The 12 Year Itch

For almost a decade, Iraq was a disagreeable problem that most policymakers preferred to pass on to their successors. (To some degree, Saddam is a problem of America's own making; during the 1980s the United States aided Iraq in its war against Iran, even helping Saddam get the ingredients for bio-chem weapons.) America has, in effect, been at war with Saddam for 12 years, ever since it drove the Iraqi dictator from Kuwait in 1991 and imposed a "no fly" zone over two thirds of his country. The CIA has tried, off and on, to get rid of Saddam, and "regime change" in Iraq has been the official policy of the United States government since 1998. But despite occasional volleys of cruise missiles and periodic spasms of determined talk, the war against Saddam was--until September 11, 2001--a phony war, an exercise in wishful thinking, buck-passing, denial and equivocation. For much of that time, Saddam was able to declare victory and probably believe it himself.

The delusions began with Bush's father. Defenders of the administration of "41," as the Bush family calls the 41st president of the United States, never tire of repeating that the goal of Operation Desert Storm was to drive Saddam from Kuwait, not to oust him from power. Nonetheless, it is also true that Bush and his advisers expected Saddam to fall after the war. The theory, says former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, was, "if you beat him badly enough in Kuwait and chased him out of there he would fall like a ripe plum from the tree, because his Army and everyone else would become totally discouraged with the brilliance --of his leadership and do him in." Pickering adds: "It didn't work."

The first mistake was to end the war at least a day early. Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, forcefully argued to the president that Saddam's forces were utterly defeated after 100 hours of ground combat. Powell had been misinformed by the field commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. In fact, most of Saddam's Republican Guard escaped back into Iraq. It was a bad sign when Saddam himself did not show up to sign the ceasefire papers but instead sent second-rank generals. The message was, or should have been, perfectly clear: Saddam wasn't surrendering.

In the days after the gulf war, the Butcher of Baghdad used his Republican Guard to smash the rebellions by the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. Although the United States still had tens of thousands of troops in the region, Washington decided not to intervene (except to provide relief to Kurdish refugees in the north). The explanation offered by administration briefers was that the international coalition assembled to drive Saddam from Kuwait would not support rebellions that might dismember Iraq. Civil war in Iraq would be "destabilizing," said Bush administration officials. The Shiites might make common cause with Iran, threatening Sunni-controlled Saudi Arabia. The concern was justifiable and remains one of the worries about post-Saddam Iraq today. But it overlooked a larger reality. According to a top Saudi diplomat, in 1990, when King Fahd gave permission to the United States to use Saudi bases to oust Saddam from Kuwait, the Saudi king added, "But he must not get up off the floor again." In other words, Saddam could not be contained; he must be killed. According to a knowledgeable source, the Saudis proposed that the CIA run a covert operation to depose Saddam after the war. The Bush White House decided that the CIA lacked the resources.

Instead, the international community moved to contain Saddam with arms inspections and economic sanctions. Saddam did not wait long to begin his campaign of "cheat and retreat," hiding his weapons programs and from time to time openly defying U.N. inspectors. President Bush, running for re-election, was unwilling to try to pull together another international coalition to finish the job.

To Bill Clinton, Saddam was a dangerous annoyance, but not one worth going to war over. Clinton had run on "It's the economy, stupid," and he had no desire to take on vast and expensive military commitments. The Clinton policy was, in the words of Martin Indyk, a White House Middle East specialist, "whack-a-mole," after an old penny-arcade game. "Saddam would stick his head up, and we'd whack him." When Saddam was caught plotting an assassination attempt against former president Bush in 1993, Clinton ordered a cruise-missile attack against the headquarters of his intelligence service in Baghdad.