Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 15, 1993 TAG: 9301150440
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SADDAM PROVOKES, ALLIES RESPOND
In the last days of his administration - on top of Somalia, Bosnia and deficits - President Bush has added one more stalk of broccoli on President- elect Clinton's plate: Desert Storm II.Saddam Hussein's provocations, his violations of the terms of the Iraqi surrender after Desert Storm I, left the U.S.-led international community little alternative but to respond.
So, on Wednesday, some 110 American, British and French aircraft bombed missile sites in southern Iraq, and 1,250 U.S. troops have been ordered to Kuwait. It is a forceful response; at least it is a limited one: Sites only of military, not economic, importance were targeted, and they were far from population centers.
Nonetheless, the situation is another reminder of the need to get serious about controlling the proliferation of arms throughout the post-Cold War world, and to establish a U.N. force capable of enforcing U.N. resolutions.
Restraint in the latest response to Saddam's outrages was appropriate partly because Iraqis already have suffered greatly from the sins of the tyrant who rules them. Thousands of the Iraqi casualties in Desert Storm I were conscripts, not professional soldiers. Thousands more Iraqis were killed by Saddam's forces when Kurds of northern Iraq and Shiites in the south sought unsuccessfully to break free. The destruction of much of Iraq's infrastructure during Desert Storm I, coupled with the effect of U.N. economic sanctions, has added to the misery.
Moreover, the United States and the West bear a measure of responsibility for inflicting Saddam on the Iraqis and the world. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq conflict, and the sale of armaments and nuclear-related technology to Iraq by Western vendors, helped create the Saddam that hurts his people and taunts the world.
Restraint was necessary, too, for reasons of realpolitik. The allied coalition is fragile, consisting not only of the industrial democracies but also of Middle East authoritarian states such as Syria and Saudi Arabia. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait two years ago had to be reversed; his provocations of recent days had to be answered. Arguing against a wholesale dismemberment of Iraq as an outlaw nation, however, is the tempting vacuum it would create for a Syria or, more worrisome at the moment, a rapidly arming Iran.
That the United States has assembled a coalition to oppose Saddam, and that it has acted nominally under U.N. authority, represents an advance. Still, controlling Saddam has been and remains principally an American effort. The United States may be the world's only remaining military superpower, but it cannot act indefinitely as the world's policeman.
The time has come not just to respond to past mistakes, but to prevent new ones. One start would be to depersonalize the confrontation with Saddam, a process that Clinton seems already to have begun.
Bush's tendency to demonize Saddam has been unfortunate. "Another Hitler," Bush called him - but Saddam was not treated as another Hitler, from whom no less than absolute surrender would be acceptable. So the meaning of the Gulf War's outcome was scrambled. And to the extent Saddam was made a personal enemy of the U.S. president, the conflict's wider point - international resistance to unvarnished aggression - was obscured.
Perhaps Saddam, ignorant of the ways of constitutional democracy, undertook the recent provocations because he saw Bush's electoral defeat as personal vindication, and a chance to regain lost ground. But who knows why Saddam acts as he does?
If he could send a message to Saddam, Clinton told the New York Times, he would say: "I am going to judge you by your behavior. I am not going to sit around trying to figure out what is motivating you."
If only Saddam were so reasonable.