OCR Text |
Show Hinckley Journal of Politics Autumn 1998 president of PaL-Tech, Inc. and an expert on the politics of the Middle East. "The policy of dual containment is not workable," he says. "It isn't really accurate in saying it's dual containment. We have to do all we can to get rid of Saddam's regime, but not the Iranian leadership. In other words, we want to get rid of one regime and get better relations with the other." Kader also sees dual containment as straining relations with U.S. allies in the Gulf. Our allies in the region have been telling us to lay down conditions for engagement with Iran. We don't have to agree (with Teheran), but we must begin a dialogue. Avenues of compatibility have to be found. The best way is to seek economic ties through organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and diplomatic links, through the U.N. [As for Iraq], the United States should give a general amnesty to every Iraqi political and military figure except Saddam, and prevent them from leaving the country. There will be plenty of high-ranking officials and military personnel ready to rise against Saddam, since they will know that Iraq will be accepted back into the community of nations once he is out of power (Telephone interview, August 28, 1997). A Heritage Foundation report issued in 1992, a year before the implementation of dual containment, makes a similar call. An objective of U.S. policy in the Middle East, it states, should be to "[m]ake the ouster of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein the top short-term U.S. policy goal in the Persian Gulf," and the United States should "give military, economic, and diplomatic support to the Iraqi opposition" in order to bring this objective about (Phillips 1992, 3). One element of containment against Iraq that critics find most ineffective is that of economic sanctions. The high humanitarian cost of sanctions, with shortages of food and medical supplies leading to high mortality and morbidity rates among the Iraqi people, is seen as punishing them, rather than Saddam's regime, the main target of these sanctions. Anthony Cordesman, who calls for a change in priorities (e.g. dropping the demand for war crimes trials of Iraqis implicated in atrocities during the Gulf War) rather than an all-out lifting of sanctions, himself writes that economic sanctions, in their present form, "are clearly dividing Western and Arab nations over their policies towards Iraq, they almost certainly [are] making Iraq's population more hostile to the West and other moderate Arab states, and their long-term cost may well exceed any short-term benefits" (1996, 15). The Clinton Administration's attempts to prevent Iraqi interference in the north, where there is a large Kurdish population, have also been criticized. One of the strongest critiques has come from former Secretary of State James A.Baker III, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 12, 1996, after the United States retaliated militarily in response to Iraqi moves against a Kurdish faction. Although Baker believes that the Administration was justified in using force against Saddam, due to the need to maintain American credibility, he believes that more targets, including Republican Guard units, should have been attacked as well. Moreover, the lack of support from U.S. allies, except for Great Britain, for this action represented a "serious situation" for allied cohesion against Iraq. The United States, in Baker's view, should have played a greater role in northern Iraq. He calls the disunity of the coalition and the ineffective U.S. policy toward Iraq a "failure of leadership" in the United States. Another approach to dealing with Iraq calls for abandoning containment, in favor of a collapse of the Iraqi state. Challenging the notion that maintaining the Iraqi state in its present form is of vital interest to the United States, Daniel Byman, writing in the National Interest, argues that such a collapse is certainly feasible. "The Iraqi state is inherently fragile, having never been able to build up widespread popular legitimacy among its heterogeneous population. Since its creation following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq has wrestled unsuccessfully with the question of how to incorporate the interests of its Shi'a and Kurdish populations into a Sunni-dominated political system" (Byman 1996, 48-49). In contrast to the long-held belief among U.S. policymakers that the collapse of the Iraqi state would lead to desta-bilization throughout the Persian Gulf, Byman writes that this would not be the case. Iran's ideological appeal to Iraqi Shi'a is limited at best, and any tilt in the regional balance of conventional forces in favor of Iran could be easily countered by U.S. power. On the positive side of the ledger, the division of Iraq into three entities would eliminate the Iraqi threat to the oil-rich Gulf states, end the Ba'athi quest for nuclear weapons, free the Shi'a and Kurds from oppression, and remove Baghdad from the list of revisionist rogue states (48). Byman calls for a Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni Muslim one in the center, and one for the Shi'a in the south. American concerns that a Kurdish state in the north would undermine Turkey, a key U.S. ally with a large Kurdish population within its borders, are refuted by Byman. "A permanent, internationally recognized Kurdish government in northern Iraq, on the other hand (as opposed to Kurdish minorities in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria), would have a strong incentive to discourage aggression or subversion from its territory since it would be an obvious-and vulnerable- target of retaliation" (53). U.S. containment policy toward Iran has not avoided strong criticism. Jahangir Amuzegar, who served as minister of finance in the Shah's government, sees economic sanctions against Iran as being largely ineffectual. "Although the comparison may be invidious," he writes, "the Iranian economy under sanctions is in certain respects healthier and more stable than many developing economies the United States has assisted. Militarily, Iran appears to be stronger now than in 1989, and is certainly less vulnerable than some U.S. allies in the region. The embargo has isolated Washington rather than Tehran" (Amuzegar 1997, 31). Amuzegar points out that a host of reasons-the unilateral nature of the sanctions and different policies followed by U.S. allies, the ability of Iran to import U.S. products and export its own to U.S. markets through "third countries," the inconsistency of U.S. pol- 83 |