Cruise missle strike in Iraq - 6 September 1996

The best informed Middle Eastern correspondent I know sent a dispatch in mid-week from Tehran, after he'd reported from Iraq the American response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Kurdish enclave. He mentioned the bewildering reaction of old friends and old enemies and old neutrals. The Russians found the Clinton action unacceptable. China went along with them. The Arab League condemned it. Britain and Germany strongly approved, but, as I talk, give no sign of committing their heavy guns. The reporter ended:

"The bombings reveal the broader strategic morass in the Middle East today. Which is by no means the fault of America. There aren't three countries in the Middle East today aligned with one another. The bottom line is that the half-finished Gulf war and the half-finished Arab-Israeli peace process and the half-baked US containment policies in both Iran and Iraq have failed to produce a new order in the Middle East."

A lesson I learned long ago was that to comment on a military action days before the commentary will be heard, is a sure recipe for panicky cables: Stop previous talk. Stop. Stand by. Stop. A prescription for starting all over again.

So I think the most useful thing I can manage is to do a memory sketch of the Desert Storm war, remind ourselves of a disturbing popular complaint after President Bush ordered a ceasefire after the four days ground war, and to notice the revival of that complaint this past week, as soon as American cruise missiles attacked Saddam's military and command targets as an answer to his invasion of the so-called "protective zone" which, remember, was set up by the United Nations to give a safe haven to the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. Saddam swore to respect that zone in the ceasefire agreements he signed.

Now what is this, I've called "disturbing complaint?" We heard it in the moment of our acclaimed victory in February 1991 and we're hearing it again today. It is simply why didn't we finish off Saddam's retreating forces in the first place? The first place being the Desert Storm war.

The question is there, very muted, in the dispatch I just read to you, "the half-finished Gulf war." It was practically shouted, not muted at all, by a well-known news commentator last Sunday in questioning President Bush's former Secretary of State, Mr James Baker. Why the so-and-so, he cried, didn't we march all the way to Baghdad and eliminate Saddam? Mr Baker's response, after a gasp at the word "eliminate", was a whoa Dobbin, and a sigh.

He had no time to lecture the man in the appalling responsibility the United States would undertake if it was faced with uniting the whole of Iraq. But he did convey that this popular protest, heard from all sorts of people – sophisticated and dumb – reflects a root misunderstanding of, first, what the Desert Storm war was about, and, second, a bland unawareness of the terrible political and ethnic complexity of a country that many of us think of as wholly and ruthlessly under the heel of Saddam Hussein.

First. Iraq, considered as a battleground, is larger than California: 170,000 square miles – mostly of mountains, barren lowlands, desert and marsh. Secondly, the Desert war was a United Nations war, started after Saddam had failed to meet a United Nations ultimatum. The mission, which was spelled out in the UN Security Council resolution, was precise: to oust Saddam from Kuwait. That was all, and that was done. And his retreating forces were pursued far to the north, beyond a line drawn to protect the Kurds with whom Saddam had been at war for a very long time. The last time he became notorious for massacring Kurds with chemical weapons.

It would be a massive job for the United States or for Nato to try and occupy, let alone unite the whole of Iraq. Saddam himself has been trying to do that for almost twenty years.

His bête noire, or rather he has two: the Kurdish minority in the north and the Shi'ites in the south. Iraq is 90 per cent Muslim. Seventy per cent of them are Arabs. The 20 per cent Kurds are non-Arab Muslims. Now we know that the bête noire that has caused him most trouble, is what we conveniently call the Kurdish "minority." But now you have to say which Kurds? All the Kurds are a disturbing militant minority, and, until they can have their own kingdom, they live as a nuisance to the established governments wherever they live, and they live as a sort of dissenting nation in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan.

But in Iraq, under Saddam and before, they have been pitiless victims of massacres, murderous raids, atrocities, long distance shelling, which did not conquer them but did succeed in breaking up any political unity they tried to establish. So now there are two main political parties. One ironically named the Kurdish Democratic Party, which gave up under the endless bombardment and atrocity raids and has joined Saddam. It is now engaged in a civil war with the other still resisting party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Saddam's aim from years before the Kuwait...diversion – which admittedly was a very crucial one to us of denying oil to the Western allies – his main aim has been to unite all of Iraq. In wanting to obliterate or finally tame all Kurds, he's wanting something that Turkey is also interested in, not to mention Iran, against whom most of us remember Saddam fought a bloody war for eight years. However this comes out, none of us is ever likely to understand which nations sided with Saddam and which didn't, how many alliances were made and broken inside the Arab world alone.

But there is an intelligent and cold-blooded answer to our why-didn't-we go-all-the-way-boys. If we choose to ignore the fact that Desert Storm was a United Nations war and that it had only one defined mission: to get Saddam out of Kuwait, the mission was accomplished. And when the ground war ended, there were about eighty-five thousand Iraqi casualties and miraculously few allied casualties. I'm sure most people remember that we all thought it was a mighty victory. The unforgettable, long helicopter panning shots of the retreating troops, the miles and miles of bombed and abandoned tanks, weapons of all sorts. All these vivid pictures confirmed our conviction, our wish anyway, that Saddam Hussein was finished once for all. President Bush's popularity rose to a figure no president had ever dreamed of: 92 per cent. But once Saddam refused to admit defeat and started raids into the Kurdish territory again, it took only a little time for a lot of people and many congressmen to raise the cry: "Why didn't we go to Baghdad?"

The general impression – reinforced, as I say, from our television coverage of the war – was that his crack division had been broken and his arsenal shattered. He has remained a constant irritation to the UN, to the United States, to the allies who fought in the Desert war – in the main by being so cunningly and maddeningly defiant in resisting United Nations inspection of his nuclear weapons and chemical warfare deposits.

But it comes out now that well, maybe the missiles and the high-tech weapons Saddam might use in a large war were immobilised or spotted and destroyed, but he was left with a considerable arsenal, with lots of tanks and armour and airplanes, and of course thousands of soldiers. Those crack troops we thought were broken are very much on the mend. Heaven and Saddam alone know how much ability he has to drop lethal chemicals and to use battlefield nuclear weapons.

Some of you may wonder what effect President Clinton's first and subsequent actions will have on the political campaign. Well Mr Dole, when the word of Saddam's new invasion came in, happened to be about to address of all people, the American Legion. He had on his old fatigue cap and nobody doubted that he spoke as an old soldier as well as a presidential candidate. Indeed implicit but never said out loud in any of his campaign speeches, is the silent reproof of Mr Clinton as a student safe in Oxford leading protests against the Vietnam war. What would he say now?

Mr Dole has been taking heavy pots-shots at President Clinton's foreign policy in general, and in his daily rounds on the stump he's been, not very convincingly, deploring Mr Clinton's weakness. I don't think Mr Dole, who as a candidate is given access to the administration's intelligence, I don't think he'd been briefed about Saddam's intentions, which were foreshadowed weeks ago by his troop movements up to the border of the protective zone.

Anyway on Tuesday, at the mention of the phrase "cruise missiles", the Dole inner circle held a quick caucus. Mr Dole couldn't go on calling the president weak and at the same time imply that calling Saddam's bluff was a deed too strong. Mr Dole has been saying all along that whenever an enemy baits America or performs an act of aggression, it will be met with force and promptitude by all Americans irrespective of party.

So one of Mr Dole's chief advisers – a senator, for five years a Vietnamese prisoner of war – Mr Dole called him on Tuesday a "true hero." Well this hero warned Mr Dole that to defy or criticise the president in the Iraq crisis would leave him open to a fair charge of ignoring or undermining the security interests of the United States. So to the general satisfaction, for the time being, Mr Dole supports the president "without hesitation or reservation".

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