#8
San Francisco Chronicle
January 10, 2002
Why Bush can't go after Saddam Hussein
By Steve Kettmann
Steve Kettmann is a writer living in Berlin. His work has appeared in The Chronicle, Salon, the New Republic and the New York Times.

Berlin -- THE BUSH administration has consistently said the war on terrorism will go beyond Afghanistan. So naturally, people are wondering what comes next.

Somalia is one option. The Philippines and Yemen are also possibilities.

But any analysis that takes into consideration more than Washington-based political posturing can swiftly conclude that the chances of the United States acting any time soon to topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein are negligible to nil.

Here's why:

Russia: The Bush administration ditching the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty might not seem like much to Americans, but its importance in internal Russian political dynamics should not be underestimated.

Russian President Vladimir Putin still has powerful enemies who are not at all sure about his strategy of courting Bush, carrying on like best buddies at photo ops, and -- in the end -- acquiescing to Bush on the ABM treaty.

Even Putin made it very clear that the practical result would be for Russia to equip its missiles with multiple warheads -- the dreaded MIRVing (Multiple, Independently re-targetable re-entry vehicles), which makes the world a more dangerous place. (The incentive grows to use MIRVed missiles for a first strike, rather than risk having them taken out in their silos.)

Given Russia's historic ties to Iraq, which single-handedly accounts for 60 percent of Russia's trade with the Arab world, and its strong public opposition to further U.S. military action against Hussein, the Bush administration would be taking a huge risk by invading Iraq so soon after walking away from the ABM treaty.

As key Bush officials are well aware, most especially Russian-speaking Condoleezza Rice, Russian politics remain a rough-and-tumble world of backroom maneuvering and the occasional high-level political murder. It would be foolish -- and dangerous -- to risk losing Putin as a friend.

By making the move on the ABM treaty when it did, the Bush administration tipped its hand. No Iraqi invasion. Not, at least, until one or more other targets have been pursued.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Europeans: To longtime Washington insiders such as Richard Perle, the famous "Prince of Darkness" of the Reagan years, the case for going after Iraq seems so strong that it's easy to dismiss certain key realities. Namely: There is no Sept. 11 sympathy factor at work in this equation.

If Hussein played a role in the terrorist attacks of September, it likely was a small one. And anyway, the United States tried very hard to find proof of such a role, and came up with nothing.

Blair has not just been a staunch Bush ally in recent months, he has been something more than that. Actually, at times, it has seemed as if Blair, rather than Colin Powell, was the U.S. Secretary of State, flying from foreign capital to foreign capital to deliver the most recent U.S. message.

Blair has been a passionate and eloquent advocate of the war on terrorism, and Bush could not have a better friend abroad. But even Blair is known to resist the idea of a U.S. invasion of Iraq behind the scenes. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made that clear last week when he said that he was confident Bush would make a "statesman-like" decision on whether to invade Iraq.

As for the rest of the Europeans, they firmly backed the United States on direct retaliation for the crimes of Sept. 11, but would issue no blank checks.

They were specifically concerned about the United States using the war momentum to take care of other business.

If the United States were to go after Iraq in a serious way, it would be doing so without benefit of the large international coalition that Bush skillfully assembled for the campaign against Afghanistan.

Middle East: Many Arab world leaders might actually be pleased to see Hussein removed from power, but that does not mean they would support more assertion of American military power in their region.

And any U.S. action against Iraq would surely trigger a proliferation of condemnation and protest in the Arab world, which in somewhat different circumstances might be a price well worth paying to have Hussein's head on a platter.

But the timing is wrong, with the Arab-Israeli conflict in so precarious and dangerous a position. The Bush administration had been widely perceived, at least early on, to be backing off of a peace-keeping role in the Middle East, and it has a long way to go to make up that ground. It's already likely that a year from now, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be the largest foreign-policy problem facing the administration.

War against Hussein, lacking the proxy forces at U.S. disposal in Afghanistan, might take months, long enough for it to incite anti-U.S. feeling all over the Middle East. Even the Persian Gulf War, brief as it was, inflamed anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Arab world.

Factoring that influence into the nightmarish cycle of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is enough to give anyone pause.

There's no doubt that the success of the Afghanistan operation has the president and his advisers full of confidence about what U.S. power can accomplish, and that could be a good thing.

Maybe the next time we are confronted with genocide in places such as Rwanda or Bosnia, we will not place so much stress on what we cannot do, rather than what we can.

But the talk of war with Iraq is something to keep the armchair warriors busy, not a serious option for a world power facing so intractable and thorny a problem as worldwide terrorism.

BACK TO THE TOP    #188 CONTENTS    NEXT SECTION