India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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COVER STORY

Battles at home

SRIDHAR KRISHNASWAMI
in Washington

EVEN as a major political spectacle - a debate on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and a vote in the House of Representatives - was nearing conclusion on Capitol Hill, another started. And the writing on the wall was clear the moment the United Nations weapons inspectors started pulling out of Iraq. Clinton was not exactly looking to Saddam Hussein to stall a domestic political mess of his making, but critics of the President, especially his Republican tormentors, lost no time in talking about the "Wag the Dog" theory. (The allusion is to a feature film of that name, in which a U.S. President starts a war to divert public attention from a scandal he finds himself embroiled in.)

The air strikes against Iraq ordered by Clinton on the eve of the start of the impeachment proceedings in the House offered at best a very temporary reprieve. After a bitter inter-party debate, Republicans and Democrats agreed to postpone the House proceedings - not until hostilities were over, as some Democrats demanded, but only by a day. And while U.S. and British jets were getting ready to wind up their four-day operations against Iraq, Clinton made his way into the history books by becoming only the second U.S. President to be impeached. In fact, Operation Desert Fox ended the day Clinton was impeached.

Only five weeks earlier, Clinton had told Baghdad that the strikes would come swiftly and without warning if there were any hitches in the U.N. arms inspections. The White House was under no illusion that there would be any "positive" fallout from Operation Desert Fox. Some Democrats dramatised the need to rally behind the Commander-in-Chief and angrily called for postponement of the impeachment debate and voting until U.S. forces were out of "harm's way", but their entreaties fell on deaf ears.

Hardline Republicans saw in all this a desperate attempt to stall proceedings until the start of the 106th Congress in January, when the Grand Old Party will have five seats fewer in the House. And Conservatives even mocked those Democrats who sought bipartisan support for the President's military action against Iraq by asking how many Democrats responded to similar occasions during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

WIN McNAMEE / REUTERS
Clinton with (from left) Vice-President Al Gore, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, CIA Director George Tenet and U.S. Naval Commander Admiral Tom Wilson at a meeting at the White House on December 17 to assess the impact of the first round of air strikes.

IF it is an oversimplification to suggest that Clinton did not look to Iraq as a diversionary mechanism, surely few in the Republican Party were going to be distracted by events halfway round the world. If anything, the Clinton administration has been attacked in Congress for having a policy on Iraq that did not fit the ground realities. The point has also been made that pinpricks are not going to rattle Saddam Hussein.

That is perhaps what it all boiled down to after 70 hours of punishing strikes involving two aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, strike aircraft operating out of land bases in and around the region, the unhindered unleashing of 500 cruise missiles from support ships and the heavy set B-52 bombers doing their "rounds" from their base in Diego Garcia. "Encounters" with Saddam Hussein have turned out to be six-monthly occurrences, and the big question is when the next round of aggression will be launched and at what cost.

Senior officials of the Clinton administration, in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, have talked tough: Washington, they said, will not hesitate to unleash another pulverising round if Baghdad is found re-starting its weapons programmes. But the political question is: has Saddam Hussein used the latest round of attacks as an opportunity to block permanently the United Nations from conducting weapons inspections?

The argument goes that even if Saddam Hussein is unable to stand up to the United Nations, he can come away with substantially rewriting the nature and scope of future inspections. And in the meantime, with no personnel on the ground, the United States is left with satellites to monitor activities inside Iraq - a pretty expensive proposition. In the post-operation phase, U.S. administration officials have been reduced to saying regularly that severe damage has been done to some of Iraq's critical military infrastructure, and that whatever missile programme Saddam Hussein might be continuing has been set back.

PRECISELY what the U.S. and British military operation in Iraq has achieved is now the subject of a debate. If Official Washington is anything to go by, the targets were strictly military plus the related infrastructure that propped up Saddam Hussein. This would include command and control centres, the Baa'th Party headquarters, bunkers and training facilities of the elite Republican Guards, Presidential palaces, and those facilities which were believed to be assisting Saddam Hussein's alleged programme for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

But Baghdad's version - which has been effectively presented in the U.S. media - is that the targets included schools, hospitals and homes. A subsidiary question, following up on the U.S. military's claim that bunkers of the elite Republican Guards were demolished, is: how many soldiers had been sleeping there? Not many, perhaps, since the soldiers had been dispersed when the U.N. weapons inspectors pulled out. The Clinton administration grudgingly conceded that achieving a high "body count" was not exactly the objective of the mission.

The administration says that its short- and medium-term objective is the containment of Saddam Hussein, by military means if needed. It claims that every time Saddam Hussein has tried to break out of the "box", he has failed. And in the immediate context it is being said that "dislodging Saddam Hussein" is not a military objective. In the aftermath of the 70-hour operation, the U.S. President's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, argued that Saddam Hussein was weaker and West Asia was a safer place.

The Clinton administration has made it known that it will not ease up on the sanctions regime unless Iraq adheres to the weapons inspection plan. The bottom line, according to the administration, is that Baghdad's "intransigence" cannot and should not be rewarded.

In spite of all that has been dished out on what has been "achieved" by Operation Desert Fox, there is the realisation that the U.S. cannot get rid of Saddam Hussein for the simple reason that he gains political strength by standing up to the U.S. and no one in the U.S. political establishment has the stomach to bear the tremendous domestic and international costs of such an enterprise. If the U.S. were to pursue Saddam Hussein, it would require a major land operation that would involve hundreds of thousands of troops. The idea of "body bags" is volatile and unsettling in the U.S.

In almost any discussion of Iraq, the Clinton administration talks of the longer term political prospect that has already been put in place. At a very broad level this would mean working with the overseas Iraqi opposition and reconciling their differences and trying to sow the seeds of dissension within Iraq itself. In fact, during Operation Desert Fox, the U.S. Air Force dropped millions of leaflets over southern Iraq; these were directed at the regional army personnel in the hope of waging psychological warfare aimed at creating divisions in the military infrastructure. The U.S. will not "over-reach", the argument goes, but will be ready to help a new government by finding a quick end to the sanctions regime.