HE'S TOO UNREASONABLE FOR DETERRENCE

Artículo de Kenneth M. Pollack en "The International Herald Tribune" del 29-9-02

Saddam the miscalculator

WASHINGTON Some have suggested relying on deterrence to deal with Saddam Hussein. They admit that the containment regime which constrained Iraq during the 1990s has frayed beyond repair, but they argue that Saddam can be kept in check by American threats to respond to any new Iraqi aggression with force - including nuclear bombardment, if necessary.

Certainly deterrence is a seemingly reasonable alternative to war; after all, it worked with the Soviet Union for 45 years. Unfortunately, those who seek to apply it to Iraq base their views on a dangerous misreading of Saddam. .Proponents of deterrence argue that he will not engage in new aggression, even after he has acquired nuclear weapons, because he is not deliberately suicidal and so would not risk an American nuclear response. But Saddam is often unintentionally suicidal - that is, he miscalculates his odds of success and frequently ignores the likelihood of catastrophic failure.

Saddam is a risk-taker who plays dangerous games without realizing how dangerous they truly are. He is deeply ignorant of the outside world and surrounded by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear. When Yevgeni Primakov, a Soviet envoy, went to Baghdad in 1991 to try to warn Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, he was amazed to find out how cut off from reality Saddam was. "I realized that it was possible Saddam did not have complete information," Primakov later wrote. "He gave priority to positive reports ... and as for bad news, the bearer could pay a high price." These factors make Saddam difficult to deter. His calculations are based on ideas that do not necessarily correspond to reality and are often impervious to outside influences. In 1974, for example, he attacked the Kurds even though Iran had been arming and supporting them (with American and Israeli support). He believed, for reasons unknown, that Iran would do nothing to help its proxies. The shah responded decisively, sending troops into Iraqi Kurdistan, mobilizing his army and provoking clashes along the border. To stave off an Iranian invasion that he feared would end his regime, Saddam signed the humiliating Algiers accord, which gave Iran everything it wanted from Iraq, including contested territory.

In 1980 Saddam attacked Iran under the misguided assumption that the new Islamic Republic was so unpopular that it would collapse after one good shove. He embroiled Iraq in a war that nearly destroyed his own regime.

In 1991, rather than withdraw from Kuwait and head off a war, he convinced himself that the American-led coalition would not attack and that even if it did his army would win. The best evidence that Saddam can be deterred comes from the 1991 Gulf War, when he refrained from using weapons of mass destruction because of U.S. and Israeli threats of nuclear retaliation. But a closer look at the evidence provides a more ominous lesson. .When Secretary of State James Baker met with Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the war, the letter he presented from President George H.W. Bush to Saddam threatened the "severest consequences" if Iraq took any of three actions: use of weapons of mass destruction, destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields or terrorist action against the United States. This did not stop Saddam from destroying the oil fields or dispatching hit teams to the United States, so the notion that he is easily deterrable is dubious. .Saddam did not use chemical munitions against coalition ground forces because he initially believed that he did not need them to prevail. Nevertheless, he did keep stockpiles farther back from the front, suggesting that he planned to use them if the battle did not go as he expected. As it happened, the coalition's ground advance was so rapid that Iraq's forces never had a chance to deploy those weapons.

A better case can be made that Saddam was deterred from launching Scud missiles tipped with chemical or biological agents at Israel for fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation. But even here the evidence is hardly perfect. After the war, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that Iraqi engineers knew that their warheads were awful and probably would have done little damage if they had worked at all. For this reason, Saddam might have considered the conventionally armed Scuds to be the most potent arrows in his quiver.

After the Gulf War, UN inspectors and Iraqi defectors revealed a set of secret plans and orders issued by Saddam, which are disturbing at best. .He had set up a special Scud unit with both chemical and biological warheads that was ordered to launch its missiles against Israel in the event of a nuclear attack or coalition march on Baghdad. Since no one outside Iraq knew about this unit and its orders, it was clearly intended not as a deterrent but simply as a force for revenge.

In August 1990, after he realized that America might challenge the invasion of Kuwait, he ordered a crash program to build one nuclear weapon, which came close to succeeding. (It failed only because the Iraqis could not enrich enough uranium in time.) His former chief bomb-maker has said that Saddam intended to launch the bomb as a revenge weapon at Tel Aviv if his regime were collapsing.

Iraqi defectors and other sources report that Saddam told aides after the war that his greatest mistake was to invade Kuwait before he had a nuclear weapon, because then America would never have dared to oppose him. What all this suggests is that if Saddam is able to acquire nuclear weapons, he will see them as tools to achieve his goals - to dominate the Arab world, destroy Israel and punish the United States. He will brandish them to deter the United States from interfering in his efforts to conquer or blackmail neighboring countries.

Both invasion and deterrence carry serious costs and risks. But a well-planned invasion, one that mustered overwhelming force and the support of key allies, could keep those risks to a minimum. Staking hopes on a policy of deterrence would run the much greater risk of postponing the day of reckoning to a time of Iraq's choosing. .Given Saddam's history of catastrophic miscalculations and his faith that nuclear weapons can deter not him but America, there is every reason to believe that the question is not one of war or no war, but rather of war now or war later - a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them.

The writer, a former CIA analyst of the Iraqi military, is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." He contributed this comment to The New York Times.