SADDAM - Reprisals for failure, huge bonuses for success in shooting down US pilot

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread

Intl Herald-Trib

Saddam's Baghdad Escalates as Bush's Washington Dithers
Jim Hoagland The Washington Post
Thursday, May 3, 2001

WASHINGTON While the Bush administration struggles to determine what to do about Iraq and the Gulf, Saddam Hussein has concluded his own policy review with characteristic speed and brutishness. He wants an American pilot's head, and he wants it now.

Far from backing off after U.S. warplanes bombed air defenses near Baghdad on Feb. 16, Saddam's rocketeers have significantly escalated in recent weeks their firings at American and British aircraft flying routine patrols over Iraq, according to U.S. military and intelligence reports.

Those reports indicate that the escalation follows direct orders from Saddam to his military commanders to bag him an American pilot. These orders reportedly combine threats of reprisal for failure, and offers of huge cash bonuses for success.

When it comes to policy reviews, Saddam is different - he knows what he wants and he goes after it frontally. One murderous glance from the still unmellow dictator, who turned 64 last week, is enough to silence any disagreement in his national security team.

This is not to suggest that George W. Bush should or could conduct policy deliberations in a similar manner. But a drawn-out search for a new Iraq policy that allows vacillation and divergences to dominate the process will doom a new U.S. approach before it can get started. Saddam seeks that outcome with his newly aggressive, across-the-board response to the change of government in Washington.

While his gunners were targeting American F-15s, his diplomats set out at the recent Arab summit in Amman to intimidate and humiliate Jordan and other Arab states that could be tempted to support a more focused U.S. policy. Iraq scored no diplomatic points at the parley, but that was not Saddam's goal. His oil merchants have stepped up incentives for smuggling and evading sanctions since Secretary of State Colin Powell focused on that subject as part of the review. Iraq's illegal oil exports to Syria, and the revenues they bring directly to Saddam, have grown from 150,000 barrels a day to 250,000 since February. That was when General Powell visited Damascus and asserted that President Bashar Assad had promised to cooperate with a new U.S. approach to sanctions.

Iraq sells oil to Syria at $19 a barrel, or nearly $9 below recent world market prices, according to the Iraqi National Congress, the leading anti-Saddam opposition group. The INC also reports that Russian technicians are helping Syrian engineers refurbish a second Syrian pipeline to Iraq for future exports and that Baghdad has opened discussions with Lebanon about a similar deal.

Saddam Hussein hurries while President Bush's people still organize themselves in a serious but needlessly protracted review. The Bush team needs to recognize and respond to Saddam's rush. The most urgent task is to redraw the rules of engagement and mission requirements for the pilots enforcing the two no-flight zones over Iraq. Instead of flying the present purely reactive patrols that limit the time and scope they have to respond to being targeted, the pilots should be cleared to strike militarily significant targets that are identifiably part of a new strategy of constant confrontation.

At the top of that target list should be the dikes that Saddam has built in southern Iraq to dry up the marshes that an insurgency could use as cover. Blowing them away would be an effective way of announcing the end of the U.S. policy review.

At the conceptual level, the administration should abandon the current internal debate over regime change vs. containment as its alternative policies. Those unconvincing labels should be replaced by a clear American commitment to support the establishment of democracy in Iraq, through a long-term program of material and political support for Iraqis who share that goal and will work for it.

Only by publicly identifying the need for a democratic Iraq and holding it up as a model, much as Washington did through the long and unpromising years of calling for the independence of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union, can the United States convince the people of Iraq and of the region that it is finally serious about promoting change of a lasting nature in Baghdad.

That change will not be easy, or risk-free. Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf monarchies will not rush initially to help bring it about, any more than will oil-poor dictatorships like Syria. But clear and sustained American leadership can turn the tide against Saddam's hurry-up offense.

By going to war against Iraq in 1991, America incurred a moral obligation to that country's long-suffering people. Washington has set that obligation aside for a decade. It should not wait any longer.

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2001


Moderation questions? read the FAQ