Slate's Bizbox
dialogues: E-mail debates of newsworthy topics.

Iraq and Al-Qaida

dialogues
entries
123456
from: Warren Bass
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

For the Neighbors' Sake

Posted Friday, March 22, 2002, at 6:33 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Jeff,

25 dinars? Sold.

Actually, not sold—which is no tragedy since 25 Iraqi dinars and a plate of hummus will get you, well, a plate of hummus. (I actually used to have some Iraqi dinars that I picked up in Jordan stuffed absent-mindedly into my travel wallet; after 9/11, I wisely decided to take 'em out.) No, there's no way to leave Saddam in power and guarantee he doesn't get the bomb.

Which brings us, of course, to the reason your piece made such waves around D.C. this week: the raging Beltway debate about what to do with Saddam. Before 9/11, the range of policy options were mostly about various forms of containment—ways to keep Saddam boxed in—or about rollback—toppling Saddam, probably using the Iraqi opposition. Some favored sanctions without arms inspections, others preferred arms inspections without sanctions, others backed a tweaked new regime of "smart sanctions," and another group (including a Bush I adviser turned grad school dean, Paul Wolfowitz) pushed rollback.

Now, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, as well as Richard Perle and many other neocons, are close to the seat of power, and the policy debate increasingly centers not around whether to topple Saddam but about when and how. Within the administration, the split can be not inaccurately caricatured as being between Wolfowitz and his Pentagon allies (arguing for yesterday, if not sooner) and Colin Powell's State Department (arguing for tomorrow, if not later). And plenty of Democrats have also urged mopping up al-Qaida more thoroughly first—including Leon Fuerth, who'd be running the NSC today if a few things had gone differently in the closer-to-home rogue state of Florida.

So tell me if you buy this: Some of the people most prone to inflate the claims you make in the piece are actually from the neocon, get-Saddam-now crowd. For my part, I'm pretty sure I've got your piece right, in all its glory (hell, the thing's long enough for us to have run at my old job at Foreign Affairs), and you and your exquisitely careful editors haven't oversold the new stuff. I've just popped ahead to policy implications—simply because you know the way the piece has been received by some folks around D.C.: as the smoking gun tying Saddam to al-Qaida and thence to 9/11.

What interests me is that neither of us sound sure you need that particular smoking gun to favor interventionism in Iraq. No, Saddam isn't the mastermind of global terror. Yes, he is a dedicated pursuer of doomsday weapons, a serial aggressor, and a human rights abuser on a scale that should get liberals muttering about humanitarian intervention. On the basis of current evidence, the case for getting Saddam is less about terrorism than it is about weapons of mass destruction. Hence the importance of reminding people of the Anfal.

(By the by, I can assure you that the redoubtable Ken Pollack read the piece—both because it's a blockbuster and because, well, Ken reads everything. The rest of us here have signed a petition asking him to stop making the rest of us look like slackers. And to the best of my knowledge, Ken has no position on this one: He's just mulling it all through. Aaron Brown, however, is on his own.)

(Also tangentially, in an impressive display of meekness, we haven't abandoned our brief yet to say a few insubordinate words about Yasser and Arik.)

A weird sidelight: Some of the snarkiest things I've ever heard about the Iraqi National Congress—a rickety alliance of Kurdish peshmerga, Hashimite monarchists, Parisian exiles, and Shiites of various degrees of fundamentalist nuttery—came from Israelis who don't think the INC can fight its way out of a paper bag. That may be because the Israelis worry that if America does Iraq the slow way—à la Afghanistan, casting the Iraqi opposition in the role of the Northern Alliance—it leaves more time for Israel to sit and get pegged by Saddam's Scuds, which could be carrying gas or germs this time. (Then again, the snarkiest thing ever said about the Iraqi opposition came from the long-suffering Anthony Zinni, the administration's Israeli-Palestinian peace envoy, who back in his days as head of Centcom said that relying on the Iraqi opposition would lead to a Bay of Goats.)

Like you, I'm persuaded that Saddam has to go, and I'm just sorry that Powell, Cheney, and Bush père didn't hammer away at the Republican Guard for a few more hours in February 1991. It might not have collapsed the regime, but I wish Washington had hung in a bit longer—not least because, given the law of unintended consequences, the unfinished business of Desert Storm left 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to deter the still-standing Saddam, which turned Osama Bin Laden definitively against the House of Saud, which led to 9/11.

So what would Saddam do if he were on the brink? Well, think of the way he behaves when he's not in extremis. He was deterred from launching chemical and biological Scuds in 1991; he might not be if he were truly about to buy it. But for the sake of all of Saddam's neighbors, better to get it over with, no? The Kurds are in terrible trouble anyway. If it's anthrax and sarin we're worried about today, it'll be nukes tomorrow. That points toward a sharp, short intervention, and that points toward an anti-Saddam campaign spearheaded by U.S. troops, not the Iraqi opposition. Maybe, for the sake of the Kurds, America shouldn't rely on the Kurds.

What think you?

Best,
Warren

dialogues
entries
123456
from: Warren Bass
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

For the Neighbors' Sake

Posted Friday, March 22, 2002, at 6:33 PM ET
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Warren Bass is a senior editor at the Washington Post's "Book World" section and the author of Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance. Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Over the Line
Harold Ford Jr. | I know what it's like to be smeared by your opponent.
: The Positive in Negative Ads
PLUS » Milbank: The President's Lullaby