From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history and you can all say that you were present at its birth.
With these famous words, the great German poet-philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, captured the historical significance of the battle of Valmy fought on 20 September 1792. At Valmy, ragged French citizen-soldiers used a blazing cannonade to defeat Prussian regular troops and secured the French Revolution. The age of the Enlightenment abruptly gave way to an age of revolution and war. Since the al-Qa’ida attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, astute political observers have sometimes invoked Goethe’s famous words to describe the symbolism of the revolutionary change that now infuse American thinking about the future of international security. On 20 September 1792 Goethe was one of a handful of witnesses to the cannonade at Valmy; in September 2001, through television, we were all witnesses to the awesome sight of the aerial destruction of the Twin Towers. The whole world was ‘present at the birth’ of a new age in world security, an uncomfortable reality for those in the West who had seen the post-Cold War years as ‘the end of history’.
In 2002, two books—Yossef Bodansky’s The High Cost of Peace: How Washington’s Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism and Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Treatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq—were published. Both studies reflect the revolution that has occurred in the psychology of American national security policy following the terrible events of 11 September 2001. It is no accident that these studies were authored by senior policy-makers with long experience of the complex politics of the Middle East. Yossef Bodansky—Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, and author of the bestselling 1999 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America—has excellent Middle East credentials. Kenneth M. Pollack, served as Director for Gulf Affairs in the National Security Council from 1995 to 1996, and again from 1999 to 2001 in the Clinton Administration. In this position, Pollack was the principal working-level official responsible for US policy towards Iraq.
Although the works of Bodansky and Pollack predate the outbreak of the recent war against Iraq in April 2003, they remain indispensable in explaining the dramatic changes in US Middle East policy since 11 September 2001. Both authors come to the conclusion that US policy towards the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular, has failed to secure American interests and must be rethought as a matter of urgency. Bodansky’s exhaustive study of the Middle East crisis, The High Cost of Peace, is a book based on a detailed examination of the region’s interacting indigenous dynamics and should be required reading for any policy maker or student who seeks to understand the political complexities of the Middle East. At the heart of the book is Bodansky’s belief that the ‘Middle East in the early 21st century remains the most volatile and dangerous region in the world’. Moreover, it is a region that has been gravely misunderstood by Western diplomacy in general and by American statecraft in particular.
While Western diplomacy has concentrated on creating a ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinians, the region has become radicalised under the impact of political Islam. The author argues that the radicalisation of the Arab world has, from its roots in the 1920s, now broken to the surface at the beginning of the 21st century. The Muslim masses have been drawn into the world of ‘confessional politics’, that is, ‘contemporary politics based on the tenets of historic Islamic sociopolitical and military actions of the first four caliphs who succeeded Prophet Muhammad and uses religious jurisprudence as the sole foundation for decision-making and policy formulation’. The rise of militant Islamism in the region means that the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be separated from wider regional considerations. It is a multifaceted problem that affects the most basic relations between the West and the Islamic world in areas such as modernity, identity and socioeconomic influence. For radical Islamists, Israel is simply the forward post of the West in the cradle of Islam and represents ‘the illegitimate offspring of the Great Satan’. The founding of Israel was, in this sense, a Nakba—a calamity for the Arab world that must be reversed.
Bodansky believes that many observers in the West do not understand the basic fact that ‘it is less that the Arabs and Islamists hate the United States for supporting Israel than they hate Israel because it furthers, by its very existence, the interests of the hated US-led West’. Many of the youthful followers of Yassir Arafat and Osama bin Laden share a radical belief in a pan-Islamist state that defies the logic of political compromise. If the Ehud Barak Government, described as the most dovish in Israeli history, could not secure peace with the Palestinians by concessions and withdrawals from occupied territories, then the outlook for peace remains bleak. According to the author, in the face of suicide bombings and implacable hostility, the majority of Israelis ‘have reluctantly adopted the conviction of the nationalist camp that there is nothing to talk about and nobody to talk with’.
For Bodansky, America’s difficulties with the war on terrorism arise from a philosophical failure to understand the basic dynamics of Middle East politics. The reality is that Islamist confessional politics confront unpopular Arab regimes with social revolution while Israel must now consider a future in which possible annihilation from weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has moved from the realm of fiction to reality. The Arab-Israeli conflict is confounded by the failure of the Arab world to create institutions of responsible governance and modern civil society. This failure has led unrepresentative and dictatorial Arab elites—from the House of Saud to the Ba’athist regimes of Iraq and Syria—to adopt a socio-political culture of chauvinistic militant Arabism, which is used as a shield to protect them against both militant Islam and American influence.
What is clear from this important book is that there has been a profound change in US policy towards the Middle East since the events of 11 September 2001. In Bodansky’s opinion, the United States has decided that the ideal of a ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinians pursued by every Administration since the 1970s is no longer viable. From this perspective, Bodansky’s study foreshadows the present situation where American statecraft can now apparently envisage a future in which the Middle East is politically reordered. This reordering involves the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime followed by the sidelining of Yassir Arafat in favour of more moderate Palestinian political figures.
In his equally sweeping analysis of America’s long confrontation with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Kenneth Pollack argues that the United States has no option left but to take firm action to remove Saddam Hussein from power:
Unfortunately, the only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime, and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction ... In the case of Iraq, we need to recognise that we have run out of alternatives and our options truly have come down to a dangerous deterrence or potentially costly invasion.
In a detailed 500-page survey of the Iraq crisis—a work that seems to have become almost a blueprint for action in current US policy and military circles— Pollack analyses the main five options for dealing with Iraq in the changed security conditions following the 11 September attacks of 2001. First, there is the option of continuing with a policy of containment using UN disarmament provisions and sanctions. Second, there is the potential to rely on deterrence using the US arsenal to deter Saddam in the future. hird, the United States could apply covert action to weaken Baghdad in an attempt to topple Saddam. Fourth, the United States could adopt the Afghan Approach’ in a war using air power, special forces and indigenous allies to destroy the Ba’athist regime. Finally, there is the option of invasion and regime change, followed by the construction of a stable Iraqi state. To make his case for invasion as the only viable course that is left to the United States, Pollack’s book examines the reasons why the first four policy options are not realistic.
The Failure of Containment
Pollack believes that containment based on sanctions, no fly zones and weapons inspections has failed. The United Nations’ (UN) weapons inspection process, in particular, has become a trap because it is impossible to get authentic compliance from the Iraqis. The French, Russians and Chinese are not prepared to pursue genuine disarmament. Such unwillingness has led to a situation where the burden of proof lies not in Iraqi compliance but in the inspectors’ having to prove that Iraq has not complied—an impossible task, given the character of the Ba’athist regime.
Pollack points out that Saddam’s track record is one of constantly playing for time combined with mastery of the method of ‘cheat and retreat’. Since the time for an effective inspection would be between twelve and eighteen months, the Iraqis can easily outlast any military deployment designed to enforce disarmament. This is the dilemma at the heart of the weapons inspection regime. In addition, the creation of mobile chemical and biological warfare laboratories, and the use of hidden factories and decoy facilities make elimination of WMD using air power difficult, if not impossible. For Pollack, the weapons inspection route is ‘a dead-end street’ and cannot yield a long-term solution.
The Unreliabiltiy of Deterrence
The core assumption of deterrence is that Saddam would, in time, acquire nuclear weapons but remain deterred by the US arsenal. In the calculus of the advocates of deterrence, Saddam is viewed as a rational actor within the international system. For Pollack, the case for the indefinite deterrence of Saddam is deeply flawed and rests on old-fashioned Cold War beliefs. While the Soviets were fundamentally conservative decision-makers, Saddam and his regime are the polar opposite of desirable characteristics for stable deterrence. Saddam ‘has a twenty-eight year pattern of aggression, violence, miscalculation, and purposeful underestimation of the consequences of his actions that should give real pause to anyone considering whether to allow him to acquire nuclear weapons’. Pollack suggests that, in some respects, Saddam may be ‘unintentionally suicidal’ because of his history of miscalculation. Ultimately, with regard to Iraq, deterrence may not be the costliest policy, but it is certainly the riskiest one. This is because, in the long term, the United States and its allies are likely to face a much worse conflict with Saddam after Iraq has acquired nuclear weapons.
The Weaknesses of Covert Action
Pollack believes that covert action is largely a substitute for policy and, as a result, is unlikely to succeed in toppling Saddam’s regime. The preconditions for regime change by internal means with covert backing from the United States and the West simply do not exist in Iraq. The Iraqi Ba’ath government is an Orwellian clan regime that has killed, imprisoned or exiled most of its opponents. Moreover, Saddam is surrounded by his Murafiqin bodyguard, wears a bulletproof vest, carries a pistol, and employs doubles and a food taster. A coup would be difficult to mount in a police state supported by the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard. Covert action may have a place in the disruption of the regime, but not in its overthrow.
The Shortcomings of the 'Afghan Approach'
The Afghan Approach’ involves the use of proxy forces and limited US and allied military means to collapse the Iraqi regime, as was done in Operation Enduring Freedom. Yet, as Pollack notes, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) is not the Northern Alliance and the Iraqi Army is not the Taliban militia. Saddam has a 300 000 army, with the elite Republican Guard of 80 000 organised in six divisions—three armoured, two infantry and one mechanised—at its core.
Relying on air power would not succeed. A bombing campaign in Iraq would resemble Kosovo rather than Kuwait or Afghanistan. Pollack notes, ‘under the likely circumstances in a future air war against Iraq, when the Iraqis would have better cover and concealment, as well as civilian populations nearby, we must expect air strikes to do worse than they did during Desert Storm [in 1991] not better’. Under the ‘Afghan Approach’, primary reliance on air power might hinder, but cannot prevent, ground movement or destroy the Iraqi Army. For this reason, the use of air power, special forces and proxies would be unlikely to succeed.
The Case for an Invasion
For Pollack, a US invasion of Iraq poses high immediate costs but has the advantage of minimising long-term risks. An invasion, followed by the reconstruction of Iraq, gives an opportunity to turn the country from a malignant growth poisoning the Middle East into an engine for change for the entire region. Pollack notes:
Strangely, then, invasion is actually the conservative course of action in the sense that it accepts higher costs to minimize risks. It is the one policy that would give us the greatest certainty that Saddam Hussein will never be able to threaten the region, the United States, or the world with nuclear weapons.
The military requirements of a US-led Western invasion would be between four and six divisions, with supporting forces supplemented by between 700 and 1000 aircraft. A main thrust would involve the mounting of a swift offensive towards Baghdad by US and British heavy divisions. A light or air-mobile division would be required in western Iraq to stop Scud attacks on Israel, and another light division would need to be deployed in the north in Kurdistan. Airborne brigades would probably have to be used to assault WMD facilities, seize Iraq’s largest airfields and to seal off Tikrit, Saddam’s tribal stronghold. In an invasion, a worst-case scenario would be a six-month campaign with possibly 10 000 US dead and the use of WMD by the Iraqis. A best-case scenario, however, would be a four- to eight-week campaign, with perhaps 500-1000 US deaths and limited WMD use.
Success in any invasion would depend on speed, momentum and initiative by airground forces, the much-touted ‘shock and awe’ approach favoured by the doctrine of rapid decisive operations (RDO). The paradox of an invasion is a simple one: the bigger the force, the faster it moves and the lower the casualties; the smaller the force, the slower it moves and the greater the risk of casualties. For Pollack, the great question mark in any military operation to remove Saddam is the possibility of costly urban warfare in Baghdad. There is the possibility of Baghdad becoming, in Pollack’s arresting phrase, ‘a Mesopotamian Stalingrad’, with Saddam and his hard-core Ba’ath followers fighting to a fanatical finish from underground bunkers.
The book concludes with an interesting consideration of the legal aspects surrounding an invasion of Iraq. Pollack believes that an invasion can be justified on two grounds: first, through the doctrine of ‘anticipatory self-defence’ in international law, as defined in 1837, and second, by employing UN Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687. Resolution 678 authorises member states to ‘use all necessary means to uphold and implement Security Council Resolution 660 and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area’. In 1991, Resolution 687 established the weapons inspection regime and sanctions, and was adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that invokes the rights to collective security and self-defence. Iraq has been in breach of Resolution 687 since 1998, when it expelled all UN weapons inspectors. The author comments:
It would not be a terrible stretch for Washington to make the legal argument that Iraq’s constant, flagrant violations of UN Security Council Resolution 687, among others, requires the United States to once again invoke UN Security Council Resolution 678’s authorisation of ‘all means necessary’ to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein as being the only way to ensure that Iraq will abide by the relevant resolutions.
Pollack warns, however, that there needs to be strong awareness of setting the wrong precedent. ‘We [in the US] should be wary’, he says, ‘of making facile arguments based on Iraq’s support of terrorism or on its pursuit of WMD alone, that is, uncoupled from Saddam’s behaviour and Iraq’s clear violations of international law’. In taking action against Iraq, the United States and its allies should not set a dangerous precedent for other nations to make similar claims for pre-emptive action. In terms of a history of aggression, violations of international law and refusal to comply with multiple UN resolutions, many of them enacted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, Iraq represents a unique case.
Whether one agrees with the views of Bodansky and Pollack or not, there is much in these two major studies to warrant sombre reflection. If the authors are right—and this reviewer believes that they are—we are in the midst of a change in US security policy as profound as that which occurred under President Harry S. Truman between 1947 and 1952. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 laid the foundations for containment and deterrence, and created the security apparatus for the United States to wage the long Cold War. Similarly, President George W. Bush is creating a new 21st-century security system. The latter’s purpose is to defend America against the threat from ‘the crossroads of radicalism and technology’. The promulgation of the Bush Doctrine in June 2002, based on pre-emption and preventive war against international terrorism and rogue states, heralds the greatest strategic revolution in American security policy in over fifty years. Unlike Goethe at Valmy, we are all witnesses to this drama of change, or, to quote Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, we have all been ‘present at the creation’.
Postscript: The End of Saddam
This review essay was written in March 2003. The following month, Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was removed from power in a post-11 September 2001 Middle East ‘security revolution, as foreshadowed in the works of Bodansky and Pollack. The latter’s best-case scenario of a brief war of between four and eight weeks was easily fulfilled when the US-led Coalition swept into Baghdad in a swift, three-week campaign. The assessment made by Pollack that a successful invasion of Iraq would require up to six ground divisions proved to be an overestimate. In terms of combat numbers, the Coalition deployed the equivalent of only three ground divisions to smash the Iraqi military. Moreover, the most dangerous scenario, that of a ‘Mesopotamian Stalingrad’ waged by die-hard Ba’athists in the capital, Baghdad, failed to materialise.
In the wake of Saddam Hussein’s removal, the United States has attempted to use the momentum of Middle East change in order to broker a new Israel-Palestine ‘road map’ peace initiative culminating in a June 2003 US-Israeli-Palestinian summit in Aqaba, Jordan. This American diplomatic initiative seeks to introduce a new political dynamic by bypassing Yassir Arafat and dealing with the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas. While the future of the Middle East is impossible to predict, the patterns of regional politics outlined by Bodansky have been irrevocably changed by the American-led intervention in, and occupation of, Iraq.
