CIAO DATE: 2/00

Apply the Reagan Doctrine to Iraq

Joshua Muravchik

On The Issues
December 1999

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

 

The Clinton administration has been unwilling to seriously support the Iraqi opposition, apparently because of doubts about the viability of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Those doubts are not without ground, but in the absence of a serious alternative for thwarting Saddam and his renascent nuclear program, there is no reason not to abet insurgents in Iraq. After all, the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghani mujahideen were both derided as hapless insurgents before proving to be effective fighters.

Some 300 members of diverse Iraqi opposition groups met in New York last month to unify their efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In anticipation of the gathering, the State Department announced it would spend the first $5 million of $97 million appropriated by Congress for military aid to Iraqi insurgents. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering promised the gathering that the United States “will actively support you.”

But while Mr. Pickering was smiling to their faces, former Assistant Secretary Robert Pelletreau—the man who has largely designed the Clinton administration’s Iraq policy—was slipping a shiv in their backs, telling reporters that the opposition could have no more than “nuisance value.” Accordingly, it turns out that the material to be supplied is only office equipment, and the training will be in administrative, not military, skills.

President Clinton first gave lip service to the idea of fostering “a new government” in Baghdad last autumn, when he called off air strikes against Iraq at the last possible moment. Waggish U.S. military officers were quoted as dubbing the aborted mission Operation Just Kidding. Now the question is whether sweet words from Mr. Pickering and the offer of surplus Army typewriters amount to anything more than Operation Still Kidding.

Former United Nations arms inspector Richard Butler said recently that he is “sure [Saddam] has put back together the required people... to design a [nuclear] bomb [and] look into the ways of gaining the material they need to make it.” He cited estimates by the International Atomic Energy Commission that Iraq might need only six months to two years to make a bomb. Why then has the administration dragged its feet on assisting the opposition?

Mostly the reasons have to be gleaned from echoes in the press of off-the-record briefings by U.S. officials, but a clear statement of the admin istration’s reluctance was offered by Gen. Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, during Senate testimony earlier this year. Gen. Zinni told the senators that the Iraqi opposition groups “are very fragmented” and that he did not “see an opposition group that has the viability to overthrow Saddam at this point.” Moreover, he warned that the effort to do so “could be very dangerous” in that U.S. forces might get drawn into the fray. Gen. Zinni also emphasized that “a regime-change strategy depends on the support of the countries in the region,” implying that this was in doubt.

 

Two Parallels from the 1980s

These worries are reasonable, but in the absence of a compelling alternative policy, they shouldn’t deter a serious effort to foster insurrection in Iraq. Every one of these arguments was heard the last time America tried supporting insurgent groups, in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In congressional debate on aid to the Nicaraguan “contras,” Sens. Ted Kennedy and Tom Harkin seized on testimony by Gen. Paul Gorman, then the U.S. commander with responsibility for S outh America. The rebels, he had testified, would be incapable of overthrowing the ruling Sandinistas “in the foreseeable future.”

Rep. Lee Hamilton, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, spoke to the lack of regional support: “No Latin American [government] publicly endorses our military aid in this area.” As for the issue of fragmentation, Rep. Dave McCurdy of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees said that “the contras have not become a unified and credible” force. Rep. Dave Obey of the Foreign Affairs Committee warned that aid to the contras will “get the United States on the slippery slope to direct military involvement in Central America.”

Aid to the Afghan mujahideen was less controversial because of indignation at Soviet aggression, but not because many people believed they could prevail. Newsweek stated the conventional wisdom: “Despite the support they receive from the United States, the anticommunist insurgents can never hope to defeat their better-equipped adversaries.”

As it turned out, the mujahideen bled the mighty Soviet army dry, and the contras forced the Sandinistas to agree to an internationally supervised election, which turned them out of power. While Nicaraguans have benefited from the change, the poor Afghans traded one misery for another. But for the United States, the success of these anticommunist insurgencies was a linchpin of victory in the Cold War.

The success of the Reagan doctrine of supporting such insurgents did not flow from any operational brilliance. When the Iran-contra scandal blew the lid off some of Oliver North’s antics, much of it looked like Keystone Kops. And CIA chief Bill Casey, the doctrine’s mastermind, almost destroyed the operation at the outset by authorizing the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, an act that was quickly and embarrassingly traced back to the United States. Casey’s error grew out of the can-do spirit he had learned in World War II as an operative in America’s first dedicated intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services. Although it sometimes got him in trouble, it was also that spirit that underlay the Reagan doctrine’s ultimate success.

 

Don’t Underestimate Determined Rebels

With all due respect to Gen. Zinni, no one knows what the military prospects of the Iraqi opposition might be. Nor can anyone foresee what the political ramifications of an insurgency, even one that falls short of victory, might be inside Iraq. In March 1995, before Washington cut the opposition off, one of its military operations caused Saddam enough unease to impel him to sack his northern commander and his defense minister.

And Saddam seems nervous today. Iraq’s controlled newspapers and the country’s vice president vociferously attacked last month’s meeting, and some of the invitees received threatening calls from Iraq, warning them against participating. Meanwhile, Saddam publicly broached the idea of reforming Iraq’s constitution to allow multiple political parties.

In addition to learning from the success of the Reagan doctrine, Americans might recall from our failure in Vietnam how hard it is to judge the prospects for success of an insurgency by a static estimation of the assets on each side. The most important ingredient there, as in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, was will. This is not to say that will alone can ensure success in Iraq. It is only to say that if we wait until a united opposition appears, with proven military credentials and widespread support in the region, we will still be waiting when Saddam unveils new weapons of mass destruction or invades another of his neighbors.

 

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on November 3, 1999.