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Seven fallacies of
US plans to invade
Iraq
By Stephen Zunes
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
CONTENTS
1. A
war against Iraq would be illegal
2. Regional allies
widely oppose a US attack
3. There is no evidence of
Iraqi links to al-Qaeda or other anti-American
terrorists
4. There is no proof that Iraq is
developing weapons of mass destruction
5. Iraq is no
longer a significant military threat to its
neighbors
6. There are still nonmilitary options
available
7. Defeating Iraq would be militarily
difficult
Conclusion
The United
States appears to be barging ahead with plans to engage
in a large-scale military operation against Iraq to
overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. In the
international community, however, serious questions are
being raised regarding its legality, its justification,
its political implications, and the costs of the war
itself. Such an invasion would constitute an important
precedent, being the first test of the new doctrine
articulated by President George W Bush of “preemption”,
which declares that the United States has the right to
invade sovereign countries and overthrow their
governments if they are seen as hostile to US interests.
All previous large-scale interventions by American
forces abroad have been rationalized - albeit not always
convincingly to many observers - on the principle of
collective self-defense, such as through regional
organizations like the South East Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO) or the Organization of American
States (OAS). To invade Iraq would constitute an
unprecedented repudiation of the international legal
conventions that such American presidents as Woodrow
Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight
Eisenhower helped create in order to build a safer
world.
Although there have been some questions
raised recently about the scale and logistics of such a
military operation, there has been surprisingly little
dissent from leading policymakers, including
congressional Democrats. This raises serious concerns,
given that an invasion of Iraq constitutes such a
dramatic shift in US foreign policy and involves
enormous political and military risks. It appears that
war is inevitable unless there is a groundswell of
popular opposition. This policy report attempts to
encourage popular debate by raising a number of concerns
that challenge some of the key rationales and
assumptions behind such a military action.
1.
A war against Iraq would be illegal
There is
no legal justification for US military action against
Iraq. Iraq is currently in violation of part of one
section of UN Security Council Resolution 687 (and a
series of subsequent resolutions reiterating that
segment) requiring full cooperation with United Nations
inspectors ensuring that Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction, delivery systems, and facilities for
manufacturing such weapons are destroyed. The conflict
regarding access for UN inspectors and possible Iraqi
procurement of weapons of mass destruction has always
been an issue involving the Iraqi government and the
United Nations, not an impasse between Iraq and the
United States. Although UN Security Council Resolution
687 was the most detailed in the world body’s history,
no military enforcement mechanisms were specified. Nor
did the Security Council specify any military
enforcement mechanisms in subsequent resolutions. As is
normally the case when it is determined that governments
violate all or part of UN resolutions, any decision
about the enforcement of its resolutions is a matter for
the UN Security Council as a whole - not for any one
member of the council.
The most explicit warning
to Iraq regarding its noncompliance came in UN Security
Council Resolution 1154. Although this resolution warned
Iraq of the “severest consequences” if it continued its
refusal to comply, the Security Council declared that it
alone had the authority to “ensure implementation of
this resolution and peace and security in the area.”
According to articles 41 and 42 of the United
Nations Charter, no member state has the right to
enforce any resolution militarily unless the UN Security
Council determines that there has been a material breach
of its resolution, decides that all nonmilitary means of
enforcement have been exhausted, and then specifically
authorizes the use of military force. This is what the
Security Council did in November 1990 with Resolution
678 in response to Iraq’s ongoing occupation of Kuwait
in violation of a series of resolutions passed that
August. The UN has not done so for any subsequent
violations involving Iraq or any other government.
If the United States can unilaterally claim the
right to invade Iraq due to that country’s violation of
UN Security Council resolutions, other Security Council
members could logically also claim the right to invade
other member states that are in violation of UN Security
Council resolutions. For example, Russia could claim the
right to invade Israel, France could claim the right to
invade Turkey, and Great Britain could claim the right
to invade Morocco, simply because those targeted
governments are also violating UN Security Council
resolutions. The US insistence on the right to attack
unilaterally could seriously undermine the principle of
collective security and the authority of the United
Nations and in doing so would open the door to
international anarchy.
International law is
quite clear about when military force is allowed. In
addition to the aforementioned case of UN Security
Council authorization, the only other time that any
member state is allowed to use armed force is described
in Article 51, which states that it is permissible for
“individual or collective self-defense” against “armed
attack ... until the Security Council has taken the
measures necessary to maintain international peace and
security.” If Iraq’s neighbors were attacked or feared
an imminent attack from Iraq, any of these countries
could call on the United States to help, pending a
Security Council decision authorizing the use of force.
But they have not appealed to the Security Council,
because they have not felt threatened by Iraq.
Based on evidence that the Bush administration
has made public, there does not appear to be anything
close to sufficient legal grounds for the United States
to convince the Security Council to approve the use of
military force against Iraq in US self-defense. This may
explain why the Bush administration has thus far refused
to go before the United Nations on this matter. Unless
the United States gets such authorization, any such
attack on Iraq would be illegal and would be viewed by
most members of the international community as an act of
aggression. In contrast to the Persian Gulf War of
1990-91, it is likely that the world community would
view the United States - not Iraq - as the international
outlaw.
There is little debate regarding the
nefarious nature of the Iraqi regime, but this has never
been a legal ground for invasion. When Vietnam invaded
Cambodia in 1978 to overthrow the Khmer Rouge - a
radical communist movement even more brutal than the
regime of Saddam Hussein - the United States condemned
the action before the United Nations as an act of
aggression and a violation of international law. The
United States successfully led an international effort
to impose sanctions against Vietnam and insisted that
the UN recognize the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate
government of Cambodia for more than a decade after
their leaders were forced out of the capital into remote
jungle areas. Similarly, the United States challenged
three of its closest allies - Great Britain, France, and
Israel - before the United Nations in 1956 when they
invaded Egypt in an attempt to overthrow the radical
anti-Western regime of Gamal Abdul-Nasser. The
Eisenhower administration insisted that international
law and the UN Charter must be upheld by all nations
regardless of their relations with the United States. It
now appears that the leadership of both political
parties is ready to reverse what was once a bipartisan
consensus.
2. Regional allies widely oppose a
US attack
Although there was some serious
opposition to the Gulf War in many parts of the Middle
East and elsewhere, it did have the support of major
segments of the international community, including
several important Arab states. The Gulf War was widely
viewed as an act of collective security in response to
aggression by Iraq against its small neighbor. This
would not be the case, however, in the event of a new
war against Iraq. Instead, Washington’s proposed action
would be seen as an unprovoked invasion. Unlike in 1991,
when most of the region supported - and even contributed
to - the US-led war effort (or was at least neutral),
Arab opposition is strong today. Saudi Crown Prince
Abdullah has warned that the US “should not strike Iraq,
because such an attack would only raise animosity in the
region against the United States.” When Vice President
Dick Cheney visited the Middle East in March, every Arab
leader made clear his opposition. At the Beirut summit
of the Arab League at the end of March, the Arab nations
unanimously endorsed a resolution opposing an attack
against Iraq.
Even Kuwait has reconciled with
Iraq. This past March, Iraq and Kuwait signed a document
written by Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheik Sabah al Ahmed
al Jabbar al Sabah in which Iraq, for the first time,
formally consented to respect the sovereignty of Kuwait.
Sabah declared that his country was 100% satisfied with
the agreement, and Kuwait reiterated its opposition to a
US invasion of Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince
Abdullah called the pact a “very positive achievement”
and expressed confidence that Iraq would uphold the
agreement.
US officials claim that, public
statements to the contrary, there may be some regional
allies willing to support a US war effort. Given
President Bush’s ultimatum that “you are either with us
or the terrorists,” it is quite possible that some
governments might be successfully pressured to go along.
However, almost any Middle Eastern government willing to
provide such support and cooperation would be doing so
over the opposition of the vast majority of its
citizens. Given the real political risks for such a
ruler in supporting the US war effort, such acquiescence
would take place only reluctantly as a result of
American pressure or inducements, not from a sincere
belief in the validity of the US military operation.
In the event of a US invasion of Iraq, there
would likely be an outbreak of widespread anti-American
protests, perhaps even attacks against American
interests. Some pro-Western regimes could become
vulnerable to internal radical forces as part of such a
reaction. Passions are particularly high in light of
strong US support for the policies of Israel’s rightist
government and its ongoing occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. The anger over US double standards
regarding Israeli and Iraqi violations of UN Security
Council resolutions could reach a boiling point.
3. There is no evidence of Iraqi links to
al-Qaeda or other anti-American terrorists
In the months following the September 11
terrorist attacks, there were leaks to the media about
alleged evidence of a meeting in Prague between an Iraqi
intelligence officer and one of the hijackers of the
doomed airplanes that crashed into the World Trade
Center. Subsequent thorough investigations by the FBI,
CIA, and Czech intelligence have found no evidence that
any such meeting took place. None of the hijackers were
Iraqi, no major figure in al-Qaeda is Iraqi, and no
funds to al-Qaeda have been traced to Iraq. It is
unlikely that the decidedly secular Baathist regime -
which has savagely suppressed Islamists within Iraq -
would be able to maintain close links with Osama bin
Laden and his followers. In fact, Saudi Prince Turki bin
Faisal, his country’s former intelligence chief, noted
that bin Laden views Saddam Hussein “as an apostate, an
infidel, or someone who is not worthy of being a fellow
Muslim” and that bin Laden had offered in 1990 to raise
an army of thousands of mujaheddin fighters to liberate
Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
Iraq’s past
terrorist links have primarily been limited to such
secular groups as Abu Nidal, a now-largely defunct
Palestinian faction opposed to Yasir Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization. At the height of Iraq’s support
of Abu Nidal in the early 1980s, Washington dropped Iraq
from its list of countries that sponsored terrorism so
the US could bolster Iraq’s war effort against Iran.
Baghdad was reinstated to the list only after the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait in 1990, even though US officials
were unable to cite any increased Iraqi ties to
terrorist groups. A recent CIA report indicates that the
Iraqis have actually been consciously avoiding any
actions against the United States or its facilities
abroad, presumably to deny Washington any excuse to
engage in further military strikes against their
country. The last clear example that American officials
can cite of such Iraqi-backed terrorism was an alleged
plot by Iraqi agents to assassinate former President
George Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993. In response,
President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Baghdad,
hitting an Iraqi intelligence headquarters as well as a
nearby civilian neighborhood.
Although Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insists that Iraq is backing
international terrorism, he has been unable to present
any evidence that they currently do so. In fact, the
State Department’s own annual study Patterns of Global
Terrorism did not list any serious act of international
terrorism by the government of Iraq.
Besides, an
American invasion of Iraq would probably weaken the
battle against terrorism. It would not only distract
from the more immediate threat posed by Osama bin
Laden’s al-Qaeda network, but it would also likely
result in an anti-American backlash that would lessen
the level of cooperation from Islamic countries in
tracking down and neutralizing the remaining al-Qaeda
cells.
4. There is no proof that Iraq is
developing weapons of mass destruction
Despite speculation - particularly by those who
seek an excuse to invade Iraq - of possible ongoing
Iraqi efforts to procure weapons of mass destruction, no
one has been able to put forward evidence that the
Iraqis are actually doing so, though they have certainly
done so in the past. The dilemma facing the
international community is that no one knows what, if
anything, the Iraqis are currently doing.
In the
aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent
inspections regimen, virtually all Iraq’s stockpile of
weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems, and
capability of producing such weapons were destroyed.
Inspectors with the United Nations Special Commission
(USOM) were withdrawn from Iraq in late 1998 before
their job was complete, however, under orders by
President Clinton prior to a heavy four-day US bombing
campaign. The Iraqi government has not yet allowed them
to return. Prior to that time, USOM reportedly oversaw
the destruction of 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000
liters of live chemical weapons agents, 48 missiles, six
missile launchers, 30 missile warheads modified to carry
chemical or biological agents, and hundreds of pieces of
related equipment with the capability to produce
chemical weapons.
In its most recent report, the
International Atomic Energy Agency categorically
declared that Iraq no longer has a nuclear program.
In late 1997, USOM Director Richard Butler
reported that USOM had made “significant progress” in
tracking Iraq’s chemical weapons program and that 817 of
the 819 Soviet-supplied long-range missiles had been
accounted for. A couple dozen Iraqi-made ballistic
missiles remained unaccounted for, but these were of
questionable caliber. Though Iraqi officials would
periodically interfere with inspections, in its last
three years of operation, USOM was unable to detect any
evidence that Iraq had been further concealing
prohibited weapons.
The development of
biological weapons, by contrast, is much easier to
conceal, due to the small amount of space needed for
their manufacture. Early USOM inspections revealed
evidence of the production of large amounts of
biological agents, including anthrax, and charged that
Iraq had vastly understated the amount of biological
warfare agents it had manufactured. In response, USOM
set up sophisticated monitoring devices to detect
chemical or biological weapons, though these devices
were dismantled in reaction to the US bombing campaign
of December 1998.
Frightening scenarios
regarding mass fatalities from a small amount of anthrax
assume that the Iraqis have developed the highly
sophisticated means of distributing these bioweapons by
missile or aircraft. However, there are serious
questions as to whether the alleged biological agents
could be dispersed successfully in a manner that could
harm troops or a civilian population, given the rather
complicated technology required. For example, a vial of
biological weapons on the tip of a missile would almost
certainly either be destroyed on impact or dispersed
harmlessly. To become lethal, highly concentrated
amounts of anthrax spores must be inhaled and then left
untreated by antibiotics until the infection is too far
advanced. Similarly, the prevailing winds would have to
be calculated, no rain could fall, the spray nozzles
could not clog, the population would need to be
unvaccinated, and everyone would need to stay around the
area targeted for attack.
Although Iraq’s
potential for developing weapons of mass destruction
should not be totally discounted, Saddam Hussein’s
refusal to allow UN inspectors to return and his lack of
full cooperation prior to their departure do not
necessarily mean he is hiding something, as President
Bush alleges. More likely, the Iraqi opposition to the
inspections program is based on Washington’s abuse of
USOM for intelligence gathering operations and
represents a desperate effort by Saddam Hussein to
increase his standing with Arab nationalists by defying
Western efforts to intrude on Iraqi sovereignty. Indeed,
the Iraqi defiance of the inspections regime may be
designed to provoke a reaction by the United States in
order to capitalize on widespread Arab resentment over
Washington’s double standard of objecting to an Arab
country procuring weapons of mass destruction while
tolerating Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
A far more
likely scenario for an Iraqi distribution of biological
agents would be through Iraqi agents smuggling them
clandestinely into targeted countries. This is what led
to some initial speculation, now considered very
doubtful, that the Iraqis were behind the anthrax mail
attacks during the fall of 2001. To prevent such a
scenario requires aggressive counterintelligence efforts
by the United States and other potentially targeted
nations, but this type of terrorism is not likely to be
prevented by an invasion. Indeed, a US invasion could
conceivably encourage rogue elements of Iraqi
intelligence or an allied terrorist group to engage in
an anthrax attack as an act of revenge for the heavy
Arab casualties resulting from US bombing. One of the
frightening things about biological weapons production
is the mobility of operations. A “regime change”
engineered by the US would not necessarily ensure the
closure of labs producing such weapons, since they could
easily be relocated elsewhere or even continue to
operate clandestinely in Iraq.
US officials have
admitted that there is no evidence that Iraq has resumed
its nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs.
Scott Ritter, a former US Marine officer who served as
chief weapons inspector for USOM, responded to a query
on a television talk show in 2001 about Iraq’s potential
threat to the US by saying:
In terms of military
threat, absolutely nothing. His military was devastated
in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm and hasn’t had the
ability to reconstitute itself … In terms of weapons of
mass destruction, … we just don’t know. We know that we
achieved a 90 to 95% level of disarmament. There’s stuff
that’s unresolved, and until we get weapons inspectors
back into Iraq, that will remain a problematic issue ….
We should be trying to get weapons inspectors back into
Iraq, so that we can ascertain exactly what’s
transpiring in Iraq today instead of guessing about it.
Finally, Saddam Hussein has demonstrated that he
cares first and foremost about his own survival. He
presumably recognizes that any effort to use weapons of
mass destruction would inevitably lead to his own
destruction. This is why he did not use them during the
Gulf War. In the event of a US invasion, seeing his
overthrow as imminent, and with nothing to lose, this
logic of self-preservation would no longer be operative.
Instead, such an invasion would dramatically increase
the likelihood of his ordering the use of any weapons of
mass destruction he may have retained.
Saddam
Hussein’s leadership style has always been that of
direct control; his distrust of subordinates (bordering
on paranoia) is one of the things that has helped him
survive. It is extremely unlikely that he would go to
the risk and expense of developing weapons of mass
destruction only to pass them on to some group of
terrorists. If he does have such weapons at his
disposal, they would be for him and nobody else. In the
chaos of a US invasion and its aftermath, however, the
chances of such weapons being smuggled out of the
country into the hands of terrorists would increase.
Currently these weapons, if they do exist, are under the
control of a highly centralized government unlikely to
provoke an attack by passing on the weapons to terrorist
groups.
5. Iraq is no longer a significant
military threat to its neighbors
It is also
hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft carrying
biological weapons, presumably some kind of drone, could
somehow penetrate the air space of neighboring
countries, much less far-off Israel, without being shot
down. Most of Iraq’s neighbors have sophisticated
antiaircraft capability, and Israel has the best
regional missile defense system in the world. Similarly,
as mentioned above, there is no evidence that Iraq’s
Scud missiles and launchers even survived the Gulf War
in operable condition. Indeed, USOM reported in 1992
that Iraq had neither launchers for their missiles nor
engines to power them.
Israeli military analyst
Meir Stieglitz, writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot
Ahronot, noted that “there is no such thing as a
long-range Iraqi missile with an effective biological
warhead. No one has found an Iraqi biological warhead.
The chances of Iraq having succeeded in developing
operative warheads without tests are zero.”
The
recent American obsession with Iraq’s potential military
threat is discredited by the fact that Iraq’s military,
including its real and potential weapons of mass
destruction, was significantly stronger in the late
1980s than it is today. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
was once a real threat to Iraq’s neighbors when he had
his full complement of medium-range missiles, a
functioning air force, and a massive stockpile of
chemical and biological weaponry and material. Yet, from
the Carter administration through the Reagan
administration and continuing through the first half of
the senior Bush administration, the US dismissed any
potential strategic Iraqi threat to the point of
coddling Saddam’s regime with overt economic subsidies
and covert military support. This support continued even
as Iraq invaded Iran and used chemical weapons against
Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians.
Iraq’s
current armed forces are barely one-third their pre-war
strength. Even though Iraq has not been required to
reduce its conventional forces, the destruction of its
weapons and the country’s economic difficulties have led
to a substantial reduction in men under arms. Iraq’s
Navy is virtually nonexistent and its Air Force is just
a fraction of what it was before the war. Military
spending by Iraq has been estimated at barely one-tenth
of its levels in the 1980s. The Bush administration has
been unable to explain why today, when Saddam has only a
tiny percentage of his once-formidable military
capability, Iraq is considered such a threat that it is
necessary to invade the country and replace its leader -
the same leader Washington quietly supported during the
peak of Iraq’s military capability.
6. There
are still nonmilitary options available
The
best way to stop the potential of Iraq developing
weapons of mass destruction would be through resuming
United Nations inspections, which - despite episodes of
Iraqi noncooperation and harassment - were largely
successful. It was Washington’s ill-considered decision
to misuse the inspection teams for unrelated spying
operations and the decision to engage in an intense
four-day bombing campaign against Iraq that led Saddam
Hussein to cease his cooperation completely in December
1998.
Since then, the United States has not
offered any incentives for Iraq to allow inspections to
resume. From the outset, Washington made it clear that
even total cooperation with USOM would not lead to an
end to the devastating international sanctions against
Iraq. As a result, Saddam Hussein may be refusing to
allow UN inspectors to return not because he has
something to hide but because he has nothing to gain by
cooperating. Offering an end to or a substantial
liberalization of nonmilitary sanctions in return for
unfettered access by UN inspection teams would probably
be the best way to regain access for the inspectors.
Unfortunately, Bush administration officials are
apparently no longer even interested in renewing UN
inspections, dismissing out of hand Iraq’s recently
announced willingness to consider their return. This
raises questions as to whether the potential Iraqi
possession of weapons of mass destruction is really a
genuine concern of American officials or merely an
excuse to go to war.
A number of observers,
including Scott Ritter - who had criticized the Clinton
administration for not pushing the Iraqi regime harder
on its initial refusals to allow inspections into some
of the government’s inner sanctums - believe that the
Bush administration is sabotaging United Nations efforts
to reopen inspections. For example, Ritter told the Los
Angeles Times that the recent decision to engage in
covert operations to assassinate Saddam Hussein and
other Iraqi leaders “effectively kills any chance of
inspectors returning to Iraq” because “the Iraqis will
never trust an inspection regime that has already shown
itself susceptible to infiltration and manipulation by
intelligence services hostile to Iraq.”
There is
also no reason why the current emphasis on deterrence
will not continue to work. Iraq was able to build up its
initial raw components, equipment, and technologies for
the development of biological, chemical, and nuclear
weapons through imports, much of which came from the
United States. The vast majority of these items and
infrastructure has since been destroyed. Although the
economic sanctions have been quite controversial as a
result of their devastating effects on Iraqi civilians
(and are therefore frequently violated), international
support for and enforcement of the military sanctions
have remained quite solid.
Furthermore, even
without a resumption of inspections, relying on existing
satellite surveillance - which ensures that Iraq cannot
build any large weapons plants without detection and
presumably destruction, immediately afterwards - seems
far less risky than an all-out war.
Finally,
given that UN Security Council Resolution 687 also calls
for disarmament initiatives throughout the region, the
United States could help curb Iraq’s appetite for
weapons procurement by reversing its opposition to arms
control initiatives for the entire Persian Gulf region.
7. Defeating Iraq would be militarily
difficult
Most likely, the United States
would eventually be victorious in a war against Iraq,
but it would come at an enormous cost. It would be a
mistake, for example, to think that defeating Iraq would
result in as few Americans casualties as occurred in
driving the Taliban militia from Kabul. Though Iraq’s
offensive capabilities have been severely weakened by
the bombings, sanctions, and USOM-sponsored
decommissioning, its defensive military capabilities are
still strong.
Nor would a military victory today
be as easy as during the Gulf War. Prior to the
launching of Operation Desert Storm, when the Iraqis
figured out the extent of the forces being deployed
against them, they decided not to put up a fight for
Kuwait and relied mostly on young conscripts from
minority communities. Only two of the eight divisions of
the elite Republican Guard were ever in Kuwait, and they
pulled back before the war began in mid-January. The
vast majority of Iraq’s strongest forces were withdrawn
to areas around Baghdad to fight for the survival of the
regime itself, and they remain there to this day. In the
event of war, defections from these units are not
likely.
There are close to one million members
of the Iraqi elite who have a vested interest in the
regime’s survival. These include the Baath Party
leadership and its supporters, security and intelligence
personnel, and core elements of the armed forces and
their extended families. Furthermore, Iraq - a largely
urban society - has a far more sophisticated
infrastructure than does the largely rural and tribal
Afghanistan that could be mobilized in the event of a
foreign invasion.
Nor is there an equivalent to
Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, which did the bulk of
the ground fighting against the Taliban. The Kurds,
after being abandoned twice in recent history by the
United States, are unlikely to fight beyond securing
autonomy for Kurdish areas. The armed Shiite opposition
has largely been eliminated, and it too would be
unlikely to fight beyond liberating the majority Shiite
sections of southern Iraq. The US would be reluctant to
support either, given that their successes could
potentially fragment the country and would encourage
both rebellious Kurds in southeastern Turkey and restive
Shiites in northeastern Saudi Arabia. US forces would
have to march on Baghdad, a city of over five million
people, virtually alone. Unlike the Gulf War, which
involved conventional and open combat where US forces
could excel and take full advantage of their firepower
and technological superiority, US soldiers would have to
fight their way through heavily populated agricultural
and urban lands. Invading forces would be faced with
bitter, house-to-house fighting in a country larger than
South Vietnam. Iraqis, who may have had little stomach
to fight to maintain their country’s conquest of Kuwait,
would be far more willing to sacrifice themselves to
resist a foreign, Western invader. To minimize American
casualties in the face of such stiff resistance, which
would largely come from within crowded urban areas, the
United States would likely engage in heavy bombing of
Iraqi residential neighborhoods, resulting in very high
civilian casualties.
The lack of support from
regional allies could result in an absence of a land
base from which to launch US aerial attacks, initially
requiring the United States to rely on Navy jets
launched from aircraft carriers. Without permission to
launch aerial refueling craft, even long-range bombers
from US air bases might not be able to be deployed. It
is hard to imagine being able to provide the necessary
reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft under such
circumstances, and the deployment of tens of thousands
of troops from distant staging areas could be
problematic as well. US forces could conceivably capture
an air base inside Iraq in the course of the fighting,
but without the pre-positioning of supplies, its
usefulness as a major center of operations would be
marginal.
Finally, there is the question of what
happens if the United States is successful in
overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime. As is becoming
apparent in Afghanistan, throwing a government out is
easier than putting a new one together. Although most
Iraqis presumably fear and despise Saddam Hussein’s rule
and would likely be relieved in the event of his ouster,
this does not mean that a regime installed by an
invading Western army would be welcomed. For example,
most of the leading candidates that US officials are
apparently considering installing to govern Iraq are
former Iraqi military officers who have been linked to
war crimes.
In addition to possible ongoing
guerrilla action by Saddam Hussein’s supporters, US
occupation forces would likely be faced with competing
armed factions among the Sunni Arab population, not to
mention Kurd and Shiite rebel groups seeking to break
away from any ruler in Baghdad. This could lead the
United States into a bloody counterinsurgency war.
Without the support of other countries or the United
Nations, a US invasion could leave American forces
effectively alone enforcing a peace amidst the chaos of
a post-Saddam Iraq.
Conclusion
The serious moral, legal, political, and
strategic problems with a possible US invasion of Iraq
require that the American public become engaged in the
debate over the wisdom of such a dramatic course of
action. What is at stake is not just the lives of
thousands of Iraqi and American soldiers and thousands
more Iraqi civilians but also the international legal
framework established in the aftermath of World War II.
Despite its failings, this multilateral framework of
collective security has resulted in far greater
international stability and far less intergovernmental
conflict than would otherwise have been the case.
During the 2000 election campaign, George W.
Bush scored well among voters by calling for greater
“humility” in US foreign policy, decrying the
overextension of US military force, and criticizing the
idea that the US armed forces should be engaged in such
practices as “nation-building” in unstable areas. As
president, Bush has made a remarkable reversal of this
popular position and appears eager to embark on perhaps
the most reckless foreign military campaign in US
history. Taking advantage of the fear, anger, and sense
of nationalism felt by so many Americans in the wake of
the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush
administration and its allies in Congress and the media
are now seeking to justify an unrelated military
campaign that would have otherwise been unimaginable.
The most effective antidote to such arrogance of
power is democracy. Unfortunately, in times of
international crisis, many Americans are wary of
exercising their democratic rights and are reluctant to
oppose a president’s foreign policy. Yet, seldom in US
history has it been so important for Americans to raise
their concerns publicly and challenge their elected
representatives to honor their legal and moral
obligations.
Stephen Zunes is a
professor at the University of San Francisco and Middle
East editor of Foreign Policy in
Focus.
(Posted with permission from
Foreign Policy in Focus)
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