Bush, Saddam and Dr. Evil

Last fall, in the Congressional debate over authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq, one Congressman explained his support for a war with a nightmare scenario: supposing the Iraqi leader were to send a nuclear bomb to a U.S. city, conceal it in a hotel room, and then telephone the White House and blackmail the American government into giving in to his (unspecified) demands? One can almost see Saddam on the White House TV monitors, holding his pinkie to the corner of his mouth, and demanding "One Million Dollars!" from the trembling Americans, before being reminded by his aides that this won't get you a decent apartment in Manhattan any more.

Is this why the United States is about to go to war with Iraq? To combat the threat of Dr. Evil? To be fair to Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest, this comic understanding of world affairs probably says more about how stupid the White House thinks we are than about its own agenda. Saddam is interested in consolidating power in Iraq, crushing domestic opposition, and squeezing both his own people and, to a lesser extent, his neighbors for anything they can offer. Like any good bully, however, Saddam is extremely wary of folks who are tougher than he is. Nothing suggests that he would pick a fight that he didn't expect to win, and there's certainly no evidence to suggest that either (a) he wants to rule the world, à la Dr. Evil or (b) he's interested in martyrdom.

But what about the invasion of Kuwait in 1990? While this certainly offers better evidence of Saddam's malfeasance than anything he's done in the past few years, it's still a poor foundation for the Dr. Evil comparison. In 1990, Saddam was basking in the memory of being a close friend of Presidents Reagan and Bush, given Iraq's recent war with Iran. Just a week before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam met with the U.S. ambassador to air his grievances about longstanding boundary disputes with the Kuwaiti emirs. This testing-the-waters approach wasn't unprecedented in American foreign policy: President Suharto discussed his proposed invasion of East Timor in 1975 with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Ford, who happened to be visiting Indonesia at the time; he was asked by his American guests only to delay his troops until Air Force One could get back to Washington. In July 1990, Saddam imagined that he could get away with his Kuwaiti adventure without upsetting his American friends.

In the event, Saddam either misread the tone of the meeting or overplayed his hand with his eventual attack on Kuwait. Opting not simply to seize the oilfields on the disputed border between the two nations but to occupy Kuwait entire, Saddam made it hard for the United States — or any other nation — to turn a blind eye. However, in spite of the massive U.S.-led effort to expel Iraq from Kuwait, the Coalition forces in early 1991 did nothing to support the efforts of rebel Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. The reason for this was simple: the United States realized that Saddam was hellbent not on world domination but on maintaining his regime in Iraq. Moreover, Saddam was an excellent instrument for holding together a nation divided along religious and ethnic lines. President Bush allowed Saddam to continue his rule precisely because U.S. policy demanded the maintenance of a unified Iraq; from 1993 until 2000, President Clinton faithfully continued this policy.

On Saddam's side, little has changed. The Iraqi leader is still a thug of the first order, still committed to maintaining his rule over the country and still (as the CIA conceded last fall) extremely unlikely to pick a fight with anyone stronger than he is. Saddam isn't about to smuggle a nuclear bomb into the Four Seasons because he knows what would happen if he did: Baghdad, civilians and all, would be incinerated. The doctrine of MAD — mutually-assured destruction — still makes a crazy kind of sense when applied to nation-states and folks (like Saddam) who care more about living than about making a political point which might result in their death. The place where this logic breaks down is with groups like Al Qaeda, which have shown that they're unafraid of death and which can't be tied to a particular nation or regime. Can anyone explain, then, why President Bush is pretending that Saddam and Al Qaeda are virtually synonymous, in spite of substantial evidence to the contrary? Beyond the obvious motive of all that Iraqi oil, trickling towards America the moment the dust settles in Baghdad, is there something else going on? Perhaps if we imagine that Saddam really is Dr. Evil, then we'll feel less anxious about the fact that the truly scary guys are still out there, unaccounted for, watching us and waiting.

Nicholas Guyatt is a graduate student in the History Department. He is from Bristol, England.