America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Americans have always tended to overpersonalize hostile forces in the world. The vilification of Saddam Hussein is only the latest example. His mug shot now hangs on the walls of various U.S. government offices in Washington. There it joins those of other comandantes, party bosses and maximum leaders who make up the U.S.'s most-wanted list.

Two veterans of that rogues' gallery, Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, have survived attempts at what is known in spookspeak as "termination with extreme prejudice." In the early 1960s the CIA concocted exotic poisons and hired Mafia hit men in a bizarre and feckless murder plot against the Cuban leader. In 1986 Ronald Reagan hurled squadrons of fighter-bombers at Libya, and White House aides privately hoped at least one bomb would have Gaddafi's name on it.

Those close brushes with martyrdom gave Castro and Gaddafi not just new incentives for making mischief against the U.S. but also new prestige in the eyes of others who have their own grievances, of which some may even be legitimate. When he plays Goliath, Uncle Sam elicits boos for himself and applause for the would-be Davids of the Third World.

By concentrating its fury on one miscreant, the U.S. has sometimes overlooked or even pampered another, potentially greater source of trouble in the same region. The American obsession with Cuba as the Soviet cat's-paw in the Western Hemisphere was one factor that led Washington to support Panama's Manuel Noriega. As an anticommunist, Noriega qualified, in Franklin Roosevelt's famous phrase, as "our son of a bitch." Not until the cold war faded and the war on drugs escalated did Noriega earn his place on the CIA's dart boards and a one-way trip to Miami, where he now sits in jail.

Then there was the mutual odium between the late Ayatullah Khomeini of Iran and the country he kept calling "the Great Satan." So thoroughly did American politicians and citizens reciprocate Khomeini's loathing that U.S. policy in the '80s tilted toward none other than Saddam Hussein. The enemy of our enemy was our friend. It turns out that the enemy of our enemy became our even greater enemy, because Saddam, more than Khomeini, is bent on aggressive territorial expansion. That should have come as no surprise. After all, 10 years before Saddam invaded Kuwait, he invaded Iran.

U.S. policymakers risk disappointment and worse if they think they can solve the crisis of the moment by getting rid of the scoundrel of the hour. Experts on Iraq have conjured up a number of post-Saddam "succession scenarios" that would be no improvement on the current situation. "There are people waiting in the wings who make Saddam look like an eagle scout by comparison," says a top U.S. intelligence official.

One of the few mistakes George Bush has made in his otherwise masterly handling of the showdown was to hint in a press conference that Saddam's physical elimination was an objective of U.S. policy. The President's advisers persuaded him to back off. But last week Bush's jaw still tightened and his eyes narrowed when he uttered any sentence that had Saddam's name in it. Like earlier confrontations between Bush's predecessors and Castro or Gaddafi, this one is personal, not just for the President but for much of the U.S. public as well.

Americans live in a celebrity culture. At home they are in constant search of heroes, while abroad they are on the lookout for supervillains -- tyrants and aggressors whose indisputable nastiness makes it easier to comprehend why so much of the outside world often seems an unfriendly if not dangerous place. Singling out icons of evil apparently helps Americans cope with what Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffmann has called their "difficulty in understanding the foreignness of foreigners."

It is often a strength but sometimes a weakness of Americans that they want so much to be liked in far-off lands, even when they are throwing their weight around. If one result of their government's intervention is a frenzied anti- American demonstration somewhere, many in the U.S. instinctively try to blame a sinister and demagogic strongman rather than the people themselves.

James Schlesinger, a former director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, makes another useful observation: "To move out of its isolationism, American society historically has required a crusade, and crusaders need to focus on infidels and rascals. In World War I we rallied round the goal of biffing Kaiser Bill, the symbol of all that was hateful about Germany. The great American presupposition is that other societies want to be like us. If they're not acting like us, it must be because of some Lucifer-like figure. Saddam is a rascal and a brute of the first order, but the more fixated we are on him, the more likely we are to miss the underlying social and political fact that he appeals to a lot of people who are not like us at all."

While Bush has been able to galvanize an extraordinary degree of international cooperation, Saddam has done some galvanizing of his own. Whether he ends up with Kuwait's oil or not, he has already tapped into a well of Arab resentment and xenophobia that is both wide and deep. Stanching that flow will require a lot more time -- and a lot less denunciatory rhetoric -- than dealing with just Saddam. For what it has done in Kuwait, Iraq -- not just its leader but the country -- must suffer a defeat, so that whoever comes after Saddam will inherit a powerful lesson. But it is equally important that this crisis not end with the Arab world feeling it has suffered a humiliation at the hands of the West.