With military aid, the Iraqi resistance can overthrow the Butcher of Baghdad.
Tony Blair is wrong. The choice on Iraq is not simply for or against war. There is a third way. We can help the Iraqi people topple Saddam Hussein. With serious military aid from the international community, Iraq’s opposition movements, especially the Kurds and Shias, have the power to demolish the dictatorship.
Although belatedly, and perhaps cynically, Tony Blair is right to highlight Saddam’s human rights abuses as the moral basis for regime change. There can be no toleration of a leader who imprisons, tortures and murders. Saddam must be removed from power.
The issue is not whether there should be regime change, but how. Blair is wrong to suggest that invasion is the only option. Apart from potential civilian casualties, a US-UK attack on Iraq has a major military drawback.
It could turn into a long and bloody urban war in the streets of Baghdad, with very high civilian and military casualties. Forced to engage in house-to-house street fighting, British soldiers may come home in body bags for weeks, months or even years. Assuming, optimistically, that our troops take Baghdad relatively easily, they will have to remain in Iraq for at least three years to prevent a counter-coup by Saddam loyalists. The price could be high, with allied patrols being picked off in hit-and-run attacks by pro-Saddam terrorist squads.
There may be parallels with the way the French were bogged down in Algiers, and the British in Aden, during the 1960s. We could get caught up in a protracted, difficult-to-win guerrilla war against Saddam’s Republican Guard and remnants of his regular forces.
Saddam has learned lessons from the first Gulf War. He will avoid battles in the open desert, where his forces are vulnerable to superior allied fire-power. Instead, he is likely to concentrate his troops in densely populated cities, especially Baghdad, using the population as human shields. Most of his soldiers will go underground, posing as civilians, to fight an irregular war with no big military hardware and no set piece battles. Defeating this shadowy, invisible enemy in unfamiliar terrain may be difficult for our troops.
There is also the problem of Iraqi public opinion. To sustain a change of regime in Iraq, we need the Iraqi people on-side. Right now, only a minority of Iraqis favour a western invasion. Although they hate Saddam, most are also against a US-UK attack. They fear civilians will suffer greatly and rightly dislike the neo-imperial connotations of an allied ‘liberation’ where they are treated like pawns, with no say or control over their own destiny.
Saddam is already successfully exploiting nationalist sentiment. Playing the patriotic card against the ‘western imperialists’, he is deflecting and diffusing opposition to his regime. High civilian casualties in a war would make matters worse, provoking hostility towards our forces. A US-UK occupation of Iraq could easily become a Vietnam-style fiasco, where we lose the hearts and minds of the civilian population and face growing popular resentment and eventual outright rebellion.
There is, however, a credible alternative to a western invasion. The international community could aid an uprising by the Iraqi people – a Vietnam-style guerrilla war in tandem with a ‘people power’ campaign of civilian revolt.
This ‘change-from-within’ strategy would involve providing massive material aid to the Iraqi opposition forces with a genuine base of popular support inside the country: the Kurdish nationalists of the DKP and PUK, and the Shi’ite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Instead of creating proxy forces, as the US did with the contras in Nicaragua, the aim must be to empower the authentic voices of dissent inside Iraq to achieve their own home-made democratic revolution.
Compared to western invasion, a domestic insurrection would be far more popular with the people of Iraq. Fiercely nationalistic, they rightly dislike the idea of a US-imposed regime. Saddam’s troops are also more likely to defect to an internal revolt than to the armies of ‘imperialism’.
Modelled on the non-violent ‘people power’ methods that bought down the dictatorships in Romania and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, an organised campaign of civilian resistance could seriously undermine Sadam’s ability to govern, weakening his authority and strengthening the Iraqi people’s confidence that he can be overthrown. This resistance could include workplace go-slows, mass sick leaves, industrial and military sabotage, and the non-payment of rents and taxes. These tactics were used with some success by the Danes to frustrate the Nazi war effort during the Second World War, by the Indian independence movement to end British colonial rule, and by black South Africans to make apartheid unsustainable.
But given Saddam’s ruthless repression, it is unlikely that civilian resistance methods alone would be sufficient to overthrow him. Armed struggle is now, regrettably, the only certain way to get rid of Saddam.
The international community should train and arm the Iraqi opposition forces, especially the Kurds and Shias who already have viable armies. This military assistance could be along the lines of the support we gave the Free French forces and the French resistance from 1940-45 – only more substantial. An even better model of successful military aid is the assistance given by the Russians and Chinese to the Vietnamese people, which enabled them to defeat the technologically superior US forces. If Vietnam can defeat the mightiest military power in history, then surely, with a little help, the Iraqi people can get rid of Saddam?
The Kurds have 80,000 troops, and the Shias have 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Both are desperate to take on Saddam. But they need more training and better weapons: tanks, helicopter gun-ships, fighter planes, heavy artillery and anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. The West sold Saddam many of the weapons he used to murder his own people. Isn’t it now time we redressed the balance by arming his victims so they can fight back?
Equipped with the latest weaponry, guerrilla armies could be assembled in the northern and southern no-fly zones, where Saddam’s air force cannot penetrate. From these safe-havens, the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south could launch military strikes; taking most of the rural areas and small towns with relative ease. This would create large liberated areas around the major cities, freeing millions of Iraqis from
Saddam’s control and bringing tens of thousands of new recruits into the ranks of the free Iraqi forces. With pincer movements from the north and south, Baghdad could be encircled and under siege within six months.
The liberation of most of Iraq would leave Saddam holed up in the capital – isolated, surrounded and doomed. With his aura of invincibility shattered, there would be mass defections by his troops and the civilian population would be emboldened to open revolt; paving the way for the guerrilla armies to liberate Baghdad.
This internally-based civilian and military rebellion avoid the taint of neo-imperialism and lessen the likelihood of Muslim states rushing to Saddam’s defence. It could also reduce the danger of a wider conflict, drawing in Israel and its Arab neighbours, and minimise the risk of provoking a global Islamic Jihad against West.
Regime change cannot, ethically, be imposed from outside in a flourish of revived western imperialism. Removing Saddam should lead to a democratic state, and not to a new form of autocratic rule by a US military governor and a US-imposed puppet regime. A home-grown change of regime by Iraqis and for Iraqis is the key to democracy, human rights and regional peace.
A democratic Iraq could become a beacon for human rights throughout the Middle East; giving the Arab people their first taste of freedom in a region that is dominated by semi-feudal Islamist dictatorships, notorious for their brutality, nepotism and corruption. Perhaps, in time, it might even encourage similar, long overdue regime change in neighbouring tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria.