Before Baghdad burns

The author of a new book on Iraq cautions that a U.S. invasion to get rid of Saddam Hussein could be even more dangerous than his weapons of mass destruction.

By Laura Miller

Jun 18, 2002 | Behind the closed doors of the Bush administration, officials are debating the advisability of invading Iraq, a nation it has accused of sponsoring international terrorism. The announcement that Bush is proposing a new national security doctrine legitimating preemptive strikes against regimes or groups that attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction has strengthened many observers' conviction that it's just a matter of time before the U.S. acts on the desires of the hawkish side of that debate and moves in to remove Saddam Hussein from power, finally "finishing the job" that many felt was left undone at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. Others are urging caution, or at least more consideration of that fateful step than some U.S. leaders currently seem inclined to take. Sandra Mackey, a journalist and the author of books on Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Arab world and Iran, as well as the new "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein," is one of those voices.

The U.S., Mackey argues, must ask itself which is the greater potential danger: the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam probably has and may use, or the radical destabilization of Iraq that is likely to follow if his regime is toppled by the West. She worries that U.S. officials barely understand the nation they intend to liberate and foolishly believe in "some exaggerated expectation that the removal of the despot of Baghdad will solve all of Iraq's problems and all the challenges to the United States in the Persian Gulf." Instead, she insists, however monstrous Saddam is, it's likely that U.S. involvement in his ouster could lead to something even worse: chaos, violence and even more anti-American fury in a region of key geopolitical significance. Mackey, who has traveled in Iraq and throughout the Arab world, describes a nation ravaged and debilitated by decades of tyranny and years of U.N.-imposed economic sanctions, a nation that will need to be painstakingly rebuilt once the tyrant is gone.

Salon spoke with Mackey at her vacation retreat in South Carolina.

Whenever the question of U.S. military intervention in another nation arises, as we recently saw in Afghanistan, there's usually a certain amount of griping from the know-nothing elements of the American public along the lines of "If everybody there hates the government so much but they don't want the U.S. to take it out, why don't the people just overthrow it themselves?" Saddam Hussein is hated both inside and outside of Iraq, yet he's been running the nation for decades. What keeps him from being ousted?

There are at least two reasons. To begin with, the Iraqis are so fragmented into ethnic, sectarian and tribal groups that there's a great fear that overthrowing Saddam Hussein might give your adversary or rival an advantage. This is particularly true among the Sunni population of Iraq, which is roughly 20 percent, and the group that Saddam Hussein belongs to. The Shia Arabs make up 60 percent of the population and there's this rivalry between the groups.

Then you've got the Kurds, who have their own agenda. With all these rivalries, it's very difficult to get together the cross-communal alliances to overthrow a government, particularly a government like Saddam Hussein's.

The second reason is that Saddam Hussein has been able to put the whole country in a prison. His security forces are so extensive. They permeate every aspect of life in the country. They are very good at picking up any plots against Baghdad, and they move very effectively to put those down. I'd also add a third reason. Since 1991 and the end of the Gulf War, the imposition of the sanctions has so decimated the Iraqi economy that survival is all anyone is thinking about. They really don't have the energy to rise up and overthrow the tyrant in Baghdad.

You write that the current problem the U.S. has with Iraq has its roots in what you call "the neglect of and arrogance toward the Arab world" on the part of the U.S., going back to the foundation of Israel. How is what we're facing today the result of that?

For Iraq specifically, we've never looked at it as Iraq itself, but always as a part of another problem, like the Cold War.

We only asked ourselves how we could use Iraq to do something else?

That's exactly right. After the revolution in Iran in 1979, it becomes, How are we going to use Iraq to fend off more Islamic revolution? Then, after the Gulf War, while we were trying to control Saddam Hussein's arms, we should have been thinking of the next step beyond. Is there anything we can do to prepare the Iraqis for the time when he's gone? I think there were some good reasons for the sanctions -- I don't just slam them in the book -- but they destroyed the middle class, and those are the people that you really need to get the society back on track once he's gone.

The U.S. got involved in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but once the Soviets were forced out we abandoned the country to fall into chaos -- and the Taliban and scores of al-Qaida training camps were the result. Do you think we're in danger of opting for another shortsighted action if we intervene militarily in Iraq, something where the blowback consequences could be equally perilous?

Yes. And Iraq is even more dangerous to our interests than Afghanistan. Once the Taliban and al-Qaida are dismantled, the Afghans will have to sort out their tribal conflicts, but it's not going to have a lot to do with the strategic balance. But Iraq is sitting there between the Persian Gulf and the pipelines bringing oil and natural gas out of those new fields in Central Asia, and with Iran in the east and Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all around there, you can't afford chaos. You can't just walk out and leave it. So that means, if there's an invasion, is the U.S. going to be in Iraq for the next umpteen years trying to maintain some order?

Next Page: Mackey responds to the New York Times review

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