Saddam Hussein has proved wrong friends and foes alike. Contrary to the hopes and calculations of both, he has brought on his country a war which can only prove disastrous for it. Indeed, even in retrospect, it is difficult to find a rational explanation for his behaviour in terms of Iraq’s interests.
Once the United States and its allies had assembled the greatest military force in history in and around the Gulf and secured the endorsement of the world community through as many as 12 UN Security Council resolutions, it should have been evident to him that he had no option but to look for a face-saving formula and pull out of Kuwait. In fact, he did just the reverse. He rejected the proposal the UN Secretary-General made to him last Sunday in a last-minute effort to avoid war. The proposal in effect linked Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait with an international conference on the Arab-Israeli dispute over Palestine.
While it is certainly possible that he misread the signals emanating from the United States and miscalculated the character of President Bush, that does not appear likely, unless he is worse than a reckless gambler, that is a moron, which clearly he is not.
For, the American people’s reluctance to accept casualties notwithstanding, it has all along been reasonably clear that they would back their President if it came to the crunch. If there could be any doubt on this score, it should have been removed last week when both Houses of Congress authorised President Bush to go to war if he deemed it necessary. Similarly, it has been evident that President Bush is not the kind of man who would shirk a painful decision if he is persuaded that it is vital for his country.
As the January 15 deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait drew close, speculation intensified that Saddam Hussein would attack Israel, provoke Israeli retaliation and thereby oblige America’s Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria to scuttle the coalition. But as the well-known commentator on military affairs, Edward N. Luttwak, wrote in The New York Times, clearly on the basis of US intelligence, only 35 launchers, with reloads, were targeted on Israel and these did not constitute much of a threat to that country since they were known to be “very inaccurate” and carried payloads of only 180 kg of high explosives each in their long-range versions against 4,000 kg of a modern fighter-bomber.
The threat to the US-led coalition on this count has, in my view, been greatly exaggerated. There has not been much reason to believe at any point either that Iraq is in a position to inflict considerable damage on Israel, or that the Israeli retaliation would be excessive, or that Egypt and Syria, not to speak of Saudi Arabia, would allow themselves to be swept off by a patently diversionary move on the part of Saddam Hussein.
It is possible that he felt he had exhausted whatever room for manoeuvre he possessed when he conceded all Iranian claims last August and that he feared a coup in case he agreed to withdraw from Kuwait as well. But from what we know of the Iraqi set-up and Saddam Hussein’s ruthlessness, it is not easy to accept this proposition at its face value. He is known to have purged and executed successful generals earlier and there is no good reason to suggest that he could not have done so once again.
As I view the scene, I think it is a fundamental mistake to think of Saddam Hussein as a modern leader who makes careful calculations, even if they turn out to be wrong, and acts accordingly. He can legitimately be called a dictator inasmuch as only dictators can be absolute rulers in our times. But we confuse ourselves by using this terminology. Saddam Hussein belongs to an earlier age. In terms of our own historical experience, we would not, in my view, be too wide of the mark if we were to think of him as a Rajput and a Moghul prince rolled into one.
It is hardly necessary to recall that any number of Rajput princes preferred what they regarded honourable death to compromise, even if the adversary offered generous terms, and that their women gladly and voluntarily performed jauhar in order to ensure that their husbands and sons did not weaken in their resolve. Similarly, it is superfluous to detail the extent to which Moghul princes were prepared to go to obtain and keep power. They killed and tortured their own brothers and led revolts against their fathers.
Saddam Hussein, it seems to me, is also haunted by history. It is not possible to appreciate this point unless we recall that by the eleventh century the world of Arab Islam was in a state of obvious decay; that it has not recovered ever since; that the political independence they won in the post-war period primarily as a result of the debilitation of Britain and France has only added to their sense of frustration and rage, accompanied as it has been by intra-Arab conflicts and utter helplessness in the face of the power of the US-backed Israel; that their oil wealth too has not helped them redress this imbalance; and that if anything, it has exposed further Arab incapacity to cope with the modern world.
Two words – rage and impotence – spring to my mind when I think of the Arab behaviour in the post-war period. Nasser embodied this rage and impotence from the mid-fifties when he came to power till the time of his death, with consequences that are well known. He failed to achieve all his major objectives – to lay the foundation of a modern economy in Egypt, to unite the Arabs in the struggle against Western attempts at continued hegemony in the region and to oblige Israel to offer an acceptable deal to Palestinians. Saddam Hussein’s has been the same story in more recent years.
Mercifully for Nasser, the Soviet protective umbrella was available to him. Or else, Israeli tanks could have rolled into Cairo in 1967 and brought him down. Unmercifully for Saddam Hussein, that umbrella now lies in tatters and the tattered one too has not been available to him in the present crisis.
An element of calculation was possibly present in Saddam Hussein’s decision to attack Iran in 1980. He could have calculated that the Iranian armed forces were a shambles on account of Ayatollah Khomeini’s murderous assaults on the officer corps and denial of spare parts by the United States. But deeper passions moved him, as should be evident from his frequent references to the battle of Qadisiya in 637 which had paved the way for the Arab entry into the Persian capital of Ctesiphon. As a Sunni Arab, he could never reconcile himself to Shia Iran’s pre-eminence in the Gulf. He could not help it when the Shah was around, backed as the latter was by the mighty United States. Khomeini’s Iran was a different proposition. He felt he could take it on and he did.
The same kind of logic, or lack of it, has operated in the case of Kuwait. If Khomeini had provided the provocation in the shape of appeals to Shias in Iraq to rise in revolt, the Kuwaiti Emir had done so by drawing more than his share of oil from the joint Rumaila oilfield. Similarly, if Iran appeared to be an easy target in 1980, so did Kuwait in 1990. He could also have calculated that the US would acquiesce in a fait accompli in Kuwait, especially since it was just then preoccupied with the consequences of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and turbulence of unknown proportions in the Soviet Union. But as in the case of Iran, deeper passions appear to have moved Saddam Hussein in respect of Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein can be said to have been helpless in another sense. The Iraqi society had got militarised by the eight-year war with Iran; that is the plain implication of the presence of one million regular troops and reservists in a population of around 16 million, 75 per cent of which would be women, children and the aged. Since Saddam Hussein could not have demobilised quickly, he had of necessity to look for a larger role for himself and his country to give his armed forces a sense of purpose
The search, however, was foredoomed. Other Arab countries would not either accept Iraqi leadership of the struggle against Israel or agree to subordinate their parochial interests to the requirements of that struggle. Commonsense demanded that Saddam Hussein proceed cautiously. Instead, he behaved recklessly. No worthwhile leader, operating under his kind of constraints, would, for instance, have threatened to “incinerate one-half of Israel” with the use of binary chemical weapons, as he did months before he attacked Kuwait, knowing full well that this would arouse the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States and ruin whatever prospect there existed of strengthening his position in the Gulf region.
Iraq, as is well known, is critically dependent on the export of oil. The price of oil in the international market had fallen disastrously, partly as a result of quota violations by Kuwait and the UAE. Saddam Hussein was within his rights to ask them to end these violations and to try get the price raised. But he had already achieved his second objective by the time he invaded Kuwait on August 2 and a mere display of his armed might would in all probability have sufficed to help achieve the first. But for reasons which remain obscure even today, he decided to occupy Kuwait.
In the circumstances America had to respond more or less in the manner it did. It could not have allowed Saddam Hussein to get away with the occupation of Kuwait, not because he was guilty of aggression, but because that would have enabled him to dominate Saudi Arabia which by itself accounts for over 25 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves and for almost 50 per cent together with Iraq and Kuwait.
A lot of nonsense has been written and spoken about a new international order and unacceptability of use of force for settling disputes in this post-cold war era. Americans are masters at this kind of rhetoric. Perhaps they mean what they say because their thinking is greatly influenced by self-serving moralism. But all that should be ignored so that we can concentrate on the central issue. Which is that the US, as leader of the industrialised world, could not possibly be expected to countenance the rise of an unfriendly power capable of dominating the oil-rich Gulf.
There is another aspect of the problem which would bear mention. If, for some reason, America had failed to respond to the Iraqi move, Israel would almost certainly have – at a time and in a manner of its choosing, to destroy Iraqi missiles and chemical and nuclear plants. And this could have led to even a bigger war than the one we now face.
Sunday Mail, 20 January 1991