Should we have allied with Saddam?

[Túrin Turambar]

Note – I don’t fully subscribe to this argument, but I think it’s curious that it’s never come up.

Critics of the Iraq War like to point out that Saddam Hussein was not allied with or in any way a supporter of Al-Qaeda. They usually don’t dispute that he was a brutal and potentially dangerous dictator, only that there wasn’t a case for attacking him in 2003. What they don’t do, though, is follow this argument through to a further possible conclusion. If Saddam was not allied with the Islamic fundamentalists against us, could he have become our ally against them?

The liberal democracies have seen off two major threats in the last century – fascism and communism. In both cases, they allied with regimes and movements just as brutal and authoritarian.

Winning the Second World War would have been much harder without the U.S.S.R. The U.S. and U.K. knew of Stalin’s authoritarianism and brutality. They had seen the Soviet Union aggressively attack its neighbours, like Finland, without provocation. They had fought against before in the early 1920s, and knew that, given the chance, communism would overthrow and stamp out liberal democracy wherever it could. Yet they allied with it the moment it shared a common enemy with them in Nazi Germany. The cost was high – a stronger Soviet Union emerged from the war, and many countries fell beneath the communist yoke. Yet Fascism was destroyed.

Fast forward to the 1980s. Te U.S. Government adopts the Reagan doctrine – any regime, even an authoritarian one, which is not communist is a potential ally. This led to the west co-operating with terrorists like the Contras, religious extremists like the Afghan Mujahedeen, and dictatorships like South Korea. This time, though, the carrot was bigger and stick smaller – communism was overthrown and millions freed without a major war being fought, and the bad guys that emerged from the rubble weren’t as numerous or strong as they had been in 1945. Granted, co-operating with villains wasn’t critical to the western victory in the Cold War, but it still made it easier than if it had tried to concurrently fight them.

So here we are now, trying to fight a war against another anti-western, anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideology in Islamic extremism. It has us in its sights, but also secular Muslim regimes. The Ba’athist Governments of Iraq, Syria and Libya are (or were) for all their (many) faults, secular. They live under threat from an Iran-style revolution, just as we live under threat from a 9/11-style attack. They could not, of course, be trusted, but trust isn’t needed for a relationship like this. Not with U.S. carrier fleets in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf at any rate. All that we need is for them to hunt out and destroy any Al-Qaeda cells in their country, a la Egypt in its many crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Jihad. It’s in their interests, after all. To get back to Iraq, we could have made life easier for Saddam in exchange for him giving up all ambitions to threaten and/or conquer his neighbours, and for keeping Al-Qaeda out of his country. Colonel Qadaffi proved reasonable when offered sufficient reward and threatened with severe-enough punishment. Granted, they were our enemies in the cold war, but that hasn’t stopped us from working with the Russians. The locals can do all the legwork for us, while we can get onto more important things (like winning the war in Afghanistan, and hunting out terrorist cells in the west). We might even be able to do something about the whole Israel-Palestine thing.

Then, when Al-Qaeda and its ilk are wiped out, we can get back to dealing with them. South Korea went democratic as the Berlin Wall fell, don’t forget. It isn’t nice, and it doesn’t really fit with the whole ‘friend of freedom and democracy’ image, but as Machiavelli would not doubt tell us, if it works…

[The One Ring]

Very interesting thesis, Lord. M.

(You start such interesting threads!)

I would have to give this some serious thought. It's not clear to me that the Ba'ath governments of Iraq and Syria would have agreed to enter into alliance with us because I'm not sure they perceive the enemy as common to both of us as we perceive him to be. But I have to give this some thought.

Also, regarding the anti-Communist alliances that the history books believe us to have made, these require consideration at more than face value as well. We did not ally with the Contra, for example, because they were anti-Communist (that being the one war with which I am intimately familiar without having to look in a book), though that was the causus belli presented to the American people because it required no new packaging. I suspect that our support for the KMT in Taiwan and the South Korean government may have had similar hidden agendae behind them, given what we know about our entry into Vietnam, but I don't know enough about these situations personally without doing a bit of studying.

Jn

[solicitr]

Isn't that in effect what we're doing? The military-aid package announced today principally benefits, besides democratic Israel, authoritarian Egypt and monarchical Saudi Arabia.

[baby tuckoo]

Absolutely yes, LM.


Those who know me (OK, Misha) will know that I've said something similar for a long while. The U.S. has a long history of uncomfortable alliances with tyrants, some even worse than Saddam. We have done it for the sake of regional stability or for the sake of market stability or for the sake of nuclear stalemate. But we have rarely (I'm trying to think of an instance) become aggressive simply because "he's evil."


Saddam would be doing our dirty work with Iran at the moment, as he did in the past.

[solicitr]

One teeny-weenie problem: why would Saddam play nice? After all, he sponsored the Abu Nidal group, American-killers, and tried to have George I assassinated. And he might just have been slightly ticked off at us over that Kuwait thing.

[Túrin Turambar]

One teeny-weenie problem: why would Saddam play nice? After all, he sponsored the Abu Nidal group, American-killers, and tried to have George I assassinated. And he might just have been slightly ticked off at us over that Kuwait thing.

We couldn’t trust him, but we do have a carrot (fewer sanctions and all) and a stick (air strikes) to persuade him with. Also, we’re not really asking him to do anything against his own best interests (not start a war he’d be bound to loose, and go after people who want to overthrow him anyway).

[solicitr]

But the carrot-and-stick thing didn't even persuade him to stop playing shell games with the UN weapons inspectors- where (apparently) the only thing at stake was maintaining a bluff!* Nor did it stop him from ripping off the Oil-for-food program, nor continuing to pay bounties to Palestinian suicide bombers. No, Saddam was a writeoff. A sick bastard, and I'm glad he's dead- even if the price has proven to be too high.



*However, I'm still not convinced that the story Saddam flew his stockpiles out to Syria is entirely a wingnut fantasy. And it's certainly the case that the Iraq Survey Group, which famously found no WMD stockpiles, did in fact find considerable dispersed-and-concealed production assets, and concluded that Saddam had both the ability and the intention to resume production once sanctions were lifted (somehow a part of the report nobody remembers)- most of this stuff the UN inspectors had never seen.

[Frelga]

This is an interesting topic, LM. In brief, I think that this sort of "enemy of my enemy" thinking has resulted in multiple disasters. The enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend, if we have no interests in common other than the common enemy. Some day I'll have the time to put down my fairly lengthy musings on it. Meanwhile, I'll let Jon Stewart speak for me.

[solicitr]

The sad irony is that the Neocon project was in part an attempt to *break* our historical reliance on 'our bastards' to maintain stability. The (naive) assumption was that if we could jumpstart democracies in the region then we could make our alliances with the 'good guys' rather than pricks like the House of Saud.

When pigs fly.