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What If... ...Saddam were still in power?
The aggressive, bellowing Saddam Hussein of his trial raises a question unmentioned in debates over the war. What if Saddam were still in power? Let's see: Sanctions have collapsed; the French and Russians are keen on rehabilitating the Iraqi dictator and his military. He benefits from the sharp increase in oil prices, whether or not he still labors under the U.N.'s corrupted and creaky Oil for Food program (most likely it would be gone). The U.S. no-fly zones still exist only on paper, because neighboring countries won't let our planes fly armed. Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South are either preparing for civil war or seeking coexistence with a resurgent Saddam. Then Arafat dies, and Saddam, who's been promoting himself as having bested the U.S. in the long standoff, issues a stream of inflammatory rhetoric, seeking to secure his place as the renewed militant hero of the Muslim world. But he has a rival in Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hosts a conference and calls for the destruction of Israel. Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons--even closer given what would be a general perception of U.S. retreat after 9-11. Iranian agents are trying to stoke a Shiite rebellion in the Iraqi south. What does the Iraqi dictator do next? Saddam's regime has always been in a state of crisis and routinely resorts to starting wars: the eight-year war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait. Even the sanctions showdown that led to the current war, we have subsequently learned, was calculatedly invited by Saddam, who believed the U.S. would back down and, if it didn't, could be beaten by an insurgency. But this time the U.S. acquiesces in the French-Russian policy instead and scuttles away. That leaves Saddam with only the option of provoking Iran or Israel. He decides to attack both. His military is moribund and the fighting on the Iranian border is limited, but he's back in the business of handing out $50,000 checks to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. His goal is to force the Saudis, Kuwaitis and maybe even the U.S. to bail him out, as they did in the 1980s. But the U.S. isn't interested and the local Gulf royalty is on shaky ground. Saddam just ends up delivering Iran a stronger hand, culminating in a full-blown Iraqi civil war embroiling the whole region . . . "Counterfactual" is the ungainly term for such speculation. But political leaders have no choice but to guess what might happen, and it doesn't require excessive imagination to dispel the idea that the world would be a happier place if U.S. troops hadn't removed Saddam and weren't now trying to make something better arise in his place. Posted by: .com 2005-12-09 |
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