Control

The ultimate tragedy of the Iraq War, at least for those who are still alive, is that the United States and could have been rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 with no economic investment, no major military commitment, and without the undying enmity and hatred that it has engendered due to the 2003 invasion. The United States passed on this golden opportunity, however, because of one illusory and self-defeating obsession: control.


In March of 1991, Saddam Hussein was on the ropes. The American-led coalition had mauled his armies, eviscerated his infrastructure, and made it clear to his subjects that his delusions of grandeur had set their country back by a half century. Emboldened by the exhortations of George H.W. Bush, they revolted against the Ba'athist regime.


You don't hear much about it these days, but the twin insurgencies of 1991 (Kurdish and Shi'ite) gained control, albeit briefly, of all of Iraq except for Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. Saddam was finished, and he knew it. Unless...unless he was allowed to crush the rebellions with massive, indiscriminate, Saddam-ish levels of violence visited over 80% of his country.

Normally, this would not have been a difficult thing for Saddam to conceive or to execute, but in March of 1991, there was a mitigating factor. Actually, there were 500,000 mitigating factors. American soldiers. In Iraq.


The half a million Americans sent to drive Saddam from Kuwait were in the south of Iraq following their victory, and thousands of them witnessed the slaughter of Shi'ite rebels. The United States could have had its regime change in 1991 with minimal cost. Americans were then in a physical, moral, legal, political, and logistical position to ensure the demise of Saddam Hussein at very low cost.


A direct entry into the fight would not have been necessary. An invasion and occupation of Baghdad would not have been necessary. All it would have taken would have been for the Americans to ban Saddam Hussein's government from flying helicopters. Hussein was banned from flying planes in the ceasefire agreement. The helicopter loophole was allowed, so the story goes, to facilitate travel for the government to more readily rebuild its shattered country. What the helicopters were used for in practice was to slaughter tens of thousands of the 80% of Iraqis who rose up against their government.


If Americans had banned the use of helicopters by the Ba'athists, one of two things would have happened. The first possibility is that the Ba'athists would have been defeated by the insurgency, as they would have been deprived of their one remaining way to project power over their brutalized nation.

The second is that the Ba'athists would have ignored the ban, being fully aware that to give up their helicopters would be to give up their power. In this scenario, if one knows anything about American weaponry, those gunships could have been shot out of the sky from miles away without Americans being in the line of fire, therefore assuring the success of the insurgents with no American blood being spilt.

Instead, the Bush 41 administration opted to allow the massacres to be carried out, literally in full view of heavily armed American soldiers in many cases. Of all the crimes that Bush 43 catalogued in enumerating his faux justifications to break every international law on the books, this was the bloodiest: the Ba'athist regime killed between 100,000 and 300,000 Kurds and Shi'ites in early 1991 when, as opposed to Hussein's other crimes, the United States could have reached out and stopped him.

Why? Why did the United States not allow Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a goal which the United States clearly endorsed, to say the least, a dozen years later? Why did the United States allow Saddam Hussein to commit his greatest crime right in front of American soldiers? The answer, sad and simple to say, is control.

The American policy was that, while it would be great to be rid of Saddam Hussein, it would be a disaster if Iraqis were liberate themselves. No, only Americans could liberate the Iraqis. Since liberating the Iraqis in 1991 would have cost a great deal of American blood (because Hussein actually had WMD at that time), the Iraqis would have to wait until the Americans were ready.

It did not matter that Iraqis were willing to give their lives to liberate themselves, nor did it matter that they had already wrested control of most of Iraq from the dictator; what mattered, all that mattered to the Americans, was that an indigenous revolution like the one killed in its crib in 1991 would not have been under total American control. And that, of course, was unacceptable.

And what has been the cost of this insistence on total control? Well, the "realists" among us need not worry ourselves about the quarter million Iraqis slaughtered in a month after taking George H.W. Bush seriously when he called on the Iraqi people to overthrow Hussein to stop the bloodshed of the Gulf War. After all, we didn't kill all those people; Saddam Hussein did. And it gave us pretty good propaganda to use against him twelve years later.

And the "realists" could also brush aside the 500,000 deaths during the 1990's that resulted directly from the embargo on medical and water purification technology entering Iraq. After all, those deaths were "collateral damage" in the effort to "contain" Saddam Hussein, who, of course, was only still in power because the United States had allowed him to crush the insurgents of 1991.

So far, we're up to about 750,000 civilian dead in the interest of avoiding an "unpredictable" regime in Baghdad in 1991. That's more than the American dead of World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Put together. And they were all civilians.

In 2003 the United States decided, twelve years after the Iraqi people had, that it was time for the Iraqi people to be "liberated". That liberation has cost one million lives since the American invasion. Millions more have fled Iraq. If you look at the population of Iraq in 1991 and the population of Iraq now, nearly a third are dead or driven out of their country. That's the equivalent of 100 million of Americans. All for control. If this is control, pray tell, what does chaos look like?

The irony is that, as it turns out, the United States was not exactly able to "control" the situation after it "liberated" the people who were deemed too "unpredictable" to liberate themselves when they had the chance. The last five years are the story of how, in retrospect, we may have wanted to allow the insurgents to win in 1991.

There would have been chaos and bloodshed, yes, but does anybody really believe that a third of the country would have been killed or exiled? That thousands of American soldiers would die? That a trillion American dollars would be spent? That the United States would be reviled around the world? That whatever regime took hold in 1991 would have refused to sell us oil? That they would have drank it instead?

Put plainly, does anyone really think the Iraqis are better off having been "liberated" by us than they would have been had they been allowed to "liberate" themselves twelve years ago?

This is what the desire for control reaps. We insisted in doing it our way, and we are totally unable to control the situation we have created. We create a paradigm where Iraq is our problem, where we cannot allow an "unpredictable" situation there, where the Iraqi people must not be allowed to liberate themselves and where their deaths, all million and more of them, are erased as being born of noble intention, while Saddam's victims, far fewer than ours, serve to justify our own killing.