In short, Saddam Hussein gained nothing and in August 1988, he disengaged from the war and began to regroup his forces. He approached the West and it is in this period that it was announced around the world that Saddam had changed dramatically. He even declared at one point that he was ready to settle with Israel. The United States decided to sell him food, etc. And European countries helped him to develop his 200 kilometer gun and the nuclear programs that we know today. Saddam made a coalition with Egypt and Jordan, America's closest friends in the Arab world, all this in order to make himself respectable. And that was also the reason that in April 1990, just four months before he invaded Kuwait, U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad April Gillespie was convinced that Saddam Hussein could be considered almost an ally of the U.S. and he (mis)understood, as he said later, that Gillespie had given him the green light to invade Kuwait. In August 1990, he struck.

Consider Saddam's action from a strategic point of view. What Saddam could not achieve on the eastern part of the Gulf, since Iran proved to be stronger than he had anticipated, he tried to do on the other side of the Gulf, hoping to gain an additional 10% of the world's oil reserves plus a seashore from which he could secure the building of the huge navy he had been working for. He tried to achieve this when he thought his rear was safeguarded, he had the West with him, and the Arab world was solidly behind him because he posed as the representative of that world. He thought that everything would go quite easily. The rest of the story everyone knows. Saddam again had badly miscalculated.

When President Bush decided to go to war, he announced to the world some four or five main objectives. One, he said, was to liberate Kuwait from the grip of Saddam Hussein. Second, was to democratize or liberalize the Gulf area. Bush had received assurances from the sheikhs that after the war they would begin a process of modernization and liberalization. Third, he said his aim was to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Fourth, he said, the allliance would break the military backbone of Iraq.

At the end of the war none of these goals was achieved. The United States liberated Kuwait, but Kuwait was not liberalized. The sheikh ran away during the war and returned to rule in the same autocratic way he did before. In other words, for many Kuwaitis, especially those in the opposition, it was a limited liberation. Second, Saddam Hussein was not removed. Third, the backbone of the army was not broken because the forces that were in the front line and collided with American forces when they started to advance towards Iraq were really groups of militias, no more than that. The Republican Guards, who are the backbone of the army, withdrew towards Baghdad and remained almost intact. Today it seems comical, but in order to save his air force from destruction by the Americans, Saddam turned to Iran, the previous enemy. Over a decade later, the planes are still in Iran.

Now that both Iran and Iraq have been identified as two out of the three states in the axis of evil, they are trying to repair the relationship between them. Iraq is said to be allowing, for the first time, overflights of its territory by Iranian shipments of weapons to Syria, and from there to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah is on the front line now, collaborating with the Palestinians, so these overflights have become vital to the Iranians. There was a time when Iran sent them via Turkey into Syria, but the Turks, because of the coalition with the Americans, do not allow any weaponry to go to Hezbollah via Turkish territory. Therefore, this is Iran's only way of transferring the weaponry.

After the second Gulf War, the first President Bush sought to present the war as a great success despite its limited achievements. He went so far as to announce a new world order, with the Madrid Conference and a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict part of that proposed new "order." This too failed at the end, just as liberalization in the Arab world never happened. You might say that the sheikhs continued to dance sheikh-to-sheikh in support of each other and were not creative about any innovations in their regimes.

This said, the problem is not confined to Saddam Hussein. Short of an improbable replacement of Saddam by the type of liberal democratic government unknown in the Arab world (and the even more unlikely persistence of such a government), the problem of Iraq's ambitions is likely to remain and sooner or later a successor regime is also likely to seek control of a seashore on this or that side of the Gulf. Saddam himself has not given up, and during the Clinton administration tried twice to bring the crisis to a boiling point. He succeeded in making the UN withdraw and pledged he is not developing the weapons that he is of course developing. Neither Saddam's impatience nor his ambitions have changed and, given Iraq's structural characteristics, even a successor is likely to pursue the same policy.

Outpost               - 4 -               March 2002