U.S. Policy on Iraq - No Breakup, No Removal of the Regime
Hi Hawkmoon,
Re: But I rather think you're correct, since we're just looking for an excuse to get rid of Saddam
On Frontline last Thursday evening there was a very revealing moment in an interview with Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush's National Security Advisor. (see below for excerpt from the interview.)
pbs.org
He contradicted the conventional wisdom that the U.S. government's policy is to "get rid" of Saddam. While this gets plenty of press coverage, and Saddam is a swell villain for a less than well-educated public who need "black and white" foreign policy answers, Scowcroft assured the interviewer that our policy really just a continuation of the Great Game decision of the British around 1920 to simply create Iraq our of whole cloth, that is to say, there never was any ethnic or historical basis for the nation's founding. It was designed as a wedge between the rather more sinister (in the eyes of the Brits) possibility of the rise of a regional rival to British hegemon. The three nations that are kept at bay by Iraq's presence are Persia, the new Ottoman region and the Damascus Arabs, i.e. Iran, Turkey and Syria.
Examining the policy thrusts of the U.S. government in this light over the past couple of decades indicates that our key governmental decision makers actually have a tolerance for Saddam Hussein as a stabilizing force in the region, even while the American public is fed a lot of propaganda about an "evil dictator".
-Ray
Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the Scowcroft interview:
Q: We didn't cut off their gasoline supplies.
A: First of all, one of our objectives was not to have Iraq split up into constituent ... parts. It's a fundamental interest of the United States to keep a balance in that area, in Iraq. ...
Q: So part of the reason to not go after his army at that point was to make sure there was a unified country, whether or not it was ruled by Saddam?
A: Well, partly. But suppose we went in and intervened, and the Kurds declare independence, and the Shiites declare independence. Then do we go to war against them to keep a unified Iraq?
Q: But why would we care at that point?
A: We could care a lot.
Q: I thought we had two interests. One was to evict the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. But the other really was to get Saddam out of power.
A: No, it wasn't.
Q: Well, either covertly or overtly.
A: No. No, it wasn't. That was never... You can't find that anywhere as an objective, either in the U.N. mandate for what we did, or in our declarations, that our goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. |
