Also found this...1998- America's Iraq Policy..How Did It Come To This???
Long and interesting piece on PBS from 1998 by Robin Wright....Especially interesting as this was written 4 years ago, and how it relates to what has happened currently....
America's Iraq policy....how did it come to this??
pbs.org
Seven years after the Gulf War, the United States remains enmeshed in a cycle of crises with Iraq that is still far from over. The biggest challenges, in fact, may lie ahead --potentially crises with allies as well as with the regime of President Saddam Hussein. In stark contrast to the initial drama of Operation Desert Storm, when a powerful U.S.-led coalition ejected Saddam's forces from Kuwait, the current phase finds the vast majority of the three dozen members of the coalition either questioning or opposed to U.S. strategy. A swift and techno-efficient conflict that was supposed to be the model for the post-Cold War world has instead produced an open-ended morass with no easy solution.
How did it come to this? Problems were predictable for several reasons. Foremost was the enormous gap between the coalition's explicit, short-term mandate and the implicit, long-term goal. Through a series of UN resolutions, the coalition won approval to liberate Kuwait to defend the principle that aggression against neighbors is unacceptable in a post-Cold War era that emphasizes economic rather than military competition and global cooperation rather than regional rivalry. The United States and its allies fulfilled this short-term mandate during the six-week war. Iraq retreated and Kuwait's royal family was restored to power.
The war's end did not, however, address the real long-term issue-- Saddam Hussein's aggressive regime. Treating the Gulf War as a singular event missed the larger picture: By 1991, Saddam had spent all but three years since he assumed power in 1979 in conflicts he started with neighbors--Kuwait in 1990-1991 and Iran 1980-1988. Throughout his rule, he fostered border tensions or political spats with all four other neighbors--Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
With the Gulf War cease-fire, the coalition's attention then shifted from the problem of liberating Kuwait to the root cause of regional instability--Saddam's government in Baghdad. No member of the coalition wanted to again have to send thousands of troops, expend political clout to convince domestic audiences, or contribute to the $ 65 billion price tag that burdened even the Gulf's oil-rich monarchies to deal with Saddam's aggression.
But neither the United States nor the coalition sought international approval for the long-term goal of stopping, challenging, or deposing Saddam. Various hard-won UN resolutions only allowed the coalition to limit the Iraqi leader's aggressive agenda in temporary ways. Resolution 687, for example, called for the elimination of Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction; economic sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion were not to be lifted until Baghdad complied. Like other UN measures, however, this represented more of a band-aid than a real cure: Once the inspections had been completed, Iraq would have found it comparatively easy, despite monitoring devices and sporadic inspections, to secretly rearm or redevelop major aspects of its program--and potentially even to go on the offensive again.
This discrepancy between explicit mandate and implicit goal ultimately undermined the coalition and made an end game in Iraq ever more elusive. Postwar strategy, which has played out in three diverse phases over the past seven years, has suffered at the hands of global shifts in foreign policy priorities in the 1990s, growing public empathy for Iraq's humanitarian plight, market-place realities (in other words, greed), and even U.S. law. Compounding the problem, postwar U.S. policy has displayed an almost amateurish series of mis-calculations and mistakes that have often created opportunities for Iraq. Over time, Saddam Hussein has been able not only to recoup his losses in the Gulf War but to gradually regain political acceptability.
***********>Ms. Wright discusses in depth.....
Phase One: Forfeiting Options
Phase Two: Failed Containment
Phase Three: Rhetoric without Action
Lurching Toward a New Crisis
She concludes this article by stating......
The key to what happens may be the "meantime." The confrontation now boils down to which side can hold out the longest: The United States, taking the higher moral ground and the long-term view, is already having a hard time holding its line with former coalition members, at the United Nations, and among Arab allies most threatened by Iraq. In contrast, Saddam Hussein's regime, exploiting its resource potential and historic place in the Arab world, is ever more resistant to the U.S. squeeze. And, like a good chess player cornered by the opposition, Baghdad's aggressive attempts to seize the initiative have increasingly thrown Washington off its game and even cost it policy pieces.
The bottom line: In military terms, Operation Desert Storm served as a textbook case of how to deal with aggression in the post-Cold War world. In policy terms, the early gap between mandate and goal left the United States, as coalition leader, perpetually vulnerable. Permissible action and mandate never matched. The war's aftermath could well turn out to be a textbook case of what to avoid in the post-Cold War world.
Notes:
[1] George Bush, Remarks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, February 15, 1991.
[2] Robin Wright, "U.S. Failed to Assist Plan to Block Kurdish Instability," Angeles Times, September 15, 1996, p. A1.
[3] Madeleine Albright, speech at Georgetown University, March 26, 1997.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Patrick Clawson, "Oil for Food or the End of Sanctions?" Watch (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, February 1998).
[7] Author interviews with James Placke, former U.S. diplomat in Iraq now with Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Washington.
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