alcohol and Baywatch.

To bin Ladin this amounts to a sellout and blasphemy by the Saudi upper crust. That same ruling class, in one of the many ironies of bin Laden’s life, have indirectly financed his terrorist operations. The 17th of 52 children sired by Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest construction magnate, Osama controls $250 million of the $5 billion Bin Laden family kitty — money made largely by building homes, offices, and mosques for the House of Saud. But since the age of 16, when he became involved with radical religious groups, bin Laden has been less interested in making money than using it in defense of his concept of Islam.

Truly radicalized by the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, bin Ladin, then 22, became one of the early founders and financiers of what became the Mujahadeen, the Afghan rebellion. Not only did he build safe houses, roads, and tunnel complexes for these insurgents, but he bankrolled training camps and arms purchases. And he did it all alongside another group pursuing its own jihad against the Soviets — the Central Intelligence Agency, which is now charged with tracking him down.

Not content to merely be an underwriter of the resistance, bin Ladin also fought in some particularly fierce battles, including the siege of Jalabad, which marked the end for the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was, for bin Ladin, a defining and empowering moment, which cements his faith to this day. As he told CNN, it destroyed ”the myth” of the invincible superpower.

Having helped vanquish the Soviet colossus, he returned home a celebrated hero and leader of the opposition movement to the House of Saud, charging the regime with moral turpitude. But when the Saudis allowed U.S. troops to deploy in the land of the Two Most Holy Places — Mecca and Medina — bin Ladin abandoned Saudi Arabia for a more like-minded country: Sudan, where the radical National Islamic Front (NIF) had taken control in 1989.

Even before he moved to Sudan, bin Ladin was already backing the NIF. In 1990, he arranged for hundreds of Mujahadeen veterans to travel to Sudan in order to fight alongside the NIF against non-Muslim guerrillas. According to an ex-Sudanese intelligence agent who knew bin Laden, hundreds more came over in the next few years. Many became instructors at training camps he financed. During his five years in Sudan, bin Ladin’s camps trained hundreds of recruits from places like Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Somalia. The course of instruction, says the ex-agent, focused on three major areas. One was the fabrication of travel documents. The second was low-tech covert communications — from basic encryption to use of invisible ink. In light of recent events, however, it is the third area that may be most interesting: the use of small arms and explosives.

According to the ex-agent, bin Ladin dropped $15 million on one shipment of Chinese and Iranian arms — as well as explosives from Czechoslovakia, most likely Semtex. While several terrorist outfits have access to the plastic explosive, which is believed to have been used in the embassy bombings, bin Ladin was much more likely to use it because of his multinational intelligence network. According to the ex-agent, while in Sudan, bin Ladin set up an ”advisory council” of at least 43 separate Islamist groups. Many of them are active worldwide, and bin Ladin admitted on CNN that he has sent Islamist combatants to places as far-flung as Bosnia and Tajikistan.

During his years in Sudan, the government came under increased international criticism and pressure. By 1996 the U.S. was indirectly backing anti-Muslim rebels in the southern and eastern parts of the country. The Clinton administration also pressured Sudan to expel bin Ladin. But instead of couching its criticism of Sudan in terms of its human rights record, which is reviled the world over, the U.S.’s approach reinforced bin Ladin’s view that it was gunning for Islam.

At about the same time the Saudi government started to bring its financial and political power to bear on the Sudanese NIF to at least rein bin Laden in, if not expel him. ”When they insisted initially that I should keep my mouth shut, I decided to look for a land in which I can breathe a pure, free air to perform my duty in enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong,” bin Laden told CNN last year. His destination: his old stomping grounds in Afghanistan, now controlled by the ultra-conservative Taliban. He remains holed-up there to this day, still directing various Islamist military activities.

In interviews with both Arabic-and English-speaking journalists, bin Laden has often cited the U.S. approach to Sudan as an example of the assault on global Islam — a situation, he says, that justifies his sending followers to fight in such far-flung places as Chechnya, Bosnia, and Somalia. He also frequently condemns the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq, as well as U.S. support of Israel. ”His main focus is Saudi Arabia, but he doesn’t have enough Saudis or Afghans to accomplish what he wants,” says Armstrong. ”He wants to see Islamist states left alone to be Islamist states. And within the Islamist world, he’s willing to join in any coalitions to get critical mass.”

The extent of his involvement, however, varies, and just how active a role he takes in certain actions isn’t entirely clear. In the case of a 1995 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, bombing — in which five American servicemen were killed — a federal grand jury in Manhattan continues to probe his suspected role. And he was never indicted in the World Trade Center bombing, though several current and former intelligence officials indicate they strongly suspect he had some connection. One of the convicted bombers, for instance, fled to Pakistan after the incident, where he hid out in a house for Islamist radicals that bin Laden had funded. Additionally, bin Ladin and Wali Khan, a convicted conspirator on another bombing, are ”good friends” according to bin Ladin, who fought alongside Khan in Afghanistan.

As far as other actions are concerned, ”Someone might suggest something and bin Ladin might say, ‘yeah,”’ says a former CIA Middle East analyst. ”A lot of these [terrorist acts] are cooked up ad hoc. And while I believe some of bin Laden’s communications have been intercepted, part of what makes him so dangerous is that he’s so low-tech and his people are so scattered. Communications for the planning of this were probably innocuous channels–letters, innocuous-sounding phone calls from relatives’ houses.”

The apparent confession in the embassy bombings appears to have clarified things considerably, however. According to Monday’s Washington Post, Mohammed Sadiq Howaida — picked up for using a phony passport on a flight in from Kenya — has not only confessed to a role in the bombing, but has told authorities he was acting for bin Ladin. Larry Barcella, an ex-assistant U.S. attorney who specialized in terrorist cases, predicts relatively quick indictments for bin Ladin and his associates.

There is, however, the issue of apprehending bin Laden, whose remote location in Taliban territory does not lend itself to easy warrant service. In the meantime, national security expert Armstrong offers a suggestion: ”The CIA might do better to figure out what the U.S. could do to support our friends without making regimes so ostentatiously corrupt that they end up giving credence to bin Ladin.”

Fresh Approach Needed in Seeking Saddam’s Demise

May 3, 1998/in Jane's Intelligence Review/by Frank Smyth

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.

Playing the Iran Card

February 24, 1998/in The Village Voice/by Frank Smyth

It is one thing to fight and lose. It is another to lose and win. The former involves miscalculating your chances. The latter involves accepting your losses up front. The latter is the cynic’s move.

Saddam Hussein sacrificed tens of thousands of largely inexperienced Iraqi troops in the Gulf War, while saving both tactical firepower and his best forces. Only a regime with little need for legitimacy could keep power after squandering so many men.

In the end, it looks like Saddam outsmarted everyone. He did so by lowering the bar to a point beneath which only he could crawl.

Now, with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan having brokered a diplomatic accord with Saddam, Bill Clinton has had to check his plan to bomb Iraq, at least temporarily. But even if the agreement holds, it is unlikely to control Saddam over time. Clinton needs a long-term plan — something he’s never had with Iraq before. And the only real option may be so far away that Clinton can’t see it. If he could, it might take many more years to realize than he has left–even if he survives every affair. But what would be hardest of all for America to fathom: this new anti-Saddam strategy would involve a tactical alliance with Iran — yes, Islamist Iran.

However novel, this alternative is grounded in realpolitik: Everyone who knows Saddam, including his neighbors and his own people, hates him more than they hate anybody else.

Seven years after the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein continues to squander his country’s treasure. His cynicism remains his trump card. Should Clinton ever decide to bomb, and even with the symbolic and logistical loss of allies like Saudi Arabia, the Clinton administration could still launch sustained air strikes against Iraq. Bombing might, in fact, delay Saddam’s capacity to produce chemical or biological weapons. But bombing alone is unlikely to remove him or change his regime. It could even produce a backlash. Any air campaign will produce some collateral damage. More civilians would suffer if Saddam were to deploy human shields at targets such as presidential palaces. The fallout would be worse still if the bombing were to release deadly chemical or biological agents. Meanwhile, Saddam is said never to sleep in the same place twice.

Committing ground forces, the only sure way to oust Saddam, has been ruled out. Hamstrung by the Lewinsky affair, and lacking strategic vision, Clinton could never muster the authority to deploy them. Former coalition allies will not commit any ground forces either. After years of wandering, this administration is lonely in the desert.

Many observers continue to hope that Iraqis themselves somehow oust Saddam. The presumption has always been that someone somewhere in the ruling hierarchy could do it. Indeed, the CIA still prays for a coup. To encourage one, former Bush administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz, who was a senior Pentagon planner, advocate supporting an Iraqi-government-in-exile. By continuing to place their bets on palace insiders, they underestimate Saddam. He has long guarded against a palace coup. Now he has a security force run by Qusay, his younger son.

Popular insurrection was once another option. Unlike the ruling hierarchy, most Iraqis are Shi’ites — like the regime and the vast majority of people in neighboring Iran. One-fifth of Iraq’s population is made up of Kurdish Sunnis who identify themselves first as Kurdish. Together, Arab Shi’ites and Kurds comprise four-fifths of the Iraqi people. U.S. officials, however, have always feared what self-determination might bring. It could lead to the secession of its Kurdish areas or turn Iraq into an Islamist state. So instead of chancing either, President Bush, like President Eisenhower in Hungary in 1956, provoked a revolt only to stand by as the insurrectionists were slaughtered.

Today, Clinton needs the same ground forces that Bush abandoned. Supported by neighboring states, commanding the respect of their region’s residents — many of whom risked everything — the Kurdish and Shi’ite rebels who rose up and tried to oust Saddam in March 1991 were the best hope that anybody has ever had of removing the Iraqi dictator. Now, the survivors are beat. They hate us and each other almost as much as they hate Saddam.

Thus, slick Willy is in a pickle. He and his advisers don’t know what to do. So they’ve been listening to the ghosts of the Bush administration and dusting off a dead plan. Clinton never had his own policy anyway. Instead, he followed Bush’s lead, and then let Langley steer. The spooks ran the ship aground. The agency’s anti-Saddam strategy is its worst regional blunder since the 1979 fall of the Shah in Iran. And the blowback from that debacle still blinds us. The 19-year-old memory of the 444-day embassy siege is what holds our strategy hostage now.

Could a new policy that involves Iran and others work? Writing under a pseudonym on The New York Times op-ed page, an ex-CIA officer in Iran recently suggested that it might. Maybe the spooks aren’t all as dumb as they act. On Sunday, an Iraqi Shi’ite leader based in Tehran and backed by Iran was quoted in the Times suggesting the same thing. Akram al-Hakim wants the United States to coordinate anti-Saddam efforts with Shi’ite forces inside Iraq. That would mean the U.S. would work alongside Iran. The strategy would be a big leap. It is fraught with caveats — not to mention the ghosts of the past.

But it still may be the best chance anybody’s got. Sure, Algeria is a cautionary tale. For different reasons, so is Afghanistan. But if we could get past our trauma over Iran, some Iranians are already getting over their past with us. Last week the American flag flew in Iran for the first time in 19 years without catching fire. Just a month after the country’s new president, Mohammad Khatami, talked with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about opening the door to cultural and sports exchanges, five U.S. wrestlers carrying the flag in Tehran were cheered. Wrestling is as big in Iran as table tennis is in China; Ping-Pong games precipitated Nixon’s China card.

But the same day, Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, again called the United States ”the Great Satan.” Khamenei still commands fundamentalists of all ages, while president Khatami is backed by a new generation of Iranians wanting more freedom. They are united against Clinton’s plan to bomb Iraq.

Before this administration does anything pointless, or something that could even make things worse, it should expand its horizon. And it should think about what it really means to hit rock bottom, and understand how we sunk there.

The days following the Gulf War were heady days. Saddam Hussein had been driven out of Kuwait. All Bush thought he needed to do was suggest Saddam be gone and, like magic, he would vanish. Last week, Bush told CNN’s Bernard Shaw, ”I thought that when the war ended, he could not survive.” Bush had no other plan. General Norman Schwarzkopf negotiated the terms of a cease-fire agreement as if it didn’t matter. Schwarzkopf was worried about coalition forces. He grounded Saddam’s planes, but allowed him to continue flying helicopters. Saddam said he needed them to get to the negotiations.

The United States still wanted Saddam out of power, even though the U.S.-led coalition had never had the authority to remove him. So Bush tried to provoke a coup. On March 1, 1991, two days after Saddam yielded in the Gulf War, Bush told 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 members of the ruling party and the military — Arab Sunnis like Saddam. But they failed to act. Instead, many Kurds and Arab Shi’ites revolted.

Indeed, on March 1, Islamist Shi’ite clerics in the south called for insurrection. Within days, Shi’ite rebels had taken Basrah, and fighting had broken out in nearly every southern city. On March 11, the largest gathering ever of Iraqi opposition leaders took place in Beirut with Saudi financing and under Syrian guard. Three days later, Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq launched their own offensive. Within one week, they would liberate nearly all of Iraq’s Kurdish-speaking areas. Some Kurdish couples named their newborns ”Bush.” But Bush had not bet on insurrectionary forces.

Everyone presumed Saddam would be overthrown. The only question was when, and who would replace him? Back then the CIA was backing a bunch of London-based exiles. Iran was backing the Shi’ites, and Syria and Iran were helping the Kurds. Though the London exiles’ current leader, Ahmed Chalabi, is a moderate Shi’ite, most of the people he represents are Sunnis and ex-monarchists. Many left Iraq after its monarchy was deposed in 1958. They have never fielded any military force. Yet in March 1991 they planned to form a government-in-exile by themselves.

They never got the chance. While they squabbled, many Shi’ites and Kurds fought. The Kurds made the most gains, going as far as Kirkuk, a key oil-producing town, where Saddam began his northern counteroffensive.

On March 28, everything changed after dawn. In Kirkuk, thousands of Kurds were still in the city, as incoming artillery and tank shells shook the ground. A young girl was killed 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 fired machine guns, as the guerrillas returned fire with anti-aircraft guns. The shells became more accurate, and tanks closed in on the town. Kurdish guerrillas pulled out just two surface-to-air missiles. By about noon, the smaller helicopters were joined by four or five fixed-wing 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.

Kirkuk was taken by 2 p.m., not by Republican Guards but by army special forces. It took Saddam only three more days to crush the rest of the Kurdish rebellion. By then, the Shi’ite revolt had also been snuffed out. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled into the mountains bordering Turkey and Iran. They panicked as rumors spread that Saddam was using chemical weapons, as he had against the Kurds in 1988. In fact, he didn’t, but during the exodus, many ”Bush” babies died of exposure. The Bush administration eventually established a safe haven in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds.

Soon the London-based exiles tried again to usurp control of the Iraqi opposition. Until 1996, the CIA gave the Iraqi National Congress $15 million in covert aid. They used part of it to establish a headquarters in northern Iraq, and they tried and failed to unite the Kurds.

Iraq’s feuding Kurdish guerrilla leaders, Massound Barzani and Jalal Talabani, though united after the ground war, never trusted each other. They have long struggled over control of contraband traffic as well as over politics. Tensions flared so much that by August 1996 they went to war. Talabani was getting help from Iran, so Barzani made a deal with Saddam. Thus swung open the door for Saddam to the safe haven. He quickly dismantled INC headquarters, then hunted down, tortured, and killed its associates.

Today the CIA is where it always was, backing cadre among the same London crowd. Last week Chalabi tried to convince Clinton to back him in forming a government-in-exile. Ex-Bush administration officials nodded, but even Chalabi is doubtful. ”Doing something inside London,” he told AP in Cairo, ”is not the same as doing something inside Iraq.” Clinton said no.

What Bush should have done back then was back the Kurds and Shi’ites when they revolted. He told CNN why he did not. It would have fractured the coalition, incurred U.S. casualties, and upset the region’s balance of power. Though on point about the latter, Bush has always envisioned foreign forces removing Saddam. Bush always underestimated Iraqis.

Once he realized that Saddam was using helicopters on them, Bush could have knocked the copters out of the sky. Schwarzkopf could have at least kept rebel forces in mind when he negotiated the cease-fire. Anyone in the Bush administration could have asked, ”What if just calling for a coup isn’t enough?” Bush, for one, wishes he had done something different. ”I miscalculated,” he told the BBC last year.

Today, Clinton has another choice, even though he must build amongst his predecessor’s wreckage. The first thing Clinton needs to do is recognize that the bombing-versus-diplomacy debate is shortsighted. Clinton needs to develop a long-term strategy, even though it might outlast him. America needs to acknowledge that its own experience with bombing, from Vietnam to El Salvador, demonstrates mainly hubris. And diplomacy? Ask anyone who has ever dealt with Saddam.

Take [Abu Ghraib] prison [about 20] miles west of Baghdad. In April 1991, captured journalists saw guards beat a prisoner on the buttocks with a flat board. They wanted him to crow like a rooster, laughing when a real rooster finally crowed as if to answer him. Guards hosed down a prisoner on a cool day, while zapping him with an electro-shock weapon. They chased a ”subversive” 16-year-old boy around, taking turns with rubber hoses. More systematic torture took place in other cellblocks deeper inside the prison. Occasionally, journalists heard the screams of men in sustained pain.

Many Iranians are still in Saddam’s jails. Iran also lost several hundred thousand men in the Iran-Iraq war, while the U.S. and others were arming Saddam. The West backed him even after he used mustard gas in 1984. But things change. Iran’s new and old leaders know it. What doesn’t change is that they all still hate Saddam. An alliance with Iran would be a tactical one. Don’t worry, they too would be leery.

Could Clinton bring them in on a plan of prolonged confrontation? It would require more world leadership than he has ever shown. It would involve challenging, complex diplomacy with Gulf states, Turkey, and others. Of course, any progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would only help. The idea would be to develop and sustain Iraqi rebel ground forces against Saddam. Considering our history, we would have to make a serious case to convince them that we would see them through. But if people inside Iraq thought that people outside Iraq were serious about them, then someone inside, or maybe lots of people, might act. Unlike us, they suffer Saddam daily.

And the caveats? Take the worst-case scenario. Saddam is overthrown, but the country splits into a Kurdish government in the north and an Islamist Shi’ite one in the south. The former would threaten Turkey. The latter would expand the reach of Iran. Perhaps diplomacy could manage it. Maybe not. The question is, considering the alternative, Would it be worth it?

Iran, too, would need to take a leap of faith. It currently helps Iraq violate the U.N. embargo against it. Iran opposes the entire U.S. presence in the Middle East, and it still backs Islamist rebels in Israel. Iran has been caught shipping arms to Islamist rebels in Lebanon; it backs Islamist regimes as far away as Khartoum. So, however, does Iraq. Closer to home, Iran, like most of Iraq’s other neighbors, fears the breakup of Iraq. Iraq’s northern neighbors all have disenfranchised Kurds.

Indeed, to win, Clinton would need to master Saddam’s game of divide and conquer. But any clear, concrete plan for removing Saddam would attract the interest of many groups and states. If anyone could unite such disparate forces, it is Saddam Hussein. He is a man who inspires hatred within his own family. In 1990, he killed a member of his own clan, General Omar al-Hazaa, after cutting out his tongue, for criticizing him. According to The Independent, the general’s nephew, Ra’ad, eventually joined forces with underground students to seek revenge. They attacked Saddam’s elder son, Uday, six years later, leaving him a paraplegic. A year before, Uday’s cousin, Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamel al-Majid, had fled to Jordan with his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Saddam Kamel Hassan, and their families. The two men were each married to one of Saddam’s daughters. In exile, they called for his ouster. But on February 20, 1996, they returned to Iraq, thinking that as fathers of Saddam’s grandchildren they would be safe.

Three days later, Uday and his security men killed them.

No one should underestimate Saddam again. Iran doesn’t. Last week Iraq’s new foreign minister, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf, traveled to Tehran. Afterward, Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, made an ambivalent statement that mirrors Clinton’s dilemma. He told Clinton not to bomb at the same time he told Saddam to let U.S. inspectors finish verifying the destruction of his chemical and biological weapons. Iran knows Saddam would use them if he could. He already has against Kurds as well as Iran. Even though everybody wants to, no one has figured out a viable way to ensure that Iraq never uses them again. Iran could be the card Clinton needs.