Commentary No. 118, Aug. 1, 2003
"Has Saddam Hussein Lost?"
The answer, say the American authorities, is obvious. Paul Bremer, the U.S. proconsul in Iraq, said recently, "Dead or alive, this man is finished in Iraq." What is wrong with this analysis is that it is made from the narrow perspective of someone who plays the game of geopolitics from a position of habitual strength, and who therefore measures wins and losses in a very short-term perspective. But the game of geopolitics looks different if you play it from a position of relative weakness. In that case, you have to play for the middle run. Let us look at how the war in Iraq might look from the position of Saddam Hussein.
In 1958, radical nationalists overthrew the monarchy in Iraq and installed Abdul Karim Kassim in power. The government considered itself pan-Arabist and revolutionary. Kassim took Iraq out of the U.S.-backed Baghdad Pact. He nationalized part of the oil industry. He had the support of the Communist Party of Iraq. He seemed to the U.S. to be moving to align Iraq too closely with the Soviet Union. In 1963, there was a second coup, which installed the Baath party in power. The Baath party had been a secular, socialist, nationalist pan-Arab movement in several Arab countries, which however was hostile to the Communist parties. It is widely believed the CIA helped the Baath to come to power. The Baath party suppressed the Communist Party of Iraq.
At the time, Saddam Hussein was a young, up-and-coming Baath leader, nephew of the new president, intelligent and ruthless. In 1979, he staged a bloody coup against his uncle and became the ruler of Iraq. He began his unceasing purge of opponents. What did Saddam want, besides merely being in power? He wanted to strengthen the Arab role in world politics. He was in favor of greater Arab unity, and probably saw himself as the natural leader of the Arab world, the new Saladin. No doubt there were other aspirants for this role, but with Nasser out of the picture none as strong. Besides, Baghdad had always been, along with Cairo, the claimant to central status in the Arab-Muslim world.
Saddam saw his objectives as having many enemies. In the Arab world, the two main ones were the Communists and the Islamists, and both hated Saddam. In the rest of the world, the two main ones were Iran and Israel, who hated Saddam, and the United States and Russia, both of whom hoped Saddam hated the other more. Saddam couldn't fight all his enemies at once. Without cutting ties with the Soviet Union, he struck up a tacit accord with the United States in the days of Ronald Reagan. None other than Donald Rumsfeld came to Iraq to seal the deal. What was the deal? Iraq attacked Iran. This was partly to gain territory, partly to weaken the Shia opponents inside Iraq, partly to achieve pan-Arab prestige, partly to strengthen his own military. The United States, at the time regarding Iran as the chief danger to its interests in the Middle East, thought this was a wonderful idea and gave, directly (and via its allies such as Saudi Arabia), armaments, biological and chemical weapons, and intelligence support to Saddam Hussein. (To be fair, it had been the French at an earlier point in time who had given the Iraqis their first boost in the drive to obtain nuclear weapons, but then the Israelis bombed these facilities.)
The Iraq-Iran war was a bust from Saddam's point of view. After eight years of struggle, everyone was back at the starting-point, having suffered massive loss of lives and resources. Still, the war kept the Iranians busy and this was a plus for the United States. Saddam demanded recompense. Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were slow in responding. At just this point in time, the Soviet Union collapsed. The cold war was over. Saddam Hussein saw this as a bonanza, not a negative. The Soviet Union had been a continuing arms supplier for Iraq. But the price for that was that Iraq could not do anything to strain U.S.-Soviet relations. Saddam was now free from this constraint, at last.
In 1990, Iraq was in economic trouble, the price of oil being low on the world market, and the costs of the Iran war having been high. Kuwait was insisting on being repaid for its loans during the Iraq-Iran war. It may also have been stealing Iraqi oil via diagonal drilling. And Iraq had a historic claim to Kuwait, which they charged had been part of their zone in the Ottoman era, and arbitrarily separated from them by the British after the First World War. So, Saddam decided that the solution to his economic problems was to seize Kuwait. This also fulfilled an Iraqi nationalist claim, and if successful would make Iraq the number one Arab nation. Iraq could even be the savior of Palestine, the negotiations between the PLO and the Israelis having just broken down.
Saddam's calculations were probably as follows. Invading Kuwait will no doubt be called aggression. But can I get away with it? Who will respond? Only the United States would be in a position to do anything serious, and the U.S. had been for a long time ambivalent in its relations with Iraq. As we now know, the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, told Saddam just days before the invasion that the U.S. was neutral in the Iraq-Kuwait diplomatic argument. So, Saddam reasoned, either the U.S. will react or it will fudge.
If it fudged, Saddam would have won. If it reacted, there would be a war. At most, Iraq would probably come out a non-loser, for the U.S. will not dare to invade Iraq. He was of course correct, for the reasons that Pres. George H.W. Bush and Gen. Schwarzkopf gave at the time. An invasion would have been too costly in U.S. lives, the occupation would have been too costly politically, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey feared a breakup of Iraq, and the consequent creation of a Shia state in the south and a Kurdish state in the north.
So, when the first Gulf War ended, Saddam managed a truce at the line of departure. He did suffer some losses. Parts of his army and air force had been lost. A de facto Kurdish state was established in the north, but not a Shia state in the south. He was subjected to a U.N. regime to end his weapons of mass destruction. By the time he was able to evict the U.N. inspectors in 1998, most of his weapons of mass destruction were no more.
When George W. Bush came to power, Saddam knew he was in trouble, as most of his chief advisors had publicly called for overthrowing Saddam just a few years before. Then came 9/11. And Saddam must have known that it would be he, not Osama bin Laden, who would pay the price. So he called back the U.N. inspectors, knowing they would find nothing, since by now it seems he had destroyed or not replaced the destroyed weapons of mass destruction. It soon became clear however that nothing that Saddam would do would stop the U.S. invasion, since the point of the invasion was to remove Saddam and establish U.S. might in the region.
Why then, if he no longer had weapons of mass destruction, did he not say so? Well, as a matter of fact, he did, but no one believed him. So, what could he do? He knew the limited power of his own army, and he knew that he would lose the second Gulf War. If you were Saddam and knew you would lose the second Gulf War, what would you do? Obviously, prepare the third Gulf War. How could you do that? The first thing to do would be to make sure that as many of your relatively small contingent of fierce loyalist fighters would survive. Therefore, you would have the resistance collapse early and dramatically. The second thing you would do is to create massive disorder by systematic looting. The third thing you would do is start a guerilla war, aimed first of all at U.S. soldiers and second of all at collaborators.
Then you'd sit back and wait for the erosion of the U.S. position. You would expect that two crucial public opinions would shift in time. In the United States, the creeping losses of lives, the inability to get things going in Iraq, and the patent deceptions of the Bush regime would erode U.S. support for the operation. And in Iraq, as time went on, the image of Saddam, the torturer, would give way to the image of Saddam, the nationalist resister. Even if the U.S. were to find and kill Saddam, his image might survive. And in any case, the image of the U.S., the liberator, would disintegrate.
This is less good than being Saladin, but if you're weak, you have to settle for what you can get. Bush thinks that if he brings down Saddam, he will have won. But Saddam thinks that if he brings down Bush, he will have won. We shall see who is right.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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