Phase II and Iraq

By Henry A. Kissinger

The Washington Post
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page B07

As military operations in Afghanistan wind down, it is well to keep in mind President Bush's injunction that they are only the first battles of a long war.

An important step has been taken toward the goals of breaking the nexus between governments and the terrorist groups they support or tolerate, discrediting Islamic fundamentalism so that moderates in the Islamic world can reclaim their religion from the fanatics, and placing the fight against terrorism in the context of the geopolitical threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to regional stability and to American friends and interests in the region. But much more needs to be done.

Were we to flinch, the success in Afghanistan would be interpreted in time as taking on the weakest and most remote of the terrorist centers while we recoiled from unraveling terrorism in countries more central to the problem.

Three interrelated courses of action are available:

(a) To rely primarily on diplomacy and coalition-building on the theory that the fate of the Taliban will teach the appropriate lessons.

(b) To insist on a number of specific corrective steps in countries with known training camps or terrorist headquarters, such as Somalia or Yemen, or those engaged in dangerous programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, such as Iraq, and to take military action if these steps are rejected.

(c) To focus on the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in order to change the regional dynamics by showing America's determination to defend regional stability, its interests and its friends. (This would also send a strong message to other rogue states.)

Sole reliance on diplomacy is the preferred course of some members of the coalition, which claim that the remaining tasks can be accomplished by consultation and the cooperation of intelligence and security services around the world. But to rely solely on diplomacy would be to repeat the mistake with which the United States hamstrung itself in every war of the past half-century. Because it treated military operations and diplomacy as separate and sequential, the United States stopped military operations in Korea as soon as our adversaries moved to the conference table; it ended the bombing of North Vietnam as an entrance price to the Paris talks; it stopped military operations in the Gulf after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

In each case, the ending of military pressure produced diplomatic stalemate. The Korean armistice negotiations consumed two years, during which America suffered as many casualties as in the entire combat phase; an even more intractable stalemate developed in the Vietnam negotiations; and in the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein used the Republican Guard divisions preserved by the armistice to restore control over his territory and to dismantle systematically the inspection provisions of the armistice agreement.

Anti-terrorism policy is empty if it is not backed by the threat of force. Intellectual opponents of military action as well as its likely targets will procrastinate or agree to token or symbolic remedies only. Ironically, governments on whose territory terrorists are tolerated will find it especially difficult to cooperate unless the consequences of failing to do so are made more risky than their tacit bargain with the terrorists.

Phase II of the anti-terrorism campaign must therefore involve a specific set of demands geared to a precise timetable supported by credible coercive power. These should be put forward as soon as possible as a framework. And time is of the essence. Phase II must begin while the memory of the attack on the United States is still vivid and American-deployed forces are available to back up the diplomacy.

Nor should Phase II be confused with the pacification of Afghanistan. The American strategic objective was to destroy the terrorist network; that has been largely accomplished. Pacification of the entire country of Afghanistan has never been achieved by foreigners and cannot be the objective of the American military effort. The United States should be generous with economic and development assistance. But the strategic goal of Phase II should be the destruction of the global terrorist network, to prevent its reappearance in Afghanistan, but not to be drawn into Afghan civil strife.

Somalia and Yemen are often mentioned as possible targets for a Phase II campaign. That decision should depend on the ability to identify targets against which local governments are able to act and on the suitability of American forces to accomplish this task if the local governments can't or won't. And given these limitations, the United States will have to decide whether action against them is strategically productive.

All this raises the unavoidable challenge Iraq poses. The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States. The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical. Iraq's policy is implacably hostile to the United States and to certain neighboring countries. It possesses growing stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, which Saddam Hussein has used in the war against Iran and on his own population. It is working to develop a nuclear capability. Hussein breached his commitment to the United Nations by evicting the international inspectors he had accepted on his territory as part of the armistice agreement ending the Gulf War. There is no possibility of a negotiation between Washington and Baghdad and no basis for trusting Iraq's promises to the international community.

If these capabilities remain intact, they could in time be used for terrorist goals or by Saddam Hussein in the midst of some new regional or international upheaval. And if his regime survives both the Gulf War and the anti-terrorism campaign, this fact alone will elevate him to a potentially overwhelming menace.

From a long-range point of view, the greatest opportunity of Phase II is to return Iraq to a responsible role in the region. Were Iraq governed by a group representing no threat to its neighbors and willing to abandon its weapons of mass destruction, the stability of the region would be immeasurably enhanced. The remaining regimes flirting with terrorist fundamentalism or acquiescing in its exactions would be driven to shut down their support of terrorism.

At a minimum, we should insist on a U.N. inspection system to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, with an unlimited right of inspection and freedom of movement for the inspectors. But no such system exists on paper, and the effort to install it might be identical with that required to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Above all, given the ease of producing biological and chemical weapons, inspection must be extremely intrusive, and experience shows that no inspection can withstand indefinitely the opposition of a determined host government.

But if the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is to be seriously considered, three prerequisites must be met: (a) development of a military plan that is quick and decisive, (b) some prior agreement on what kind of structure is to replace Hussein and (c) the support or acquiescence of key countries needed for implementation of the military plan. (…)

But it will be far more difficult than Phase I. Local resistance -- especially in Iraq -- will be more determined and ruthless. Domestic opposition will mount in many countries. American public opinion will be crucial in sustaining such a course. It will need to be shaped by the same kind of decisive and subtle leadership by which President Bush unified the country for the first phase of the crisis.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.