Phyllis Bennis analysis

Michael Enwright's introduction :

At the heart of George W. Bush’s attitude is a simple proposition: Saddam Hussein is a dangerous despot who threatens his neighbours, the West, the U.S. specifically, and oppresses his own people. He possesses weapons of mass destruction and has demonstrated a will to use them. He is on the verge of acquiring the ultimate weapon, nuclear warheads. All of this has created a drumbeat for war coming from the West Wing of the Bush White House. The latest polls show a majority of Americans, about 54%, support a war against Iraq, but that number is down from the summer, and is falling. In two days, Americans vote in what is seen by many as a referendum on the war. Phyllis Bennis knows how she will vote on Tuesday. She is a scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, has written on a wide variety of foreign policy issues, and is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis. And she has also marched publicly against the war. She is a driving force in the National Network to End the War Against Iraq. And she is in our studio in Washington. Good morning.

Phyllis Bennis:
Good morning. Good to be with you.

ME:
Nice to have you here. I wonder if at the outset we could stipulate a couple things. One, Saddam Hussein is a monstrous tyrant and the world would be better off without him. And two, he poses a threat to his own people and others. Do you agree with those two points?

Phyllis Bennis:
I certainly agree on the first, though I think my country in particular bears a certain amount of responsibility for making that regime as aggressive and ruthless as it has been. We provided, after all, the seed stock for biological weapons, the targeting information for using howitzers filled with poison gas, and a host of other various assistance methods to the regime of Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s. On the second point, we have to be a little more cautious. A threat to whom? A threat of terrible repression to his own population, absolutely. A threat outside his own borders–not so clear. Countries in the region certainly do not think so. Kuwait does not think so. There is not a country in the region, even including Kuwait – which one would think, if anyone was urging war against Iraq, it would be Kuwait, who was, after all, the last country to be invaded by Iraq – and even Kuwait is saying, don’t go to war, it is going to make the situation worse. So, a threat to Iraq’s own population, absolutely. A threat outside his own borders, not so clear.

ME:
Given the fact that Hussein is in violation of something like 16 UN resolutions which were supposed to be binding, and given other claims of the administration, this would seem to provide a case for war. Would you go ahead and make the case against that?

Phyllis Bennis:
I think we have to be very careful before we say what makes a case for war. If we were going to go to war against every country that violates supposedly binding UN resolutions, we would be in serious trouble. We would be at war against Israel, which has violated 29 UN resolutions supposed to be binding, we would be at war against Morocco, which has violated a Council resolution against its occupation of the Western Sahara; we would have been at war for years against Indonesia for its occupation of East Timor, which was condemned by the UN. We would be at war against Turkey for its occupation of northern Cyprus, which has been condemned and it has been demanded that it end its occupation by the Security Council. So the notion that a resolution has been violated, does not mean war. The UN Charter, the supreme instrument of international law, is something that needs to be taken very seriously. The Charter says that all non-military solutions must be used before there can even be consideration of military solutions. What we face in the case of Iraq is the US claiming that the Iraqi violation – which, there have been violations, no doubt – can only be answered by war. In fact they have said that, regardless of the opinion of the UN, whether the Security Council votes for war or not, they are prepared to go to war unilaterally with whatever two or three or five countries might support that war.

ME:
Let’s look at the perceived or actual threat – and you can take issue with that. A couple weeks ago in the series I talked with David Kay, former chief arms inspector for the UN in Iraq, and he raised an interesting point. In an age of weapons of mass destruction, running all the way up the scale to nuclear warheads, are nations allowed to respond only following a devastating and deadly attack?

Phyllis Bennis:
I think the answer to that is generally yes. If that were not the case, nations around the world would be attacking my country, because of our arsenal of chemical, biological and especially nuclear weapons which we have shown a propensity to use. Let’s not forget, only one country in the world has ever used nuclear weapons, and it is not Iraq. Let’s not forget that the UN Charter is very clear on the question of self-defence and how it might be expanded. The language of article 51 is very explicit in saying that a country has the inherent right of self-defence "if" – and that is the key qualifying word – if an armed attack occurs. Now there have been discussions, and David Kay is certainly referring to this, that the threat of an imminent attack could be interpreted in the same way, could count, if you will, in the same way as justifying self-defence. But there is no imminent attack in Iraq. No one thinks that Iraq is imminently going to have nuclear weapons. The way that we hear about it is designed to sow fear, not to provide information. We hear for instance, that if Iraq received the fissile material–the fundamental radioactive material – and had massive international support, it could have a nuclear weapon in six months to a year. That may well be true. But the same is true of Cameroon. Any country that gets its sources from outside, and has massive international help, could do that in six months to a year. What we need to do is to look at the terms of the resolution which called for regional disarmament, that’s article 14 of Resolution 687. It said that disarming Iraq should be a step towards the establishment throughout the region of the Middle East of a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them.

ME:
OK, let me give you a quote. This was asked of a president, "what would happen if Saddam were allowed to continue to build his terrible weapons. He would conclude that the international community has lost its will, and that he can go right on to build an arsenal of devastating destruction and some way, some day he will use it." That’s not George Bush, that’s Bill Clinton.

Phyllis Bennis:
I think Clinton had a similar view to Bush, and I was against Clinton’s moves towards war as much as I am against Bush’s. This is not a partisan issue. The reality is we do not know what Iraq is or is not building. I support efforts to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. It was not finished by UNSCOM, the earlier weapons inspectors agency. That agency was considerably undermined by the US when it turned the agency of arms inspections and disarmament into an arm of US intelligence agencies. But the fact remains that their work was not finished. At the time they left Iraq in December 1998, they said they had found and accounted for 90 to 95% of what they were looking for. That means the job is not done. For four years we heard from US governments, one after another, saying we want inspectors back in, that’s the problem, and finally Iraq caved, they allowed the inspectors in. Then the US said it had changed its mind, that it wasn’t going to accept yes for an answer. That’s unacceptable. We need the inspectors to go back in, and we need to take seriously what they find, and not to use them as a pretext for a war.

ME:
Let me ask you about the humanitarian argument. We know he does terrible things to his own people. Throughout the 90s there was a great cry from liberals and from the left and to get into the Balkans and stop ethnic cleansing. Now Saddam is a lot worse than Slobodan Milosevic. Why can’t we use the humanitarian argument to go in?

Phyllis Bennis:
Now when we talk about humanitarian concerns, we have to be very clear about what we are talking about. For a decade or more the Iraq regime systematically violated the civil and political rights of its population. The US response to that was to impose crippling economic sanctions that left in place those earlier violations. So what you have now is a population that has no freedom of speech, no right of assembly, no opposition parties, no free press, but now they are also starving and don’t have enough water.

ME:
But isn’t that an argument for regime change? That’s George Bush’s line.

Phyllis Bennis:
It is an argument for regime change by the people of Iraq. If we lifted the sanctions and allowed them to rebuild their middle class, their intellectual capacity, I have no doubt there would be regime change. In this country, regime change does not mean a people changing their government. It means assassination and forcible overthrow. It doesn’t mean that that is acceptable under international law.

ME:
If we stay with this phrase "regime change" for a moment, the Bush people have said that what they really want is just that. Now if the threat of war leads to regime change, does that mean that that threat is justified, or was justified?

Phyllis Bennis:
Absolutely not. What does this mean in terms of precedent around the world? What if India decides that it wants a regime change in Pakistan? That means that they can put their new nuclear weapons on high alert, and threaten to use them, and hope that there will be regime change in Islamabad? What if Jordan decided that Israel was going out of control and they need regime change in Tel Aviv? They can put their army poised on the border of Israel and threaten it? What if Israel, more likely, said, we have nuclear weapons, we have 2 to 400 high density nuclear bombs, we are now putting them on high alert, because we want regime change in Syria. This is very very dangerous.

ME:
It appears to us north of the border there is some confusion within the Bush administration. On the one hand we have people who have actually gone to war like Colin Powell and the joint chiefs, and the other people who have never had a uniform on, like Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney, arguing to push ahead. Does this mean that the war is inevitable, or that the debate will rage on within the administration?

Phyllis Bennis:
I don’t think the war is inevitable. I think it is clear that a very influential sector of the Bush administration, the ones you were talking about, we call them the chicken hawks, those that have never fought but want everyone else to fight, are clearly ready to go to war. They have made up their minds, they are moving. These are the ideologues, Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the whole gang of them, Condoleezza Rice appears to be in that camp. On the other hand you have people like Colin Powell, and interestingly enough, the joint chiefs of staff, so you have severe disagreement within the Pentagon itself between the civilian leadership and the military leaders who would actually have to lead their troops into battle. They are the ones saying not so fast. This is not a good idea, this is not a good instrument for – if we are serious about an assassination, you don’t use massive bombing and ground troop invasion to carry out an assassination. We did not do so well in Afghanistan, lest we forget. We managed to kill over 4000 civilians that we know of, but not one of them was named Osama bin Laden. I am not sure of the thousands we are likely to kill in Baghdad alone in the bombing campaign that would begin any war, that any one of those people who die will be Saddam Hussein.

ME:
Address for me if you would what appears to be the most compelling argument in the hearts of a number of Americans, that Rumsfeld in particular is trying to articulate, that is: "Do you want to wake up after another Sept 11 or worse and find that we could have stopped the guy and we didn’t?"

Phyllis Bennis:
The answer to that is that it is based on falsehoods and fear. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Unfortunately many Americans seem to believe that it did.

ME:
Well, the administration would like them to believe that.

Phyllis Bennis:
Exactly. There is a reason they think it. President Bush’s speech in Cincinnati on October 7 was clearly designed to escalate the level of post 9-11 fear that had been going down in the US. People had begun to think again. 9-11 was a terrifying experience in this country. It was a horrifying experience at the human level and it was terrifying to suddenly realize that we were not as immune as we thought ourselves to be, because of our power, because of our size, because of geography, because of oceans, all those things. We were not immune to the events of the world. We could be victims too. And that was a terrifying thing. People were very frightened. But it is also true that people were beginning to think again, and George Bush did not like that. That speech of October 7 was designed to ratchet up the fear, and ratchet down the thinking. Look at what he said. He made a segue: "we must never have another terrible event like 9-11 again and so we must go to war against Iraq," as if there were a connection.

ME:
I guess some people are still thinking, "if people had listened to Churchill in 1931, we wouldn’t have had Auschwitz, we could have stopped it before it got started." There is that kind of rhetoric.

Phyllis Bennis:
You’re right, and that is rhetoric. Saddam is not Hitler. Iraq does not have global reach. The Nazis in Germany had Germany as a rising global power. Iraq is a devastated country with a devastated population. You go to the Iraqi medical schools, as I did when I took the US congressional staff to Iraq a couple years ago, and you find the most recent textbooks they have are ten years old. This is not a country that is capable of that kind of global reach. The notion of military sanctions and preventing the rearming of Iraq is I think a very important task, but if we are serious about it - and I think we should be – we have to be serious about stability in the neighbourhood. That region is the most over-armed in the world, and the US is responsible for about 80% of those arms. You have these tiny little countries surrounding Iraq – also a few big ones like Turkey and Saudi Arabia – but mostly small ones like Oman and the UAE. The UAE is the size of a city with just a couple hundred thousand people, and it has just purchased a batch of the most modern US fighter-bomber jets, the F-118s. They barely have a country big enough for a runway for the planes to take off. What are we thinking here?

ME:
Let me ask you finally. The war in Viet Nam was stopped largely in the streets of America when young people got out and protested --
Phyllis Bennis: Well, the Vietnamese had something to do with it–

ME:
Indeed they did, but is there in the US at the moment, anything, a movement approaching the power of the anti-Viet Nam war demonstrations? Do you think it could stop the train before it gets moving?

Phyllis Bennis:
Absolutely. We are far more advanced at this stage of this war than we were in Viet Nam. It took years during the Viet Nam war, and it took hundreds and thousands of American body bags coming back, before we saw the kind of mass mobilization we have seen in the last couple of months. My office has documented 250 anti-war events that have occurred in just the week before the Congressional vote, in cities, and towns and campuses across this country. Just last Saturday there were something like 150,000 people who marched in Washington and huge demonstrations in a dozen other cities, linked with a global anti-war movement. The numbers of people in this country who are supporting this war are dropping precipitously, and the Bush administration knows this. They are very worried that they are not getting the kind of support in the runup to Tuesday’s election that they were expecting. The result is that they are moderating their rhetoric. We don’t know if they are moderating their practice, but even the troop deployments have slowed down. The rhetoric has softened a bit, and there is no doubt that the members of Congress who voted against the Bush resolution, whose numbers were far higher than we anticipated, was because there were people in the street saying they don’t want this war, who were contacting their members of Congress saying they don’t want the war. And far more of them did than we ever dreamed possible.

ME:
thank you for being with us.

By Phyllis Bennis,
August 15, 2002

Nelson Mandela was right when he said that attacking Iraq would be "a disaster." A U.S. invasion of Iraq would risk the lives of U.S. military personnel and inevitably kill thousands of Iraqi civilians; it is not surprising that many U.S. military officers, including some within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are publicly opposed to a new war against Iraq.

Such an attack would violate international law and the UN Charter, and isolate us from our friends and allies around the world. An invasion would prevent the future return of UN arms inspectors, and cost billions of dollars urgently needed at home. And at the end of the day, an invasion will not insure stability, let alone democracy, in Iraq or the rest of the volatile Middle East region, and will put American civilians at greater risk of hatred and perhaps terrorist attacks than they are today.

Purported Links to Terrorism

It is now clear that (despite intensive investigative efforts) there is simply no evidence of any Iraqi involvement in the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The most popular theory, of a Prague-based collaboration between one of the 9/11 terrorists and an Iraqi official, has now collapsed. Just two weeks ago, the Prague Post quoted the director general of the Czech foreign intelligence service UZSI (Office of Foreign Relations and Information), Frantisek Bublan, denying the much-touted meeting between Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, and an Iraqi agent.

More significantly, the Iraqi regime's brutal treatment of its own population has generally not extended to international terrorist attacks. The State Department's own compilation of terrorist activity in its 2001 Patterns of Global Terrorism, released May 2002, does not document a single serious act of international terrorism by Iraq. Almost all references are either to political statements made or not made or hosting virtually defunct militant organizations.

We are told that we must go to war preemptively against Iraq because Baghdad might, some time in the future, succeed in crafting a dangerous weapon and might, some time in the future, give that weapon to some unknown terrorist group -- maybe Osama bin Laden -- who might, some time in the future, use that weapon against the U.S. The problem with this analysis, aside from the fact that preemptive strikes are simply illegal under international law, is that it ignores the widely known historic antagonism between Iraq and bin Laden.

According to the New York Times, "Shortly after Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, Osama bin Laden approached Prince Sultan bin Abdelaziz al-Saud, the Saudi defense minister, with an unusual proposition. ... Arriving with maps and many diagrams, Mr. Bin Laden told Prince Sultan that the kingdom could avoid the indignity of allowing an army of American unbelievers to enter the kingdom to repel Iraq from Kuwait. He could lead the fight himself, he said, at the head of a group of former mujahadeen that he said could number 100,000 men."

Even if bin Laden's claim to be able to provide those troops was clearly false, bin Laden's hostility towards the ruthlessly secular Iraq remained evident. There is simply no evidence that that has changed.

The Human Toll

While estimates of casualties among U.S. service personnel are not public, we can be certain they will be much higher than in the current war in Afghanistan. We do know, from Pentagon estimates of two years ago, the likely death toll among Iraqi civilians: about 10,000 Iraqi civilians would be killed. And the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as water, electrical and communications equipment, would lead to tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of more civilian deaths, particularly among children, the aged and others of the most vulnerable sectors.

We can anticipate that such targeted attacks would be justified by claims of "dual use." But if we look back to the last U.S. war with Iraq, we know that the Pentagon planned and carried out attacks knowing and documenting the likely impact on civilians.

In one case, Pentagon planners anticipated that striking Iraq's civilian infrastructure would cause "Increased incidence of diseases [that] will be attributable to degradation of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification/ distribution, electricity, and decreased ability to control disease outbreaks." The Defense Intelligence Agency document (from the Pentagon's Gulflink website), "Disease Information -- Subject: Effects of Bombing on Disease Occurrence in Baghdad" is dated 22 January 1991, just six days after the war began. It itemized the likely outbreaks to include: "acute diarrhea" brought on by bacteria such as E. coli, shigella, and salmonella, or by protozoa such as giardia, which will affect "particularly children," or by rotavirus, which will also affect "particularly children." And yet the bombing of the water treatment systems proceeded, and indeed, according to UNICEF figures, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, "particularly children," died from the effects of dirty water.

The most recent leaked military plan for invading Iraq, the so-called "inside-out" plan based on a relatively small contingent of U.S. ground troops with heavy reliance on air strikes, would focus first and primarily on Baghdad. The Iraqi capital is described as being ringed with Saddam Hussein's crack troops and studded with anti-aircraft batteries.

The report never mentions the inconvenient fact that Baghdad is also a crowded city of four to five million people; a heavy air bombardment would cause the equivalent human catastrophe of heavy air bombardment of Los Angeles.

The U.S. and Our Allies

There is no international support, at the governmental or public level, for a U.S. attack on Iraq. Our closest allies throughout Europe, in Canada, and elsewhere, have made clear their opposition to a military invasion. While they recognize the Iraqi regime as a brutal, undemocratic regime, they do not support a unilateral preemptive military assault as an appropriate response to that regime.

Yes, it is certain that if the U.S. announces it is indeed going to war, that most of those governments would grudgingly follow along. When President Bush repeats his mantra that "you are either with us or with the terrorists," there is not a government around the world prepared to stand defiant. But a foreign policy based on international coercion and our allies' fear of retaliation for noncompliance is not a policy that will protect Americans and our place in the world.

In the Middle East region, only Israel supports the U.S. build-up to war in Iraq. The Arab states, including our closest allies, have made unequivocal their opposition to an invasion of Iraq. Even Kuwait, once the target of Iraqi military occupation and ostensibly the most vulnerable to Iraqi threats, has moved to normalize its relations with Baghdad. The Arab League-sponsored rapprochement between Iraq and Kuwait at the March 2002 Arab Summit is now underway, including such long-overdue moves as the return of Kuwait's national archives.

Iraq has now repaired its relations with every Arab country. Turkey has refused to publicly announce its agreement to allow use of its air bases, and Jordan and other Arab countries have made clear their urgent plea for the U.S. to abjure a military attack on Iraq.

Again, it is certain that not a single government in the region would ultimately stand against a U.S. demand for base rights, use of airspace or overflight rights, or access to any other facilities. The question we must answer therefore is not whether our allies will ultimately accede to our wishes, but just how high a price are we prepared to exact from our allies? Virtually every Arab government, especially those most closely tied to the U.S. (Jordan and Egypt, perhaps even Saudi Arabia) will face dramatically escalated popular opposition.

The existing crisis of legitimacy faced by these undemocratic, repressive, and non-representative regimes, monarchies and president-for-life style democracies, will be seriously exacerbated by a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Region-wide instability will certainly result, and some of those governments might risk being overthrown.

The U.S. and International Law

We claim to be a nation of laws. But too often we are prepared to put aside the requirements of international law and the United Nations Charter to which we hold other nations appropriately accountable.

When it comes to policy on Iraq, the U.S. has a history of sidelining the central role that should be played by the United Nations. This increasingly unilateralist trajectory is one of the main reasons for the growing international antagonism towards the U.S. By imposing its will on the Security Council -- insisting on the continuation of economic sanctions when virtually every other country wants to lift them, announcing its intention to ignore the UN in deciding whether to go to war against Iraq -- the U.S. isolates itself from our allies, antagonizes our friends, and sets our nation apart from the international systems of laws that govern the rest of the world. This does not help, but rather undermines, our long-term security interests.

International law does not allow for preemptive military strikes, except in the case of preventing an immediate attack. We simply do not have the right -- no country does -- to launch a war against another country that has not attacked us. If the Pentagon had been able to scramble a jet to take down the second plane flying into the World Trade Center last September, that would have been a legal use of preemptive self defense. An attack on Iraq -- which lacks the capacity, and has not for a decade or more shown any specific intention or plan or effort to attack the U.S. -- violates international law and the UN Charter.

The Charter, in Article 51, outlines the terms under which a Member State of the United Nations may use force in self-defense. That Article acknowledges a nation's "inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." [Emphasis added.] The Charter does not allow military force to be used absent an armed attack having occurred.

Some administration spokespeople are fond of a sound byte that says, "the UN Charter is not a suicide pact." Others like to remind us that Iraq (and other nations) routinely violate the Charter. Both statements are true. But the United States has not been attacked by Iraq, and there is simply no evidence that Iraq is anywhere close to being able to carry out such an attack. The U.S. is the strongest international power -- in terms of global military reach, economic, cultural, diplomatic and political power -- that has ever existed throughout history. If the United States does not recognize the UN Charter and international law as the foundation of global society, how can we expect others to do so?

How Do We Get Serious About Military Sanctions?

Denying Iraq access to weapons is not sufficient, nor can it be maintained as long as Iraq is surrounded by some of the most over-armed states in the world. An immediate halt on all weapons shipments to all countries in the region would be an important step toward containing military threats.

We should expand our application of military sanctions as defined in UN Resolution 687. Military sanctions against Iraq should be tightened -- by expanding them to a system of regional military sanctions, thus lowering the volatility of this already arms-glutted region. Article 14 of Resolution 687 recognizes that the disarmament of Iraq should be seen as a step toward "the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons."

What About Negotiations?

We are told we must attack Iraq preemptively so that it can never obtain nuclear weapons. While we know from IAEA inspectors that Iraq's nuclear program was destroyed by the end of 1998, we do not know what has developed since. We do know, however, that Iraq does not have access to fissile material, without which any nuclear program is a hollow shell. And we know where fissile material is. Protection of all nuclear material, including reinstatement of the funding for protection of Russian nuclear material, must be a continuing priority.

We should note that U.S. officials are threatening a war against Iraq, a country known not to possess nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, the administration is continuing appropriate negotiations with North Korea, which does have something much closer to nuclear weapons capacity. Backed by IAEA inspections, the model of negotiations and inspections is exactly what the U.S. should be proposing for Iraq.

Inspections

There has been no solid information regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction since UNSCOM and IAEA arms inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 in advance of the U.S. Desert Fox bombing operation. Prior to their leaving, the inspectors' last report (November 1998) stated that although they had been stymied by Iraqi non-compliance in carrying out some inspections, "the majority of the inspections of facilities and sites under the ongoing monitoring system were carried out with Iraq's cooperation."

The IAEA report was unequivocal that Iraq no longer had a viable nuclear program. The UNSCOM report was less definitive, but months earlier, in March 1998, UNSCOM chief Richard Butler said that his team was satisfied there was no longer any nuclear or long-range missile capability in Iraq, and that UNSCOM was "very close" to completing the chemical and biological phases.

Since that time, there have been no verifiable reports regarding Iraq's WMD programs. It is important to get inspectors back into Iraq, but U.S. threats have made that virtually impossible by setting a "negative incentive" in place. If Baghdad believes that a U.S. military strike, as well as the maintaining of crippling economic sanctions, will take place regardless of their compliance with UN resolutions regarding inspections, they have no reason to implement their own obligations.

If the United States refuses to abide by the rule of international law, why are we surprised when an embattled and tyrannical government does so?

Throughout the 1980s Baghdad received from the U.S. high-quality germ seed stock for anthrax, botulism, E. coli, and a host of other deadly diseases. (The Commerce Department's decisions to license those shipments, even after revelations of Iraq's 1988 use of illegal chemical weapons, are documented in the 1994 hearings of the Banking Sub-Committee.)

It is certainly possible that scraps of Iraq's earlier biological and chemical weapons programs remain in existence, but there is no evidence Iraq has the ability or missile capacity to use them against the U.S. or U.S. allies. The notion that the U.S. would go to war against Iraq because of the existence of tiny amounts of biological material, insufficient for use in missiles or other strategic weapons and which the U.S. itself provided during the years of the U.S.-Iraq alliance in the 1980s, is simply unacceptable.

What About the Opposition?

General Zinni has described an opposition-led attack on Iraq as turning the country into a "Bay of Goats." Nothing has changed since that time. Almost none of the exile-based opposition has a credible base inside the country. There is no Iraqi equivalent to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to serve as ground troops to bolster a U.S. force. Some of the exile leaders closest to the U.S. have been wanted by Interpol for crimes in Jordan and elsewhere. The claim that they represent a democratic movement simply cannot be sustained.

What Happens After 'Regime Change'?

There is no democratic opposition ready to take over. Far more likely than the creation of an indigenous, popularly supported democratic Iraqi government, would be the replacement of the current regime with one virtually indistinguishable from it except for the man at the top. In February 2002, Newsweek magazine profiled the five leaders said to be on Washington's short list of candidates to replace Saddam Hussein. The Administration has not publicly issued such a list of its own (though we should note they did not dispute the list), but it certainly typifies the model the U.S. has in mind. All five of them were high-ranking officials within the Iraqi military until the mid-1990s. All five have been linked to the use of chemical weapons by the military; at least one, General al-Shammari, admits it.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by Washington's embrace of military leaders potentially guilty of war crimes; General al-Shammari told Newsweek he assessed the effect of his howitzer-fired chemical weapons by relying on "information from American satellites."

We must challenge the legitimacy of going to war against a country to replace a brutal military leader with another brutal military leader, and knowingly promoting as leaders of a "post-Saddam Iraq" a collection of generals who have apparently committed heinous war crimes.

Whoever may be installed in Baghdad by victorious U.S. troops, it is certain that a long and likely bloody occupation would follow. The price would be high; Iraqis know better than we do how their government has systematically denied them civil and political rights. But they hold us responsible for stripping them of economic and social rights -- the right to sufficient food, clean water, education, medical care -- that together form the other side of the human rights equation. Economic sanctions have devastated Iraqi society -- and among other effects, the sanctions have made the U.S. responsible for the misery of most of the Iraqi population.

After 12 years, those in Washington who believe that Iraqis accept the popular inside-the-Beltway mantra that "sanctions aren't responsible, Saddam Hussein is responsible" for hunger and deprivation in Iraq, are engaged in wishful thinking. The notion that everyone in Iraq will welcome as "liberators" those whom most Iraqis hold responsible for 12 years of crippling sanctions is simply naive. Basing a military strategy on such wishful speculation becomes very dangerous -- in particular for U.S. troops themselves.

- Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and an editor of MERIP's Middle East Report. Her forthcoming book is called "Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis."