Going to the source

IN THE NEWS
It’s old news by now, but the Bush Administration has officially abandoned the search for weapons of mass destruction. There was no surprise when Administration spokespeople didn’t quite admit abandonment, continuing to murmur about the possibility of WMDs smuggled in the dark of night into Syria or Iran. However, we all know what the moment means—including when the Administration blamed the termination of the WMD hunt on the extreme danger to the team looking for them. That’s not the only way in which the occupation has trumped the original cassus belli.

Either Saddam Hussein was engaged in one of the most reckless bluffs in history, or his aides deceived him into thinking he had weapons (or a weapons program, or something) that was sheer fantasy. While the Bush Administration made a poor case for attacking Iraq, in truth, Saddam Hussein did a poor job of defending himself.

Perhaps Hussein had so few weapons that he could hide them (something I don’t find credible, based on the available evidence), or he had only a hope of reviving the WMD program (and even that isn’t altogether clear). The basic question is the same: Was the invasion justified?

That’s roughly the same question as, Was containment still the better policy than invasion? If, after gambling away what good will and credibility the United States had left on Iraq, miring our military in a strategically defensive war, distracting both civilian and military resources away from the global counterterrorist campaign, and driving the federal budget even further into the red, doesn’t convince you, let’s take a look at an obvious historical parallel that I’m surprised hasn’t been discussed yet: Cuba.

Cuba symbolizes an invasion that the United States could have executed, but didn’t. In many respects, the shadowy threat was the same. Cuba was home to Soviet WMDs for a brief period, until the United States forced their removal. The communist regime in Havana was giving considerable training, financial, military, and moral support to like-minded insurgencies across Latin America. (In that sense, Castro did far more to threaten the United States through unconventional war than Hussein ever did.) Castro was adventuresome to the point of, to the surprise of nearly everyone, deploying Cuban troops to Angola’s civil war. He was ruthlessly repressive at home, wrecked his nation’s economy, impoverished economically and intellectually at least two generations of Cubans, and in the end, is still working to ensure the monstrous train wreck that is the Cuban Revolution does not die with him. Even if he were no tyrant, however, the United States had every reason to remove him.

Which, of course, it tried to do, in every way short of sending in the Marines. The Bay of Pigs, the assassination plots, the economic embargo, the aggressive counterinsurgency campaign in every Latin American country where the Cubans aided the insurgents—some of these measures “worked,” in the sense of limiting the Cuban threat, and some backfired. For example, the CIA plots to kill or just humiliate Castro begat the Church Committee hearings, which begat the very tough restrictions on covert action which post-9/11 Americans often bemoan. Despite our own missteps, the threat remained, as a vocal exile community reminded US politicians daily. If the Bush Administration was eager to embrace the Iraqi exiles, they never feared them the way American elected officials (especially those in Florida) worry about what the Cuban exiles might do to their re-election prospects.

And yet, the United States never invaded, even after the dying Soviet Union signaled its disinterest in its former Cuban proxy. Every Cold War president, Democrat and Republican, had the option of “going to the source” in Cuba. With historical hindsight, plus the continued release of new documentary evidence, it’s clear that the risk of nuclear war with Cuba’s Soviet protector, while never zero, was certainly never as high as the general public assumed it was at the time.

Apparently, Castro was contained enough for American foreign policy. Castro never lost his revolutionary fire, but it certainly burned less and less over the years. After repeated efforts to help topple South American governments failed, the Cuban government largely gave up more than a desultory effort to spread its revolution to other countries. Castro would never have been our friend, but as an enemy, his barking and snarling became less frightening over time.

You could easily make the same case for Saddam Hussein, a revolutionary at heart who eventually settled on survival as his ultimate aim (and, if you listened to his rhetoric, proof of his alleged strength). If you’ve never watched the video of the Ba’ath party meeting after his 1979 coup, when the assembled party leaders sweated and trembled as Hussein coolly sent many of them, one by one, to the firing squad, you’ve never experienced just what sort of revolutionary Hussein was. You can never know the heart of a Stalin or a Hussein, but you can watch them do a very convincing job of carrying out classic revolutionary terror. Hussein’s purge is even harder to watch or read about than the Moscow show trials, if that is to be believed. Whether he depended on revolution as a fig leaf of respectability, or he genuinely believed in the secular transformation of the Middle East the Ba’athists were attempting, Saddam Hussein depended on harnessing revolutionary forces, driving them to their bloody conclusion. To the extent that Hussein's revolutionary fervor made regular imbroglios with the United States an easy way to polish up his anti-Western credentials, yes, he would continue to be a "threat," but perhaps of a very limited sort.

Like Castro, Saddam Hussein would never be the United States’ friend. But was he contained enough? Why was it possible to live with the continued risk of Cuban shenanigans—helping the Soviets sneak nuclear arms back into Cuba, training and funding anti-American revolutionaries in the Western Hemisphere, helping turn other regional conflicts like Angola’s into Cold War confrontations—but the United States could not tolerate the smallest iota of risk from Iraq?

If you want to invoke the ghosts of 9/11, remember for a moment what the Cold War was like. Remember when we lived under the daily threat of nuclear war—something far worse than 9/11, or 9/11 times ten. And remember, too, how we stopped short of the sunny beaches of Cuba, when we had the chance to “go to the source.”

Comments

[J.]

Absolutely right. For some reason, the analogy to Cuba didn't leap up, but you're on target. I guess others might note that Cuba doesn't have a capability to invade its neighbors, but then again, neither did Saddam. You remember around 2000-2001, Undersecretary of State John Bolton accused Cuba of developing BW weapons and former President Carter stepped in to say "bullcrap?" Who knows, maybe there were some ambitious ideas about taking Cuba out. It sure would have been easier than Iraq, although who knows, long-term insurgency issues may have erupted there also.

I can tell you, DOD did seriously believe WMDs were in Iraq, just much less than what was there in 1991. We did worry about it in the Pentagon, made several contingency plans and bought a lot of extra CBRN defense stuff, and then... nothing. Kinda disappointing that he didn't use any CB weapons in a way, if you take my meaning. We haven't been tested on CB warfare since 1918, be interesting to see what works and what doesn't work, in a strictly impersonal and analytical manner.

In the end, you are right, Iraq was a poorly executed policy drill, wrong strategy focused on the wrong enemy. Too many other CB warfare countries with ties to terrorists for us to have wasted billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

[ali]

I have a vague recollection that Bob McNamara said a few years after the crisis he’d learned from the Soviets that Castro had threatened to seize and launch the Soviet nukes, regardless of retaliation against Cuba. We got lucky and it didn’t happen.

If that’s true Castro was very briefly a terrible threat to the US homeland. Saddam never was that and after 1992 it’s now clear he was a broken reed.

But in 1992 the US was shocked to find Saddam’s WMD capability was much greater than intelligence suggested. There are stories he was also within a whisker of getting a Skud compatible Pakistani nuke before desert storm.

Recently Wolfowitz said when asked about the Iraqs WMD “what if we’d been wrong the other way” he’s an incredibly clever man who’s been a Pentagon insider since the 70s but I suspect that’s a sincere answer. The reality is statesmen operate on doubtful facts and are conditioned by past mistakes as much as policy.

While I’d view the Iraq war as a major strategic error; being more worried about unpredictable States that may have WMD than the unfamiliar Jihadi threat is perhaps understandable in the historical context.

[J.]

I'm not sure I would agree that "the US was shocked" by Saddam's WMD program in 1992. Let's be specific, we were pretty much on target about his chem warfare capabilities, it was the BW program that we had no idea about. He may have been further along than what we had thought previous, but lacking any weaponized stocks and any experience in delivering the agent, it wasn't that big of a deal. Re: the nukes, never heard anything about a Paki nuke, but Saddam's modified Scuds were really not that good. Terror tools for Iran, maybe, but not very effective or accurate.

Re: Wolfowitz, don't confuse experience and cleverness for proficiency. His fixation on Saddam and Iraq's future put the US govt on a particular track for clashing with Islam. His use of Saddam's WMD program was a means to an end.

[r0s3bUd]

interesting article, really nice read. you mentioned a video of saddam 1979. your description of it made me curious, so i started searching for it. unfortunately i did not find it within the internet. do you know where i could get it?