Saddam is a nasty bit of unfinished business which Bush left for his successor, like a mad aunt in the White House attic. The U.N. resolutions under which Bush fought the 1991 war never called for Sad-dam’s removal. The Bush administration, anxious to maintain support among Arab nations, accepted second best-an Iraq whose economy and ability to wage war were bound tightly by international sanctions. And yet a hogtied Saddam is still Saddam, ruthless and determined. He may not now have the weapons of mass destruction which he once possessed (or was building); yet he still leads a resourceful people, still harbors ambitions of grandeur. As last week showed, all he has to do is move a couple of divisions of troops to engender near panic in the region.
The world would be a happier place without Saddam. But ff he were to be removed by force of arms, all sorts of horrors would land on Clinton’s desk. Iraq might descend into civil war, with the Shiite south and the Kurdish north both demanding autonomy from Baghdad. If the Kurds, now protected by a U.N. force, demanded full independence, how would America’s Turkish ally–wrestling with its own Kurdish problem-respond? An America responsible for removing Saddam would be an America expected to bear some responsibility for the post-Saddam shape of Iraq: a task whose dimensions (and popularity with the American public) would make Haiti look like a picnic.
Bush relied on an international coalition to fight his gulf war. Could Clinton? In 1990-91, France and Britain-desperate to show Washington that they were every bit as indispensable as a united Germany–gave the United States all the military support it asked for. But the Bosnian war has happened since the n, and with it the most vicious squabble between America and the European powers for 40 years. Can the old alliance be cobbled together.9 France has contemplated setting a timetable for lifting the sanctions on Iraq, while the British public is far from bellicose.
Turkish politics, too, make an alliance problematic. Turgut Ozal, president of Turkey during the gulf war, and a staunch ally, is now dead. He helped Bush enormously, cutting off Iraqi off and providing bases for actions in Iraqi Kurdistan. But since Ozal’s death, Islamic parties have done astonishingly well in Turkish local elections, while Turkey’s own internal war with its Kurds has gotten dirtier. It’s far from clear that the government of Prime Minister Tansu Ciller could be as helpful as Ozal. Even worse, Saudi Arabia is not the place it was. After more than a decade of profligate spending and low off prices, its economy is debt-ridden. It has its own problems with fundamentalists-the kingdom recently admitted that 110 citizens had been arrested on national-security charges (an expatriate dissident group says the true number is larger). Although a senior White House official says that the Saudis were “completely cooperative” last week, nobody should be surprised if they later prove skittish. Yet without Saudi and Turkish bases, large-scale military operations aren’t doable.
And then there’s Clinton himself. Analysts should not rush to pass judgment on him. A true crisis can bring out the best in people, as it did for many of those in the Bush administration. When asked recently to choose a moment when Clinton comported himself as a true commander in chief, one senior White House aide chose, interestingly, Clinton’s decision to bomb Baghdad in reply to the Iraqi plot to assassinate Bush.
Yet all the old doubts remain. They are not doubts about Clinton’s intelligence, and they shouldn’t (without more evidence) be doubts about his ability to face down tough foes. They are doubts about whether he understands that it is moments like this that define whether a president has what it takes. George Bush both understood and had that indefinable something–but then Bush was a World War II veteran. Clinton thought and hoped that whoever won the 1992 election could concentrate on domestic affairs. Yet the world is still a dangerous place, and American presidents will always be asked to make it less so. If anyone had doubts about that fact, Saddam-who else?–has just removed them.
