DATE=11/24/1999
TYPE=ON THE LINE
TITLE=ON THE LINE: CAN SADDAM BE OVERTHROWN?
NUMBER=1-00799
EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY - 619-0037
CONTENT=
THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Anncr:  On the Line - a discussion of United 
States policy and contemporary issues.  This week, 
"Can Saddam Be Overthrown?" Here is your host, 
Robert Reilly.

Host:   Hello and welcome to On the Line. 
Earlier this month, President Bill Clinton 
authorized the use of funds provided by the U.S. 
Congress to support the Iraqi opposition to Saddam 
Hussein. What role the various and sometimes 
fractious opposition groups can play in toppling 
Saddam Hussein remains to be seen, but few expect 
the groups to pose any direct military challenge 
to Saddam's brutal regime. The United States is 
also supporting an international campaign to bring 
senior Iraqi officials to justice for war crimes 
and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, U.S. and 
British aircraft continue to enforce the no-fly 
zones over Iraq. 

Joining me today to discuss the efforts to remove 
Saddam Hussein are three experts. Joshua Muravchik 
is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise 
Institute. David Mack is vice president of the 
Middle East institute. He is a former U.S. 
ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. And Rend 
Rahim Francke is the director of the Iraq 
Foundation, which advocates democratization and 
human rights in Iraq. Welcome to the program. 

Host:  Joshua Muravchik, how would you appraise 
the potential of this support for the Iraqi 
opposition in reaching this proclaimed objective 
of undermining Saddam Hussein?

Muravchik:  We really never know how to appraise 
the potential. We had this experience in the 1980s 
with the so-called "Reagan Doctrine," which really 
was crucial to wining the Cold War. And we 
supported insurgencies then in Nicaragua, 
Afghanistan, and elsewhere. At the time, no one 
thought they had any prospect of success but, in 
fact, they had a tremendous amount of success and 
helped us to bring down the evil empire. We don't 
know in advance what success we can have. Actually 
when we started supporting Iraqi oppositionists in 
the early 1990s, they made some start. They got 
some thousands of men active in intelligence and 
military activities in northern Iraq, and they did 
pretty much everything that we had hoped they 
would do, until we made the decision to pull the 
rug out from under them. But if we will put 
ourselves behind them, we'll see what they can do. 

Host:  David Mack, you personally know many of 
these opposition groups because of your long work 
in the U.S. State Department. How do you assess 
this situation?

Mack:  Well, I don't think that the United States 
can make the opposition effective if the 
opposition isn't prepared to buckle down to hard 
work, unify its ranks and positions, and take some 
independent positions from time to time. The key 
role of the United States is not so much to build 
up the opposition as it is to provide an underlay 
of military force and a willingness to use it in 
pursuing legitimate international grievances and 
programs against this Iraqi regime. Part of that 
is represented by what the opposition is trying to 
do to delegitimize Saddam Hussein and some of his 
key henchmen, and to provide an alternate vision 
for what the Iraqi nation can become and the 
possibility that it can take its rightful place 
again in the region.

Host:  Well, Ms. Francke, was that vision on 
display in New York several weeks ago when three-
hundred some leaders of the Iraqi opposition met 
at a conference to try to put forth a platform on 
which they could all agree and elect a new 
leadership council?
 
Francke:  Yes. The ideas of what Iraq should look 
like in the future did not simply emanate in New 
York in two and a half days of meetings. You have 
to keep in mind that there is a history to this 
meeting in New York. There were large meetings in 
1992 twice. One of them was right inside Iraq in 
northern Iraq. The vision of what we want Iraq to 
look like in the future was really evolved from 
the early 1990s, particularly through those 
meetings, the two major meetings in 1992. And, of 
course, the evolution has continued. The platform 
that was presented in New York is a natural 
continuation of the thoughts and concepts and 
ideals that were evolved from 1990 and took shape 
in 1992. I do want to go back the question of 
potential. I think there is, in fact, potential. 
One of our problems is that there has been a great 
time lag between statements and decisions in the 
U.S. and the execution on the ground or with the 
Iraqi opposition. If we go back to the Iraq 
Liberation Act, which was adopted by Congress in 
August 1998, it was signed by the President in 
October 1998. We are only now beginning to see 
some implementation. And I might say very small-
scale implementation of the Iraq Liberation Act.

Host:  But may I ask you, is that the fault of the 
administration in failing to disperse these funds, 
or is it reflective of what David Mack said that 
the opposition itself was not coherent enough to 
offer something to fund?

Francke:  I don't really particularly want to go 
back and place blame on anybody. And I think 
everybody needs to work together with the U.S. 
administration, the Iraqi opposition, the U.S.  
Congress, and, I might add, countries in the 
region. I would like to touch on this subject at 
some stage. But without saying it was the fault of 
this or that, it was rather slow in being 
implemented, and we are at the very beginning of 
thinking through ways by which the Iraqi 
opposition can become more effective, can work on 
the ground. It's really too soon to say there is 
no potential, or there is tremendous potential. I 
believe there is, but I think we are too early, at 
a too early stage to judge the value.

Muravchik:  I can just make one point that has 
come up here, which has to do with the fact of the 
opposition being divided. And Bob, even in 
introducing the topic, you said "the often 
fractious opposition." I believe this is largely a 
red herring. Of course they're divided. Of course 
they're fractious. These are people who say they 
want to create a democracy in Iraq, and certainly 
what we want is to encourage them to have a 
democracy as a goal. The nature of democracy is 
that you are going to have different fractions 
that have different ideas and that argue with each 
other about it.

Host:  But is that indeed the problem? I mean, 
some people point out that the nature of Iraq is 
that it is more or less cobbled together by 
colonial powers, that it doesn't make sense in 
terms of some kind of homogeneous population, that 
it's riven by different clans, by different 
religious beliefs, and that, were there not a 
strong power holding the place together, it would 
come apart.

Muravchik:  Well, this is true of the big majority 
of the member states of United Nations today. Most 
of the states in the world were put together, 
cobbled together by colonial rulers. If you go 
back to the founding of the U-N fifty years ago, 
there were only fifty members, and now there are 
one-hundred and eighty or so. These are new 
nations that were once colonial territories and 
out of which nations were created. And they all 
have some tensions within them. But so what? 

Francke:  I really would like to address this 
issue because I think, as Josh said, this is a red 
herring. And there are two sources for this type 
of propaganda. One of them, I think, is the people 
and countries that do not want to see change in 
Iraq. Saddam is very happy with this type of 
propaganda. He is delighted to say and to hear 
people say that Iraq is a mosaic that will fall 
apart without him, without a strong man. I think 
there are also countries in the region that would 
like to perpetrate this myth. I think, 
unfortunately, some Western countries also like to 
explore this and propound it. And I believe that 
this is a sort of neo-colonialist attitude towards 
a Middle Eastern country. These counties are too 
fractious; they cannot govern themselves; they 
don't understand about democracy. Unless there is 
a strong man, a single leader, who leads them by 
strength, by coercion, they will fall apart. I 
believe this is not true. Iraq certainly has 
variety and has pluralism. And pluralism is an 
important factor of Iraqi society and Iraqi 
politics. But I think we ought to recognize that 
and yet also recognize that there is a sense of 
Iraqi nationhood. We have seen it manifested and 
established time and time again. Even the Kurds 
who are most accused of wanting to secede and 
wanting to separate, there is not a single Kurdish 
party in Iraq that has called for separation and 
secession. And I think this is a credit we never 
give to them. 

Host: Let me ask David Mack, because of, once 
again, your long history in the U.S. State 
Department. One enunciated goal of U.S. policy is 
the territorial integrity of Iraq. Do you think it 
is at risk by supporting a broad opposition?

Mack:  Certainly not. I think what would put that 
principle at risk is if the U.S. were supporting a 
faction that wanted to have some kind of separate 
regime. I think the position that the U.S. 
government has taken in the past, and I think it 
is a very sound position, is that we want to see a 
new government in Baghdad, not a new government in 
Irbil or some new government in Karbala. I think 
this is entirely correct. And, as Rend indicated, 
there really is no support from the various 
factions of the Iraqi opposition for some kind of 
separate regional identities, as opposed to a 
certain amount of federalism and local autonomy, 
which we're very familiar with in our own system 
in the United States. But I'd like to go back a 
minute to this question of what it is we should be 
looking to the Iraqi opposition for. Because it's 
not just a question, as Josh indicated, of people 
who are engaged in political disputes. Along with, 
I think, a certain fecklessness in U.S. policy at 
various points, one of the reasons why the 
opposition lost its momentum was that people 
started fighting with one another -- not having 
arguments over a table -- but they started 
shooting at one another and blowing up bombs in 
one another's offices, and so on. So I think we 
have to be realistic. We shouldn't expect too much 
of the opposition, but at the same time we ought 
to recognize that there is potential out there. 
But there is potential that has to be built on by 
a lot of hard work, and you don't just solve that 
by suddenly thrusting guns into people's hands.

Host:  That's an interesting history you referred 
to. Joshua Muravchik referred to it too, when the 
United States failed to support uprisings in the 
north. But at the same time, Saddam Hussein has 
proved particularly adept at exploiting the 
differences within the opposition, in turning one 
Kurdish group against another. 

Muravchik: He has exploited it, but also we have, 
in a sense, encouraged it. We have encouraged some 
of them to look opportunistically toward him 
because we gave repeated signals that we were not 
very serious about supporting an effort to 
overthrow him and or supporting an effort to unite 
the opposition.

Host:  Are we serious now?

Muravchik:  I'm not sure. We seem to be a drop 
more serious than we've been. If I can just hark 
back again to the experience of the Reagan 
doctrine. I watched closely the experience in 
Nicaragua. If you want to talk about fractious, if 
you want to talk about bombs in each other's 
offices, that was all going on there. But the 
Reagan administration made a very intense 
commitment to supporting the so-called contras in 
Nicaragua. They spent lots of money and lots of 
man-hours of people in the State Department, the 
C-I-A, and the National Security Council, knocking 
heads together among the opposition. They never 
succeeded in getting them completely united, but 
they got them to the point where they were focused 
on fighting the Sandinista regime, rather than on 
fighting each other. If we would devote that kind 
of seriousness of purpose to supporting the Iraqi 
oppositionists, then I think we would have a heck 
of a lot more leverage in getting them to work in 
the way we need them to work.

Francke:  I don't want to exonerate those factions 
and we're really talking here about the two major 
Kurdish parties who fought one another from 1995-
1996 -- but I do want to add that, in many ways, I 
do fault the U.S. because they did not give the 
Kurds in northern Iraq enough moral support and 
enough political support. And in the absence of 
such support and such commitment by the U.S. as 
Josh said, the coast was cleared for intervention 
by regional countries, especially in northern 
Iraq. I went to northern Iraq between 1992 and 
1995 several times, and I had an opportunity to 
see how easy it was, not only for Saddam from 
Baghdad, but also for all of Iraq's neighbors and 
all countries in the region, to meddle in the 
situation.

Host:  You mean Turkey and Iran?

Francke:  I mean a great number of countries and 
not necessarily only Iraq's immediate neighbors, 
but certainly Iraq's immediate neighbors. I think 
this was an area which was very young, which was 
very experimental, which was weak in many ways in 
terms of being able to stand up on its own feet. 
The United States did not give it the moral and 
political support that was required. And there 
were many things at the time that we urged the 
U.S. to do and the kind of assistance we asked the 
U.S. to take up, which was absent. 

Host:  Do you think it is forthcoming now?

Francke:  Well, I think the U.S. seems to be a 
little more serious. I don't know how serious.

Host:  Let me ask this question, because you spoke 
of the opposition on the ground, which I presume 
means inside Iraq. Max van der Stoel, as you know, 
has been the U-N rapporteur on human rights in 
Iraq for many years. He recently resigned and, 
when he did, he said, as he had before, that there 
are very few parallels to this situation within 
Iraq since World War Two because it is so 
extraordinarily repressive. How, under a tyranny 
of the magnitude that Saddam Hussein conducts, can 
an opposition possibly have effect?

Mack:  Let me just say that, along with the U.S. 
support for the opposition -- something we've been 
talking about here -- the U.S. can do a tremendous 
amount to provide an environment in which not only 
the opposition outside the country, but all those 
Iraqis opposed to the regime inside the country, 
can thrive, and from which they can take 
encouragement. One of the most important things 
that the United States could be doing is to make 
it far more clear than we have before that Iraq 
after Saddam Hussein is going to be an important 
and valued part of the regional system. 

Host:  But President Clinton has said that.

Mack:  Not really. He's been very clear about the 
anti-Saddam parts of our policy. He hasn't been 
nearly so clear about the pro-Iraq parts of our 
policy. By pro-Iraq, I mean a clear statement that 
the economic sanctions would come to an end, a 
clear statement that there would be debt relief, 
that there would be relief from sanctions and 
reparations, that the United States would support 
in the international community measures to do 
this. There needs to be some light at the end of 
the tunnel for people to encourage them to take 
the extraordinary personal risks and risks for 
their families that are involved in opposing this 
regime actively from inside the country. 

Host:   I'm afraid that's all the time we have 
this week. I'd like to thank our guests - Joshua 
Muravchik from the American Enterprise Institute; 
David Mack from the Middle East institute; and 
Rend Rahim Francke from the Iraq Foundation - for 
joining me to discuss the future of Iraq. This is 
Robert Reilly for On the Line.

Anncr:  You've been listening to "On the Line" - a 
discussion of United States policies and 
contemporary issues. This is --------.





24-Nov-1999 11:22 AM EDT (24-Nov-1999 1622 UTC)
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Source: Voice of America
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