Why Bombing Is a Bad Idea by Fareed Zakaria

February 23, 1998, U.S. Edition

Why Bombing Is a Bad Idea
Either invade Iraq or continue to contain Saddam.
By Fareed Zakaria

Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength," the scholar Eliot Cohen observes, "because like modern courtship it appears to offer gratification without commitment." Washington has once again fallen in love with the idea of limited airstrikes against Iraq.

But what precisely will a 10-day bombing spree accomplish? It will not remove Saddam from office. Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. forces in the gulf, has dismissed the possibility of a rebellion: "It's a very rock-solid dictatorship, where it's hard for opposition to take hold." It will not kill Saddam. His entire police state, his guards, his dozens of palaces and their underground bunkers are designed for one purpose -- to protect him.

Bombing Iraq will not destroy its capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. Virtually all military officers in and out of service agree that any such damage will be limited and temporary. One described the mission bluntly -- "putting holes in the desert." So why do it? Frustration. Washington is understandably unhappy at Saddam's refusal to allow U.N. inspectors into his palaces. But will one more volley of missiles change his mind? Having withstood more than five weeks of bombardment during the gulf war, having forgone $ 150 billion in oil revenues over the last few years, isn't Saddam likely to wait it out? Most likely he will do what he has done the last few times the United States took military action -- make some concessions and then slowly continue to subvert U.N. sanctions. In that case the bombing will have achieved only two objectives -- strengthening the anti-American forces in the gulf and weakening the anti-Saddam coalition worldwide.

America has often used limited force to push negotiations, with dismal results -- it was called "signaling" in Vietnam. Force is not an instrument of communication. If Washington uses force, it should use massive, sustained air, sea and land power with no time limits and a clear objective -- the destruction of Saddam Hussein and his regime. That strategy has its costs. It would anger many nations around the world. And since it would mean the occupation of Iraq, it would force Washington to take on an imperial responsibility for postwar Iraq.

If the administration is unwilling to go down this path, one wonders why it has been raising the level of rhetoric -- and expectations -- around this crisis. To "bomb and hope," which appears to be the current strategy, will result in many of the costs of invasion with few of the benefits.

We should recognize that -- despite what you hear on television -- it is Saddam who is in trouble, not the United States. He is an international pariah, a dictator with a hollow army presiding over an impoverished country. It has been hard to get Arab nations to form a new anti-Saddam coalition because they understand this reality. In 1991 he posed a mortal threat to them, and they quickly rallied around America to defeat him. Today they see him as a tyrant, but one who is caged. Iraq is under virtual military occupation, with no-fly zones covering most of the country and American satellites watching its army's every move. Its industrial base has been decimated, its oil revenues blocked.

It is true that he continues to manufacture weapons of mass destruction -- chemical and biological. But arms in and of themselves are not deadly. (In the 1970s the nuclear-freeze movement had a similar moral abhorrence of nuclear weaponry, utterly ignoring the political and strategic context in which it existed.) It depends on whether they can be used. Saddam may have some lethal chemicals, but not the missiles and planes he needs to get them to their targets. Besides, he knows full well that were he to use them against Israel or the American forces, it would invite a devastating response. His preferred activity is murder, not suicide.

Saddam remains hemmed in as long as the United States and its key allies vigilantly maintain a strategy of firm, unyielding containment. Containment strategies tend to work, whether against the Soviet Union or North Korea (or even in Macedonia), because time is on America's side. A $ 6 trillion economy can afford to maintain tens of thousands of troops and a fleet in the gulf for years, even decades. The United States, after all, has had troops in South Korea for 50 years. For Saddam, on the other hand, every day brings forth a new danger.

General Zinni has said that there is no quick fix in Iraq. True, but the slow fix is working, as long as we do not lose faith in it. In love and war, there's no substitute for commitment.