POLITICS
There are only two ways of getting rid of Saddam
BRUCE ANDERSON
ome headlines are timeless. The same words will appear in today's paper as were used a month ago, or a year ago. Thus it was, in recent memory, with 'Major govern- ment in new crisis'. Thus it is now with `Saddam: West's final warning'.
That we have been here before does not necessarily mean that the West has suffered a diplomatic reverse. The mandate for force is unimpaired and the weapons point- ing at Saddam are still cocked. Saddam has been forced to make concessions, and the UN inspectors have renewed their work, which has already led to the destruction of far more Iraqi hardware than the air war achieved. But the fundamental problems remain unsolved. It is still unclear what the West wants to achieve in Iraq and even if policy were clarified, would we have the means to deliver it?
I am in Oman for a conference; it seemed an interesting moment to be in the region. Hardly surprisingly, many moderate Arabs who are in no way anti-Western are worried. They believe the West to be guilty of double standards. We all know that it would be absurd to claim any moral equiva- lence between Iraq and Israel; not all Arabs share our confidence. They point out that Ariel Sharon, who is now urging Jewish fundamentalist settlers to grab all the land that they can, is the same man who planned the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. For Lebanon, they say, read Kuwait; why such a diametric difference in Western response? The comparison is fallacious, in that Lebanon was being used to threaten Israel's security, but even anti-Saddam Arabs tend to impute a subconscious anti- Arab bias to many Western politicians.
Above all, they blame the West for fail- ing to think clearly. They fear that Presi- dent Clinton's domestic political agenda has too much influence on American poli- cy, and they are concerned about the stabil- ity of the region. They do not have a simple answer to the Saddam problem, and they are sure that the same is true of Western policy-makers, who are merely masking confusion with belligerence.
Mr Clinton tells us that he is pinning his faith on the Iraqi opposition. But in 1991 a lot of Iraqis were ready to rise up against Saddam, assuming that the West would help them. In the event, they received only slightly more assistance than the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto did in 1944. On at least one occasion since then, the Americans became excited; they had uncovered signifi- cant traces of opposition activity. So, it tran- spired, had Saddam Hussein. He is at least as keen as Mr Clinton is to meet the Iraqi opposition and he is better equipped to do so. It would be hard for him to increase his already ferocious level of vigilance, but every time the United States talks up the Iraqi opposition's prospects, Saddam's tor- ture chambers will be working double shifts.
The history of the so-called Iraqi opposi- tion reinforces two conclusions, one factu- al, the other melancholy. The factual one concerns the stability of the region's regimes, which is much greater than popu- lar mythology would suggest. Things can always go wrong, as they did for the Shah, who spent several years refusing to heed good advice, but since the days of Faisal of Iraq and Idris of Libya, it has become far harder to overthrow Middle Eastern rulers. This is partly due to the help that the West has given its friends in building up a sophis- ticated security apparatus, most evident in Saudi Arabia. But other regimes perfected their domestic security with no help from the West. In the broader region, that is true of Algeria, Syria and above all of Iraq.
But Saddam's power is not solely depen- dent on repression. Hence the melancholy conclusion: that monstrous rulers who have inflicted dreadful hardship and suffering on their peoples do not necessarily forfeit pop- ular support even after a military catastro- phe. That is as true now of Saddam as it was of Hitler and Stalin. There are only two ways of destroying such monsters: con- quest, or assassination.
No one is interested in conquering Iraq, so what about assassination? The theoreti- cal objections need not detain us. Not only does Saddam deserve to be put to death; it is better that the punishment for his crimes should fall on their perpetrator rather than, as now, on most of the Iraqi people, via sanctions. If assassination creates a prob- lem in international law, so much the worse for international law. Quibbles must not be allowed to obstruct raison d'etat or to deflect the wrath of justice. Nor should we be deterred by the objection that Saddam would be replaced by someone as bad, or worse. To be fair to Saddam, that is extremely improbable. He has earned the right to rank with that small group of tyrants who use their peoples as raw mate- rial in the pursuit of megalomaniac goals: Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ceaucescu, Milosevic of Serbia, and now Saddam. The quicker such men are killed, the less misery and destruction they will cause. The removal of such tyrants will almost always take with it the psychopathic intensity which charac- terises their regimes.
So the difficulties of killing Saddam are not theoretical, but practical. Oddly enough, it has occurred to him that one day someone might try to bump him off; he has anticipated threat by personal protection on a scale that would make Stauffenberg's problems with Hitler seem trivial. He has also ensured that those around him are almost as far in blood as he is.
Assassination would have one further advantage: it would not be in the West's interests, or the moderate Arabs', if Iraq fell apart. In concentrating on Saddam, we must not forget Iran. That was why the West made overtures to Saddam in the early Eighties; we hoped that a strong Iraq would help to contain Iran. Then we moved on to dual containment, but we are now in danger of ignoring a potential Iranian threat. That regime may be losing its psy- chopathic intensity, but it is far too early to forget Henry Kissinger's definition of an Iranian moderate: an Iranian who has run out of ammunition. A post-Saddam Iraq could still be a useful stabilising factor in the regional balance of power; a disinte- grating Iraq could cause chaos. An assassin would need luck, but so will any counter-Saddam policy. The man would not be going to such trouble to acquire weapons of mass destruction unless he had a strategy for their deployment. He is proba- bly already in a position to equip with a chemical warhead one of the four Scuds that are unaccounted for (there could well be others) and launch it at Tel Aviv. His failure to do so may simply mean that he is waiting until he has a second-strike capability. We must prevent him from acquiring one. Saddam has spent more than seven years in his version of the Muer bunker, obsessed by his geopolitical fantasies and planning his revenge. In a year's time, we may still be reading headlines about the West's final warning: let us hope that they are no worse. The earth will not be safe as long as Saddam can walk upon it: Saddam delenda est.
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