The latest round of salvos between Saddam Hussein and the United States has once again reminded Americans that Saddam is still alive and in power, which is said to bring home the incomplete close to the gulf war and the failure of American diplomacy in the Middle East. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Saddam Hussein did not exist, we would have to invent him. He is the linchpin of American policy in the Mideast. Without him, Washington would be stumbling in the desert sands.
The Persian Gulf is an area of vital interests to the United States, with vast reserves of oil–the lifeblood of the industrialized world–and a slew of historical ties to America. Simple balance-of-power politics suggests that no hostile state shoulld dominate this area. The United States has maintained such a policy for more than 40 years, from Washington’s opposition to Egypt’s quest for regional hegemony–disguised as Pan-Arabism–in the 1950s to its reversal of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Since the United States needs to maintain a long-term policy as the region’s balancer, it needs allies abroad and public support at home. The existence of Saddam Hussein immeasurably helps both tasks. If not for Saddam, would the Saudi royal family, terrified of being seen as an American protectorate (which in a sense it is), allow American troops on their soil? Would Kuwait house more than 30,000 pieces of American combat hardware, kept in readiness should the need arise? Would the King of Jordan, the political weather vane of the region, allow the Marines to conduct exercises within his borders?
In case Saddam’s mere presence were not enough, he periodically reminds the world–and his neighbors–of his intentions. In 1993 he tried to arrange the assassination of George Bush. In 1994, at a time when the coalition to block Iraqi oil sales was splintering, he moved and mobilized troops near the Kuwaiti border. And now, with the world worried about the toll that U.N. sanctions are taking on the Iraqi people, he sent 35,000 troops into Erbil to crush the Kurds. With enemies like him, who needs friends?
America’s cruise-missile response has been grudgingly accepted by most of our allies, with little public enthusiasm; France being the vociferous exception as usual. Iran actually chided Washington for not acting sooner. Elsewhere there has been greater hostility, as there always will be to a world power using force. But imagine the situation without Saddam Hussein.
Had the United States “finished the job,” gone to Baghdad and deposed Saddam Hussein, it would first have had the unenviable task of governing–or being responsible for–Iraq, with its Kurdish rebellion in the North and its Shiite rebellion in the South. Saddam is able to manage this because he is a rapacious dictator who runs a police state. We could not be similarly unconstrained by decency.
Above all, the end of Saddam Hussein would be the end of the anti-Saddam coalition. Nothing destroys an alliance like the disappearance of the enemy. Once Napoleon was safely exiled to the island of St. Helena in 1815, the Quadruple Alliance–England, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia–began crumbling. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the burgeoning ties between Uncle Sam and “Uncle Joe” (as Stalin was cheerily called by Franklin Delano Roosevelt) quickly broke. And today NATO is lost without its old enemy.
The urge for a “solution” to the problem of Saddam Hussein is understandable. He is an evil man who runs an evil regime, with particularly tragic consequences for the Iraqi people. But a post-Saddam world would have its own thorny problems. His successors would be no angels. The immediate beneficiary would be Iran. And most important, without Saddam Hussein to worry about, anti-Americanism would grown in Arab streets–and also in Arab palaces. The resentment over American global dominance and cultural imperialism, latent Pan-Arabism and militant political Islam would all make it nearly impossible for even friends like Kuwait to support Washington consistently or publicly.
Foreign policy is not a one-shot deal but an ongoing process. Maintaining a long-term American presence in the gulf would be difficult in the absence of a regional threat. With all its problems, a Middle East with a defanged but still threatening Saddam helps secure American interests.
We are currently going through one of our periodic cravings for the pearls of wisdom of Richard Nixon. In this season, President Clinton would do well to remember one of his predecessors’ most famous lines. When conceding defeat in the California gubernatorial race in 1962, Nixon bitterly reminded the press that they were going to lose their bearings without a familiar punching bag. Imagine American policy in the Middle East if we didn’t have Saddam Hussein to kick around anymore.
