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January 7, 1999 MEMORANDUM
TO: OPINION
LEADERS FROM:
MARK LAGON SUBJECT: Iraq Now that the dust
has settled from the 70-hour aerial attack on Iraq, it has become clear
that the only solution for the threat Iraq poses is to remove Saddam. That truth has prompted
questions about the viability of the Iraqi democratic opposition, which
the United States has embarked on supporting with the Iraq Liberation
Act. Assisting that opposition is essential to bringing a decent government
to Iraq. Recent critiques of this approach (Byman, Pollack, and Rose,
The Rollback Fantasy, Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 1999) have
raised questions about such a policy. But if backed by American military
power, both from the air and on the ground, support for the Iraqi opposition
can work. Support for the opposition should be only a part of a broader
political-military strategy, one which must include a willingness to send
U.S. ground forces into Iraq to complete the unfinished business of the
Gulf War. Some observers, like
the Council of Foreign Relations' Robert Manning in Wednesdays Washington
Times ("What Follows the Missiles?") call into question the
seriousness of "hard- liners" for backing the Iraqi opposition,
but not embracing the use of land force to remove Saddam. This critique
is odd, since, over the past year, such "hard-liners" as Senator
Richard Lugar have pointed out that American ground forces may well be
necessary to remove Saddam from power and end the threat posed by his
weapons of mass destruction. This has also been
the consistent position of the Project. A year ago, Project directors
William Kristol and Robert Kagan explicitly called for a ground campaign
to oust Saddam in editorials for the New York Times (30 January 1998)
and the Washington Post (26 February 1998). Writing in the Weekly Standard
last February (2 February 1998), Kagan argued that "above all, only
ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the
way for a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed
to be benign." It is not the "hard-liners"
who refuse to come to grips with the full dimension of the Iraq crisis
and what will be required to secure American interests. On the contrary,
it is those who cling to the illusion of "containment" or "containment-plus"
who refuse to confront the likely consequences of their strategy -- a
Saddam, stonger, with weapons of mass destruction.
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