Graduate alumnus and director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute Harvey Sicherman on war in Iraq and peace in the Middle East.
Interview by Samuel Hughes | Photo by Jim Graham
Two days after the September 11 attacks on the United States, Dr. Harvey Sicherman G’67 Gr’71 wrote a brief, trenchant analysis of the “Bleak New World” facing the United States. Sketching the new geopolitical landscape in the Middle East, he wrote: “As for Iraq (or the Taliban in Afghanistan), only hot lead and cold steel are likely to make any impression.”
It was a characteristically blunt and tough-minded appraisal by Sicherman, who has served as director of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) since 1993. It was also apposite: Unless something changes quickly (I write this in early February), Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is about to get a harsh taste of those metals.
Sicherman is in a sense the intellectual heir of the late Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupé Gr’46, the legendary Penn political-science professor, diplomat, author, and theorist who founded the FPRI in 1955—and who, in private conversation, often referred to Sicherman as “brilliant.” (Originally connected with the University, the FPRI went its own way in 1970; a number of Penn faculty are still connected with it.) Though he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University—and is guest-teaching a political-science course here this semester—Sicherman is hardly the stereotypical Ivory Tower scholar. He served as a special assistant to one secretary of state (Alexander M. Haig, from 1981-82); on the policy-planning staff of another (James A. Baker, 1991-92); and as a consultant to a third (George Schultz in 1988), as well as to former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr. Gr’74 (1984-97).
A prolific writer, Sicherman recently co-edited (with Lehman) America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How To Fix Them, and is the author of Palestinian Autonomy, Self-Government and Peace(1993), along with innumerable essays for the FPRI on such disparate subjects as “Judaism and International Relations,” “From Russia Without Love,” and “China’s Three Ifs.”
On January 21, Sicherman sat down to talk about Iraq and other matters Middle Eastern. Although it was still a week before President Bush gave his State of the Union speech, Sicherman had no doubt that a war was indeed on its way.
“The President is very shortly going to show what he’s made of,” he said firmly. While readily conceding that war is a “lousy option”—he quoted the 19th-century Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke’s maxim that “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”—Sicherman maintained that “all the other options have been tried,” and failed.
“The sanctions didn’t work,” he said. “The attempted overthrow from the inside or by rebellion from the outside didn’t work. Saddam is not being contained. Everybody’s cheating on the sanctions. And he’s buying weapons. And we have no proof that he’s not developing weapons of mass destruction, he having kicked the inspectors out” until recently.
As for why it should be up to the United States to go after Saddam, his answer was simple: “There is not a single other major power in the world that can send a decisive military force to the Persian Gulf.”
And so to war.
What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
Gazette: You recently wrote that while Iraq could not be definitively linked to 9/11, Saddam was “in the same trench as Osama, if not in the same foxhole.” What exactly does that mean? It’s not as though there’s a lot of love lost between them.
Sicherman: It means that they both see terrorism, the targeting of civilians, as a way to achieve political gain. And Saddam has a long record of either using terrorism or supporting terrorist groups in this kind of work.
Gazette: With or without the proverbial smoking gun, I gather you have no qualms about invading?
Sicherman: The Iraqis are guilty until they prove their innocence. That’s not an American proposition; that’s a U.N. proposition, and that’s been the proposition since 1991 when Saddam was, in effect, convicted of aggression. The third part of the resolution is: If he doesn’t come clean, then severe consequences will follow, which could include military action. Everybody agrees that Saddam has not come clean. He did not come clean in his 12,000 pages of toilet paper that he handed in as a declaration. What Saddam is doing now is saying to the inspectors, “Well, you know, I didn’t come clean, but stick with it a while longer and maybe I will come clean.” This is his standard operating procedure.
His intention is to tie up the American army in a desert until the summer, as long as he can, and maybe something else will happen: something between the Israelis and the Palestinians, or the American army in Kuwait and other places will be subject to losses because his friends and agents will be attacking it—as they can.
If the United Nations can allow Saddam to say, as he has said since 1998 until very recently: “Get out of here, stop bothering me, I’m going to do what I damn well please—and oh, by the way, I don’t have any [weapons of mass destruction], even though I haven’t answered these questions,” then you might as well close up the U.N. Security Council.
After all, why did he kick out the inspectors? Because he’s got something cookin’ in the bathtub! I mean, that’s a reasonable, real, logical conclusion one could reach from that. If he’s left alone, and he cooks long enough, and he buys enough stuff, then you’re going to see this fellow revive as a power capable of intimidating his neighbors, some of whom are our friends, others of whom are our allies, and eventually, if he gets the rockets, he’ll go further afield.
This is not Milosevic in Yugoslavia, whose ambitions ran a little north of the Drina River. This is a megalomaniac of global proportions. Why would we want to wait until he gets those weapons of mass destruction to do something about it?
In his September 12th speech to the U.N., Bush emphasized this, but I don’t think the administration has emphasized it enough: If you don’t observe a cease-fire, if you violate it, there has to be a penalty for that. And if you don’t have a penalty for it, then we might as well forget about the U.N. Security Council.
Gazette: How much more difficult is it to invade Iraq? I mean, we had a relatively easy time of it in Desert Storm and Afghanistan. But if you’re actually invading Iraq—going into Baghdad, maybe trying to lift him out of one of his presidential palaces or something—isn’t that a much riskier and nastier business?
Sicherman: I think his military strategy is to hold the population of Baghdad hostage for his last stand. A lot of that depends upon the population’s willingness to go along with Saddam. It’s possible to get people in cities without destroying the whole city in the process. I don’t think that we contemplate leveling Baghdad in order to get at Saddam.
Saddam, to do his worst, has to have people who are willing to obey his orders. That’s a question mark. We’ve already begun the campaign of saying to people, except for Saddam and his immediate entourage, “Everybody else here is an Iraqi patriot unless you prove otherwise,” meaning that you’ll live for another day unless you oppose us. When you get into that city, it’s the intelligence information that’s going to be most significant. We don’t have to go block-to-block, house-to-house, or do any of those things. We can get the right intelligence about where he’s hiding and what he’s doing. Moreover, if you can confine him to a particular site, several blocks or whatever, you can level those blocks. Obviously it’s not what we prefer to do. And a siege of Baghdad that went on for any length of time I think would be a big mistake. Because that would let him do what he wants to do, which is to hold that population hostage and to make the civilians suffer, which he will lay on us.
So, yeah, it’s risky. There’s no doubt about it. I think the risk is much less for a field army, because the way we do war will break the Iraqi army I think very quickly. It’s more how loyal Saddam’s people will be to him. I don’t think that most of the people are going to go down with Saddam. What’s the point?
Gazette: What other wildcards are there in there, and do you think they’ve been taken into account? I would say the Kurds would be a big one …
Sicherman: Well, one wildcard is that the Kurds decide it’s time to make the break for statehood. And the key to that is to capture Kirkuk and the oil fields, and that brings in the Turks. That’s why we have persuaded the Turks, who I would say are careful and thorough, that the opening of a front on their side by an American army would also guarantee that we capture the oil fields and the Kurds don’t. That’s why a campaign on the northern side is important. In the doing of it, of course, things can always go wrong. But I think that part’s foreseen.
Chemical and biological warfare is another wildcard, although I would say that people who are familiar with the art of warfare don’t really use those weapons because they’re really very hard to control. In the chemical attacks or anything like that, a lot of the chemical is burned up in the explosion. This is even more true with biological elements. And the idea that Saddam is giving his people their freedom to act in the event that they’re attacked, which is the story that came out of the 1991 war—number one, I don’t believe it. And number two, even if Saddam did, what does that mean? If they surrender, they live for another day. If they use these weapons, there won’t be any trials. And there won’t be any prisons.
Just put yourself in the commander’s shoes: You’re cut off from your headquarters. You don’t know what’s happened to Saddam. All you know is that there’s an overwhelming force coming down on you. So therefore, you go out and use chemical weapons?
Gazette: So you think the instinct for survival will take over?
Sicherman: Well, there’s an instinct for survival and also the history of Middle Eastern warfare, which indicates that individual commanders in armies that are like Saddam’s army have a very healthy skepticism about reports of victory that are coming out of central headquarters. The one lesson that all the sub-commanders took out of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was: Go on what’s in front of you, not on what you hear!
Gazette: How much do you worry that an American-led attack on Iraq, coupled with Israeli-Palestinian violence, could produce an even more violent response from the rest of the Muslim world?
Sicherman: It’s already fairly violent. I don’t expect that more people are going to be recruited for terrorists because they’ve already recruited a good number.
The issue is not whether people will like or dislike this. The issue is the extent to which they will attempt to overthrow their own governments for having gone along with the Americans. I would say that the Egyptian government and the Saudi government, they’d really rather not shoot protestors. But if those protestors threaten to overthrow their governments, they’ll shoot them.
The history of the modern Middle East holds no example of a popular revolution that overthrew an Arab government. None. And I think that’ll be the case here, too. If the military campaign is sharp, short, swift, and Saddam is gone, I think that disturbances will be absolutely minimal. I don’t think Saddam has a popular following beyond that which he bought. And that’s not the people in the streets. There may be popular sentiment for giving the Americans a black eye, but the people in the Middle East are very well attuned to distinguishing between the winners and the losers. And there ain’t any percentage in going with the losers. So the various Arab governments even now are saying things, doing things, trying to show that they went the last mile to avoid the war, while assuring the United States that if push comes to shove, they’re not standing in the way.
And the fact that they may not like us, or they’ve developed a dislike for us across the Middle East and whatnot, I don’t care. They don’t like outsiders; they’re face-to-face with a history of failure over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago, the Arab Middle East was at the same economic level as the Asian countries. Where are they now?
So sure, the reigning ideology across the region is, “We didn’t get anywhere because somebody stole it from us, and somebody did something to us.” Victimization. Well, that’s too damn bad.
Gazette: Last July you wrote, “The next six months will tell whether Bush’s Palestine has a chance.” Does it still?
Sicherman: Bush is the first president to say that he’s in favor of the Palestinian state, and following the war, obviously that’s going to be the next order of business. His father did [more or less] the same thing. And out of the 1991 war came the Madrid Peace Conference; out of the Madrid Peace Conference came Oslo. And that was all very hopeful until fairly recently. So, a lot of things could happen following the war that would offer some hope. But that very much depends on the outcome of this Iraqi business.
Arafat obviously hopes that he will then once again be the center of international attention. But my view is that about ten minutes after Saddam leaves, bye-bye! So long as the president of the United States sticks with what he said last June, which was, “Yes, within three years you can have a Palestine. No, if you continue terrorist actions and if you insist on Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as it exists now as the custodians of the state.” I don’t know anyone with any intelligence who now thinks that giving a state into the hands of Arafat is a formula for anything other than a violent failure.
Gazette: You mentioned people in the Middle East being highly attuned to winners and losers, but Arafat seems to be one who is not.
Sicherman: No, but he’s very well attuned to mass sentiments among the population. That’s why he, in the end, has always missed his chances. Most Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution; they want a one-state solution. And what Arafat has said is, “OK, you’ll get one state. First we get our state, and then, through the refugees, five years later we get the second state.” That’s his two-state solution. So he borrowed himself a little bit of maneuvering room, but he’s attuned to the popular sentiment.
Well at a certain point, a leader has to tell the truth to the population. Arafat doesn’t do that. So he proclaims that, “You have to deal with me because I’m the only man who can deliver.” And then when it comes time to deliver, he says, “I can’t deliver because the people are against it.” Well, other people may monkey around with that, but I think Bush’s approach is, “If you promise and you fail to deliver, don’t bother me. I won’t deal with you.”
Gazette: You have said that “It cannot be stated often enough that outside plans and pronouncements are helpful only when the parties are already inclined to work through the deal.” Where are we on that now with Israel and Palestine?
Sicherman: Where we are is that the Palestinians need a leadership that proves that it’s interested in working through the deal. The Israelis need to be convinced that there is a plausible partner on the other side. And you don’t have that yet.
Gazette: How would your old friend, Robert Strausz-Hupé, compare—or how would you compare—this current Protracted Conflict with the last one?
Sicherman: It’s less dangerous in that we don’t face the possibility of nuclear annihilation—which, at some points in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had the capacity to do that. But it’s more dangerous in the sense that this is a hot war. And because the forces arrayed against us aren’t so easy to find, and because they do want to attack the United States right here at home, which the Soviets were always careful not to do. In that sense it’s more diffuse and it’s more difficult—and it’s more dangerous.
And there isn’t the same sense of danger felt throughout all of our alliance, either. During the Cold War, people were more or less under the same threat. The tactical arguments had to do with what you did about that and who was the beneficiary of one approach or another approach. Today it’s very uneven. In the United States, we were attacked; in other countries, they weren’t. And it’s also much more of a test of our moral fiber, and our democratic values. The reason being that the Cold War got started in the aftermath of World War II. There was a great patriotic wave in the United States. There was a great sense of a victory. People were accustomed to making sacrifices for their country, thinking about the national interest, et cetera.
The Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bang. We’ve come off 10 years that resemble the 1920s more than they resemble anything else. And the American culture at home has come under a lot of attack. Western civilization, multiculturalism, questions about the American identity. When you started the Cold War in the ’50s, you had very little of that.
So it’s not a war of civilizations. It’s a test of our civilization. And if I had to think of what Robert would say on such an occasion, he would say: “Less dangerous physically. Therefore, more dangerous, ultimately, to the survival of American values.”
