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[Mr. Timmerman is the author of The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq (Houghton Mifflin, 1991).
Saddam Hussein's October 31 decision to halt all cooperation with United Nations arms inspectors presents an immediate problem, which can only be dealt with by a vigorous military response. The U.S. must destroy as many of the weapons that Saddam has been hiding from the UN, and we must destroy them quickly, before he decides to use them.
But Saddam's repeated defiance of the UN cease-fire resolution also presents a longer-term problem, which this Administration has never been willing to face: Saddam himself. There will never be peace in the Persian Gulf region, or for Israel, for as long as Saddam Hussein and his radical Baath Party runs the show in Iraq. That is not to "personalize" the conflict: it is simply to face facts.
For five years, as former top UN arms inspector Rolf Ekeus has said, Saddam was willing to forge oil revenues of $30 billion per year, just to keep from the UN from seizing and destroying those weapons. Now, with the inspectors heading out of Dodge, Saddam is in a position to do what the arms inspectors have long warned he would do: reassemble those expensive weapons, and use them.
Until now, all the estimates of how long it would take Saddam to rebuild his strategic weapons capability have been pegged to the end of the UN inspections. Just last January, CIA director George Tenet said that Iraq could resume production of biological weapons "very, very quickly, in a matter of weeks," and would be able to assemble missile capable of carrying those weapons to Israel within a few months. Mr. Tenet concluded that "Iraq retains the technological expertise to quickly resurrect its weapons of mass destruction, if the UN inspections were ended." Well those inspections have now been ended.
From public statements by administration officials and interviews with former weapons inspectors, it is possible to estimate Saddam's time-table with some accuracy:
- Within days of the end of inspections - in other words, now - he will be able to deploy deadly biological weapons. Iraq is known to have fitted agricultural aircraft and unmanned drones with special sprayers to deliver dried anthrax spores. He could use these over staging areas in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia where the U.S. has prepositioned military gear, severely limiting if not prohibiting any major U.S. deployment in the region.
- Within weeks, he will be able to take hidden al-Hossein missiles out of storage, and fit them with biological and chemical warheads. These are the missiles he used to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War;
- Within months, Saddam will be able to restart production lines to build additional missiles, using critical production machinery and guidance sets imported from Russia over the past three years, apparently with the connivance of the Russian authorities. The UN believes Saddam has enough equipment on hand to assemble several dozen new missiles rapidly.
- Within two years, Iraq will be capable of resuming the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Added to this is the wildcard of the three nuclear bomb sets which former UN inspector Scott Ritter says the Iraqis have built and hidden from the UN Special Commission. According to Mr. Ritter, Iraq is only lacking the fissile cores for these weapons, and may have succeeded in acquiring the nuclear material on the black market.
Such is the immediate problem the U.S. faces. And yet, rather than launch immediate military strikes using the 170-odd strike aircraft and the half-dozen Aegis cruisers already in the region, the administration's first reaction was to send Secretary of Defense William Cohen on a tour of our Persian Gulf allies, seeking their support. They understandably told him they were opposed to the type of military action planned by the administration, apparently another round of cruise missile strikes. During my own tour of the Gulf region during the last such crisis earlier this year, Gulf leaders explained that they wanted no more American "pinprick" attacks, because that only emboldened Saddam and made him more popular in the region. Our friends in the Gulf understand that the U.S. has no long-term strategy. They do not want to see us stir up the hornets nest without killing the hornets.
And that brings us to the long-range, strategic problem, which is Saddam and his brutal, dictatorial regime. Siince 1995 the Clinton administration has pursued a "Silver bullet" solution for Iraq, seeking to encourage officers close to Saddam to assassinate him. The problem with that strategy is that Saddam is far more versed in the arts of the palace coup than Bill Clinton or the CIA. When Saddam gets wind of treachery he strikes hard and fast, often killing the entire clan of officers plotting against him, right down to the uncles, the parents, and the grandchildren.
Under Director George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency has repeatedly been duped by "false-flag" Iraqi defectors, who have promised to assassinate Saddam in exchange for U.S. promises of support. The problem here is that Saddam was fully in control of these officers from the very start. In one telling case, exposed by American Enterprise Institute scholar David Wurmser, a group of Iraqi officers succeeded in duping the CIA as recently as August. For their assassination plot to succeed, they argued, it was imperative that the CIA hold off a UN weapons inspection team led by Scott Ritter, who was planning to raid buildings under their control, because that would bring them and their plot to Saddam's attention. Thinking to protect those officers, the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright killed the inspection - and Saddam laughed. He had been controlling the alleged dissidents all along, and used them to hide his secret weapons from the UN yet again.
There is only one long-term solution for Iraq, and it is one that Americans can support openly and with pride: back the democratic Iraqi opposition. Just last month, Republicans in Congress succeeded in getting the President to sign a bill authorizing the Pentagon to spend $97 million to train and equip an Iraqi Liberation Army under the leadership of the multi-confessional Iraq National Congress. These are Iraqi patriots who were dumped by the CIA in 1995 and 1996 in favor of coup-plotting officers from Baghdad.
In a short-lived military offensive in March 1995, the INC demonstrated that it could fight and win against Saddam's army, getting three entire Iraqi brigades to surrender. Saddam Hussein's political base inside Iraq is far from solid; his army is held together solely by fear. By helping democrats mount a popular movement to undermine Saddam's army, America can also promote the values we cherish the most: freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. And in the bargain, we will get a more stable, pro-Western Middle East, instead of a region constantly under threat from an Iraqi dictator whose only goals are conquest and bloodshed.