Senate Panel Ponders Removing Saddam Hussein
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, March 26) -- The Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday explored ideas on how best to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
Prominent Middle East experts told the senators the best way is to create the conditions to make it possible for the Iraqis to do the job themselves.
Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz, a former undersecretary of Defense for policy, said the U.S. should plant the seeds of Saddam's destruction.
"I think what we should concentrate on is creating havens in which the opposition against Saddam can organize and be protected," Wolfowitz said.
"We had such a one in the north and if we could restore that it would be
worth doing. I think if we could create one in the south which might be
politically less awkward, given that it doesn't raise the Kurdish problem with Turkey, that would be worth doing," Wolfowitz said.
One way to help that effort in southern Iraq, where opposition Shiite
Muslims were hurt when Saddam's forces drained life-sustaining water from the marshlands, would be to bomb the dams that hold water back.
"The dams that Saddam built to starve out the marsh Arabs that live in the lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, could be destroyed fairly easily from the air," Wolfowitz said. "That would be an act that wouldn't kill Iraqis but would help them, in fact, in their efforts to oppose Saddam and I think it would be well received in the Arab world."
David Kay, who once ran the United Nations' weapons inspection program in Iraq, agreed that fomenting political dissension in Iraq is the best way to drive out Saddam and a bombing campaign alone cannot be counted on to drive him from power.
"If, though, there is military action, for whatever reason," Kay said, "I think the most appropriate target set is really the political military infrastructure that makes Saddam secure in how he sleeps at night."
"The security headquarters, the internal, special Republican Guards, a relatively small force, many of the sites they use for monitoring political opposition ... those are picked sites and well known," said Kay. "I think you should strike sites that make him nervous, as opposed to sites that make Americans nervous, such as where he stores his chemical and biological weapons."
|
News
TIME