Should Iraq be bombed?

O. Croci

It might well be that as soon as our television screens stop showing the images of skiers coming down the hills of Nagano, they will begin offering the less pleasant spectacle of bombs raining over Baghdad and other places in Iraq. This is a good time therefore to clarify the nature of this new confrontation between Iraq and the United Nations and reflect on the consequences of its possible outcomes.

Following the end of the Gulf War, waged mainly by the US but authorised by the United Nations because of Iraq’s refusal to withdraw from Kuwait, the Security Council passed Resolutions 687 (April 3, 1991) aiming at making sure that Iraq would not manufacture and stockpile chemical and biological weapons as well as ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 km. To assure Iraqi compliance, Resolution 687 also provided for the establishment of a special commission known as UNSCOM to carry out on-site inspections. During the last two years Saddam Hussein has tried to escape inspection, first arguing that UNSCOM should not include American and British Nationals and then denying it access to a number of sites. In June 1996 and then again in June and October 1997, the UN Security Council has passed resolutions (1060, 1115, and 1134) calling upon Iraq to allow free and unfettered access to all sites. By refusing to comply with these resolutions, Saddam Hussein is thumbing his nose at the will of all nations as manifested through the UN Security Council. The UN Charter requires both UN Member Governments and the Secretary General to exhaust all peaceful means before undertaking military action to ensure compliance with Security Council resolutions. This is why Secretary General Kofi Annan is going to Baghdad this Friday. Although the details of his mission are not known, most likely he will offer a final compromise, namely that UNSCOM personnel be accompanied in its inspections by a diplomatic team. At the moment, two of the permanent members of the Security Council, France and Russia are desperately trying to convince Saddam Hussein to back down and comply while two others, the US and Great Britain, convinced that he will not, have begun preparations for military action. China, the other permanent member of the Security Council, is likely to abstain as it did on the Resolution authorising the Gulf War. Seen from this perspective, the conclusion seems rather simple: unless Iraq backs down, a United Nations military strike (which would, of necessity, be conducted primarily by American forces) is perfectly legitimate. If any courtyard rooster, such as Saddam Hussein, is allowed to defy the will of the UN, such an institution will become irrelevant in a very short time. This is, for instance, what happened to the League of Nations, the predecessor of the UN, after it failed to deal with Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian one in Ethiopia. The problem with a military attack, however, is that it cannot guarantee neither the total destruction of Iraq’s arsenal nor future compliance, especially if Saddam Hussein remains at the helm of government, or worse, is replaced by Muslim fundamentalists.

There are, moreover, political considerations that make a military intervention less than attractive. The perception, although it is a wrong one, exists that Israel, to mention another example in that turbulent region, has been very reluctant to comply with various UN resolutions exhorting it to withdraw from territories it occupied in the 1967 war and southern Lebanon. Thus if Iraq is severely punished while Israel is ignored, the UN could be accused, of using two different measures. This could make Saddam Hussein look like a victim and gain him sympathies, if not among Arab ruling elite, certainly among the Arab population in general and Muslim fundamentalists in particular. Since all Arab countries have the fundamentalist virus growing within their societies, an attack on Iraq could destabilise their precarious domestic political equilibrium and turn them increasingly in an anti-Western direction. One could even argue that Saddam Hussein is inviting a military strike precisely for this purpose. This, on the other hand, is also the reason why this time, unlike what happened after the invasion of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other American allies in the region are more reluctant to lend their support to a strike. This reluctance will not make a military intervention impossible but it would certainly make it more risky, especially from a political point of view. There is no doubt that with the end of the Cold War, Muslim fundamentalism has become the new major threat for the West. It might even be the case that a confrontation with it (what American political scientist Samuel Huntington has aptly called “the clash of civilisations”) is inevitable, but it is certainly the duty of the West to avoid taking initiatives that could precipitate it.

Finally, what should Canada’s position be? If Saddam Hussein does not back down and the UN decided for military action, Canada’s duty is to lend whatever support it can to the UN. This is exactly what Chrétien’s government is doing. Its siding with the American position is not a manifestation of preference for a military solution to a diplomatic one, but a reiteration of Canada’s belief in the role of the UN and its commitment to contribute to it.

O. Croci teaches European and International Politics at Laurentian University.