Bush’s Iraq Delusion : Baker testifies on a failure in Administration’s policy

Secretary of State James A. Baker III has conceded under pointed questioning from the House Foreign Affairs Committee that with “20-20 hindsight” it’s clear that the Bush Administration’s policy toward Iraq in the period leading up to its 1990 invasion of Kuwait “didn’t work.”

Indeed it did not, but there was no need to wait for the passage of time--and the prompting provided by Los Angeles Times articles based on internal Administration documents--to judge that the policy was fatally flawed.

Informed foresight, not postwar hindsight, should have told top Administration decision makers that their policy was based on a fundamental delusion.

That policy, as Baker summed it up, turned on the belief that the United States could influence Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to moderate his international behavior if it was generous in providing economic and political support. As things worked out, it was generous to a fault.

REAGAN’S MISTAKE: During Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran--a war that Hussein, in another example of self-delusion, started under the expectation of a cheap and quick victory--the Reagan Administration provided Iraq with valuable intelligence information about Iran’s military dispositions. Additionally, it appears to have turned a blind eye to “inadvertent” transfers of American weapons to Iraq by Saudi Arabia, something specifically prohibited by Congress.

Later, the Bush Administration greatly expanded the level of U.S. support. It approved the sales of “dual use” sensitive technology, which can have both military and civilian applications. Some of that equipment, it’s now known, was diverted to Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. And it approved billions of dollars in agricultural loans, some of which were guaranteed by Washington, to buy food; Iraq illicitly used part of the money to buy more weapons.

All this, as Baker explains it, was aimed at using “economic incentives to try and moderate Iraqi behavior.” Here is precisely where delusion became controlling.

BUSH’S MISTAKE: Iraq, in terms of its policies, is Saddam Hussein, and so the first question to be asked before undertaking any experiment in behavior modification was whether Hussein’s documented megalomania could in fact be brought under control by incentives from outside.

Hussein had never made any secret of his determination to dominate the Persian Gulf, of his territorial claims against Kuwait, of his eagerness to be accepted as leader of the Arab world by dint of superior military strength and demonstrated ruthlessness toward all who oppose him. He had additionally ensured his grip on power in Iraq by systematized abuses of human rights using unspeakable brutality.

His record, then, was long, consistent and profoundly sordid. Yet top decision makers in the Bush Administration persuaded themselves that they could effect change.

They were wrong, and not just wrong but derelict in ignoring the specifics of Hussein’s behavioral history and the larger lessons of experience.

Appeasement of a dictator--and that is exactly what the “incentives” policy aimed at--is invariably ineffective. The fact to be acknowledged is not just that American policy “didn’t work” but that Hussein played the United States for a sucker.