bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2005) — Summer/Fall 2005 // Été/Automne 2005, pp. 21–24
Through my two years in Baghdad Iraq was at war with Iran, a particularly savage war of attrition. It raged on in the trenches for eight years and over a million casualties. It has been aptly described as a war fought with modern weapons, the tactics of World War I, and the passions of the Crusades.
The day after I arrived in Baghdad in 1986 I got a powerful introduction to the country. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry organized a tour of a primary school that had been hit the previous day by an Iranian Scud missile. The Iraqis laid on visits for diplomats from time to time to show how the Iranians were killing innocent civilians indiscriminately (omitting to tell about similar Iraqi attacks on civilian targets in Iran). This visit was particularly shocking because the missile had hit the school while morning classes were in session. Many children had been killed, and they had not yet fully cleaned up the human remnants embedded in the shattered walls.
Baghdad was only 100 km from the Iranian border and the front lines, well within the range of Iranian missiles. “Scud- B” missiles from Iran fell intermittently on Baghdad. These were missiles developed originally by the Soviets in the fifties and designed to carry a nuclear warhead, now carrying conventional explosives. They did a lot of damage, if you were unlucky enough to be at the point of impact. But they were notoriously inaccurate. The black joke circulated amongst diplomatic colleagues: It’s not the missile with my name on it that worries me, it’s the one addressed: “to whom it may concern.”
Iraq was part of a violent neighbourhood, and it still is.
Strange as it may seem in light of subsequent events Iraq was then regarded as a force for stability in the region. In other Arab capitals, including Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, Saddam was seen as an ally, the eastern bulwark of the Arab world. In 1979 in neighbouring Iran the Shah had been deposed and a militant revolutionary regime had taken power under Ayatollah Khomeini. He was dangerously provocative with border incursions and incitements to Iraq’s Shiite population. He made no secret of his plan to unseat the secular government of Saddam Hussein, and spread a particularly virulent brand of Islamic extremism through the region. The Ayatollah declared that “the road to Jerusalem passes through Baghdad.”
Canada had closed down its embassy in Iran after helping US diplomats to escape from Tehran in 1980. We tilted towards Iraq, while maintaining an embargo on arms shipments to both belligerents. From Ottawa’s viewpoint, Iraq was a lucrative market for Canadian goods and services. We were hoping to position ourselves favourably for the glittering trade opportunities which seemed to beacon in the postwar reconstruction period after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. We had not reckoned with Saddam’s folly.
Amongst observers in Baghdad Saddam was inevitably the subject of lively discussion. Who was he? How had he managed to maintain himself in power in this tumultuous neighbourhood for so long? Would he be chastened by his disastrous war with Iran?
Tell me who your heroes are and you tell me something about who you are. When I arrived in Baghdad in 1986 it was said that President Saddam Hussein had three heroes. Each revealed something of the character of the man.
Insiders at the palace said that The Godfather was his favourite movie. It was not hard to see why: Saddam admired the ruthless Don Corleone, his unique family values, and his habit of crushing his enemies by pre-emptive strikes.
Stalin he admired for his brutally efficient hold on power and for his vast apparatus of security services and party informers. Iraq under Saddam was arguably the most oppressive police state the world has seen since the Soviet Union under Stalin.
I recall my amazement when I witnessed Saddam for the first time in the presence of his military high command. Here were his top generals, many battle-hardened soldiers just back from the front in the war with Iran, sitting nervously before the President like schoolboys before a stern headmaster. This was not just deference to authority. They were clearly terrorized by Saddam the tyrant. And for good reason. During my time several of these generals were to disappear under successive purges.
Portraits of Saddam were everywhere, on every public square, in every office and home. Yet, no graffiti! Iraqis had learned that the penalty for defacing the great leader was likely to be savage.
Saddam was brazenly open about his policy of terror. He made it official, in a way that would have impressed even Stalin. One day in Baghdad I opened the official Gazette of the Iraqi government and found that he had made it black letter law: it was a capital offence – punishable by death — to speak disrespectfully of the President.
He was heard to have boasted: I know when someone is going to betray me, even before he knows. Thousands of Iraqis went to their deaths, merely on suspicion or a whim, many no doubt protesting their innocence to their last breath.
Emperor Nebuchadnezzar he admired as the founder of a vast Babylonian empire which spanned most of what is today the Middle East. Nebuchadnezzar had defeated the Persian tribes, sacked Jerusalem in 586 BC and carried off the Jews in captivity. Saddam dreamed of building a similar legacy. With great fanfare, the diplomatic corps was invited to attend the opening of an elaborate reconstruction of the palaces of ancient Babylon. The bricks were inscribed for future generations to read: From the Era of Saddam.
Saddam would probably have remained just another tinpot despot in a dusty backwater if it had not been for oil. Iraq was blessed, or perhaps cursed, in the hands of Saddam, with extraordinary oil resources, the second largest oil reserves in the world, second only to those of Saudi Arabia. When oil prices quadrupled in 1973, the Iraqi regime began to amass wealth on a scale which seemed to put the grandest ambitions and dreams of glory within reach. Saddam’s self-appointed mission was to be the champion of the wider Arab world. At critical moments in his career it seemed almost as if he was asking himself: What would Nebuchadnezzar have done?
He presided over ambitious programmes for housing, education and health care that transformed Iraq from third-world to the cusp of first-world status. But Saddam was a street thug elevated to head of state. The insecurity of the street thug was never far from the surface. He invested heavily in ornate presidential palaces and monuments to himself. He invested heavily in the military and in weapons development.
It is said that if you are a hammer, most problems begin to look like nails. He turned to violence and intimidation as the natural solution to his problems. Internally, in Iraq, the hammer approach, coupled with the rewards of massive social spending, served to keep him in power for thirty-five years, an uncommonly long stretch in this unruly region. But internationally the hammer
22 bout de papier Vol. dragged him through successive wars to his ultimate downtall. It was a dangerous mix of qualities: the cunning of a street fighter at home, the folly of an ignorant brawler abroad.
Each of these wars led to the next one, like a three-car pile-up on highway 401. The 1980-88 war which Saddam had rashly initiated against Iran — a country with three times the population of Iraq – almost bankrupted him. Two years after the war ended, Saddam invaded and plundered Kuwait, like a drunken river-boat gambler, hoping to recoup his losses with one more desperate throw of the dice. After being ejected from Kuwait and in order to save himself Saddam was forced to accept draconian cease-fire terms. He agreed to give up his weapons of mass destruction under a rigorous UN inspection regime and the most intrusive economic sanctions the world had ever seen. He had no intention of complying. Thus began twelve years of cat and mouse games with UN inspectors, and repeated condemnations by the UN Security Council for violations of these terms. American public opinion, alarmed and mobilized by 9/11 and a quick victory in Afghanistan, supported George Bush in launching the war in 2003 to remove Saddam from power.
The three-car pile-up had another dimension. The Iran-Iraq war convinced Saddam that he had to have weapons of mass destruction in his armoury. As he saw it, he had been saved from defeat by the chemical weapons he had unleashed against Iranian “human-wave” attacks, and against Kurdish insurgents. Moreover, as he saw it, weapons of mass destruction had saved his skin once again in 1991 at the end of the Kuwait war, when his army was in chaotic retreat. He concluded that the Americans had been deterred from marching on Baghdad by the risk of facing chemical and biological warfare. That perception, mistaken or not, motivated Saddam for the following twelve years to try to retain the remnants of his WMD capabilities, in defiance of the UN Security Council and at great cost to ordinary Iraqis suffering under prolonged sanctions. At the end, as we now know, his feared weapons stockpiles were a sham. Saddam had struggled to retain at least the pretence of a WMD capability that could, he deluded himself, save his skin a third time, and hold back enemies circling like wolves around a dwindling campfire.
NY Times correspondent Tom Friedman has said that “some things are true even if George Bush believes them.” It is hard to deny that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. It is true that the long-suffering Iraqi people have been liberated from a cruel tyrant. The forthcoming trial of Saddam will be an important test of the principle of holding heads of state accountable for gross violations of human rights and international crimes.
The Americans urged Canada in 2003 to join with them as an active coalition partner in the march on Baghdad. Our credentials as a friend and ally were not in doubt. We had supported the US and committed Canadian armed forces, under UN authorization, to help in expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991 and in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001. We had similarly supported the air war against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 under NATO auspices, in circumstances where the UN was deadlocked.
Polls showed that public opinion in Canada, and particularly in Québec, which was about to go into an election, was strongly opposed to the war. This seems to have been decisive for Prime Minister Chrétien. This time the response was sorry, we cannot support you without an explicit UN authorization. On the eve of war Canadian diplomats in New York made ingenious but futile efforts to craft a compromise in the Security Council, seeking middle ground where none existed.
Anxious to limit damage to Canada- US relations, Prime Minister Chrétien announced Canada’s position in the House in minimalist terms, and refrained from condemning US action. If Canada had been a member of the Security Council at the time and if the US had pressed their resolution to a vote the logic of our position would have been an abstention.
The Americans argued their case on several grounds. The emphasis changed from time to time. But three interlocking arguments have recurred: the removal of Saddam should be seen as part and parcel of the war on terror, would prevent further violence by Saddam and his sons, and would lead to a democratic transformation of the entire region. How sound was their case?
Could the intervention be seen as part of the war on terror, a war in which Canada has declared itself an ally of the United States?
The 9/11 Commission found no evidence of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. They threw cold water, quite rightly to my mind, on the likelihood that the secular regime of Saddam Hussein would have found common cause with Islamic extremists planning terrorist attacks against the US. He was a gambler but he was also a survivor. My guess is that he would be very cautious about backing al-Qaeda suicide bombers committed to an extremist ideology that he did not share, who were not under his control and who could drag him to destruction, as Osama bin Laden had dragged the Taliban regime to destruction.
With mounting casualties and faltering public support for the ongoing war against insurgents in Iraq, President Bush has increasingly linked the war with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Iraq is, according to Bush, “the latest battlefield” in the war on terrorism. This may be politically astute, by playing on public fears, but in my view contrived, and fundamentally mendacious. But if US forces were withdrawn it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the New York Times put it, “Iraq would probably sink into a civil war that would create large stretches of no man’s land where private militias and stateless terrorists could operate with impunity.” destruction were found.
Saddam had expelled the UN weapons inspectors earlier, and admitted them to Iraq again only under the threat of American troops massing on his border with Kuwait. He would no doubt expel them again as soon as the threat was lifted. American troops could not be kept in the neighbourhood indefinitely.
UN sanctions were collapsing. Saddam was siphoning off huge amounts of money from the ill-fated oil-for-food program. I have little doubt that, sooner or later, if American troops had gone home leaving him in place, he would have poured powerful financial resources into revived WMD programs. Any assessment of Iraqi capabilities would have to take into account not just stockpiles but also the technical resources which would enable Saddam to jump-start rearmament. He had skilled scientists experienced in earlier weapons programs. Here was clearly a potential and perhaps an inevitable threat to international peace and security.
The Americans were right to pose the question and take it to the Security Council. With his uniquely troubling track record, who could be confident of Saddam’s intentions? Good judgment and a sense of restraint were noticeably absent from his make-up.
The Security Council, with primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, agonized over the question of legality of intervention. The contours of the debate were clear. The use of force under the UN Charter is prohibited except as a last resort, in two circumstances. When attacked, states have a right of self-defence, narrowly understood to include defence against imminent attack, but not preventive action against a potential or speculative threat. Otherwise, force may be used only when authorized by the Security Council, to meet a threat to international peace and security. The US and the U.K. invoked the pre-existent authorization of the Security Council originating in 1990. They made an arguable case that there was no need for a further Security Council resolution. The war was justified, in their view, since Iraq continued to be in breach of its disarmament obligations under a series of mandatory resolutions going back to 1990.
The Security Council remained deadlocked on the issue, amid charges of bad faith and hidden agendas of certain members. The NATO alliance, which had provided cover for military intervention in Kosovo, even in the absence of UN authorization, was similarly deadlocked.
In the end, the US failure to secure a broad-based coalition, anchored in an explicit Security Council resolution, or alternatively unanimous NATO support, undermined not only the legitimacy and legality of the intervention, but also its effectiveness. This was the first flaw in the enterprise. It was compounded by the failure to send enough troops to preserve security after the collapse of Saddam’s regime.
President Bush has insisted that the terrible costs of this war are justified by the prospects of regional transformation. This bold and worthy vision was a major theme of Bush’s second inaugural address. A democratic, peaceful Iraq would create a powerful impulse towards freedom and democracy in the Arab world. The removal of Iraq from the confrontation camp would help pave the way to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. President Bush hopes, in effect, to give new meaning to the expression, “the road to Jerusalem passes through Baghdad. “ Will it prove to be a mirage in the desert, as it was for Ayatollah Khomeini? stable, democratic and peaceful Iraq emerges. The outcome now hangs perilously in the balance. It may have already tipped over, irretrievably, into sectarian violence. US and Iraqi forces are struggling to defeat a tenacious insurgency. The weapons of choice are crudely targeted suicide bombers and Improvised Explosive Devices, often addressed indiscriminately to whom it may concern. Many Iraqis, and not just former Baathists, are beginning to look back with nostalgia to the order they knew under Saddam (graffiti-free!). Have the Iraqi people traded the oppression of Saddam for the horrors of civil war or a new Islamic fundamentalist tyranny? If so, the verdict of history will be very harsh indeed.
No one could fail to be impressed by the determination of the Iraqi people in January to cast their votes in a democratic election, the first in their history. But the next step, to craft a constitution for a unified Iraq, will be immensely difficult, as Canadians have good reason to know, and the timetable established seems wildly unrealistic. The Kurds in the north reserve for themselves the option of seceding if they are not satisfied with the terms of autonomy they are demanding in the constitution. Shiite militias in the south are challenging central authority. A sullen Sunni minority has refused, so far, to participate in the new Iragi government which they regard as a puppet of the American occupation forces. It may be that the Iraqis are too fractured to seize the opportunity they have been given to recreate their country out of the wreckage that Saddam left behind.
Canada, along with the rest of the international community, has a big stake in what happens in Iraq. Regardless of our differences at the outset, we should do what we can to help nudge Iraq towards a better future. Regrettably, we are so far very much on the sidelines. We took the lead in an international group monitoring the Iraqi election held in January, from a safe distance in Jordan. We have agreed to write off Iraq’s pre-war debts, amounting to $750 million. We have committed $300 million to Iraqi reconstruction, but this has been effectively stalled by the security situation. We have assisted on a small scale in the training of Iraqi military and security forces underway in neighbouring Jordan. In June, after a hiatus of fifteen years, Canada re-established diplomatic relations with Iraq to help legitimize the newly elected government, and appointed an ambassador, resident in Jordan.
The US hope is that the insurgency can be defeated by a combination of military and political measures, including the establishment of an Iraqi government sufficiently inclusive and representative to command the allegiance of all ethnic and sectarian groups, thereby denying insurgents the oxygen they need from the populace. Some administration officials speak of a need for the US military to remain engaged in Iraq possibly for as long as 10, 12 or 14 years. In the face of declining public support for the war, will the US be able to “stay the course”? The future of Iraq will be played out ultimately not only in the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah but in Main Street, USA Pressures to cut and run will mount with the approach of mid-term elections in 2006 and presidential elections in 2008. It may be a race against time. Can Iraqi military and police forces be built up to take over security responsibilities from the Americans before these pressures become irresistible?
Erik B. Wang served as Canadian
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2005) — Summer/Fall 2005 // Été/Automne 2005, pp. 21–24. Read the rest of this issue →
