After
Iraq without Saddam.
By NR Editors , from the March 24, 2003, issue of National Review
nationalreview.com
hen Charles X, the last Bourbon king of France, was faced with the revolution that would topple him, he declared that he saw no alternative to the throne but the scaffold. Talleyrand, the aged diplomat, told him, "Your majesty forgets the post-chaise" — a carriage-ride to exile. At an early March meeting of the Arab League, some of the attendees offered Talleyrand's advice to Saddam Hussein, whose flunkeys indignantly rejected it. Unless he changes his mind, he will face the scaffold of the battlefield.
The broad outlines of America's war strategy, discussed by Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post and others, seem clear. Precision-guided weapons, which have become more precise since the Gulf War, will be directed against the regime's arsenal and its hierarchy. (No bombing is precise enough to spare civilian casualties, and anti-American media, from CNN International to al-Jazeera, will feast on the innocents who suffer.) But bombing will be less important than it was in the Gulf War because the lessons of rapid deployment, led by on-the-ground spotters, learned in the Afghan war, will be used as well, in multiple pushes from the south and the north. The non-cooperation of Turkey would complicate the picture, without altering it: Troops would then have to be airlifted into the Kurdish north from farther away and at a slower rate. American and British special forces were already in Iraq in the first week of March, laying the groundwork. All war is uncertain. But this Gulf War could be shorter than the first.
The latest antiwar argument to be floated is the price tag. The Pentagon has been scuffling publicly over estimates ranging from $60 billion to $95 billion. War always runs up debt. The relevant counter-question is, What is the cost of inaction? New York City asked for $20 billion of federal aid after losing the World Trade Center. What would New York, or Washington, or Los Angeles, need after a dirty-bomb blast, courtesy of Saddam and al Qaeda?
Since the goal of a second Gulf War would be regime change, the peace will be more complicated. Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured Iraqi exiles in Dearborn, Mich., that we would not replace "one dictator with another." In his speech to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush repeated the pledge: "All Iraqis must have a voice in the new government, and all citizens must have their rights protected."
How are those rights to be secured? A number of unattractive options present themselves. An American military government, with Gen. Tommy Franks as Douglas MacArthur, could be a magnet for terrorism, provocation, and storms of whipped-up nationalism. A U.N. peacekeeping force would be far worse. Imagine turning Iraq over to a gaggle of Libyans, Chinese, and Frenchmen. The organization that bungled the task of disarming Saddam cannot be allowed to sabotage the recovery from his brutality.
An Allied Control Commission, consisting of representatives of Iraq's liberators — America, Britain, etc. — and free Iraqis should arrest Saddam's criminal henchmen, establish just courts, and provide for local elections to a convention that would propose the structure of a new Iraqi state. Once elections for that government were held, it should depart.
Who are the free Iraqis? A meeting of Iraqi dissidents in the Kurdish enclave, attended by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration's special envoy, picked a committee of six, consisting of Ahmad Chalabi, chairman of the Iraqi National Congress, two Kurds, two Sunnis, and one Shiite. The Sunnis belong to a minority group that currently rules the country, in the sense that Saddam is a Sunni. They will have to be wooed. The largest organized Shiite groups are backed by Iran. They will be a source of trouble, since Teheran itself is an anti-American terrorist regime.
The problems will be complex. Even with success in Iraq, it is visionary to expect that a wave of democracy will sweep the Middle East: So many oligarchs, and so many passions, stand in the way. But a reasonably free Iraq will stop being a danger to us, and to civilization. It will offer a model to those who wish one. And it will be a blessing to Iraq's long-suffering people. |
