The Consequences: What Kind of Peace?

By Lisa Beyer

World War I led to the Bolshevik Revolution, a power vacuum in Central Europe that was eventually filled by Adolf Hitler, and a British-French carve- up of the Middle East that 72 years later still forms the background for bloodshed. World War II boosted the Soviet Union to the status of a superpower dominating Eastern Europe and challenging the other superpower, the U.S., in a cold war that began almost as soon as the bombs stopped falling. The Korean War ended with U.S. forces stationed approximately on the line along which the shooting began. In the almost 38 years that have intervened, no President has found the time to be right for withdrawing those troops.

All of which goes to show that wars almost invariably have consequences that the victors never foresee and certainly do not intend. There is no reason to believe that the war against Saddam Hussein will be any different.

The rosiest predictions for the war's aftermath envision a solution to the Palestinian problem and the emergence of new collective security arrangements that would calm the tempestuous region. The darkest prognoses foresee a Lebanon-like partitioning of Iraq and Jordan and a fueling of nationalist and Islamic extremism that would threaten Western interests and perhaps even bring down moderate Arab regimes. The array of possibilities is bewildering even to those who are leading the war effort. "Some sort of planning needs to be done," conceded Defense Secretary Dick Cheney while appearing before the House Armed Services Committee last December. "Everybody's been so busy dealing with the crisis of the moment that there really hasn't been much effort put into longer range focus."

The repercussions of Desert Storm, however, will be far more than a footnote to a glorious chapter of U.S. military history. "The only reason to make war is to make peace at the end," says Mohamad Milhem, an executive-committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization. "If at the end there is instability and no peace, what is the point in making war?" The shape of the postwar order will depend to a great extent on how the various parties embroiled in the conflict survive the cataclysm of the battle.

IRAQ. Early in the gulf crisis, the Bush Administration realized that it would be unwise to liquidate the country's military altogether. "If Iraq is totally out of the picture," says William Quandt, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, "there is no counterbalance to Iran." At the same time, the U.S. and its allies are determined to wipe out Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and seriously impair its conventional war machine. Reconciling those two aims requires a delicate balancing act. "You want an Iraq weak enough that it can't threaten the weakest of its neighbors, yet strong enough to deter the strongest of its neighbors," says Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

The crucial question of who would rule a defeated Iraq is a black hole of speculation. It is conceivable that Saddam could survive and continue to govern. Though Washington would cheer Saddam's fall, the official mission of Desert Storm is to force him from Kuwait, not from Baghdad. Should Saddam manage to muddle through, Iraq's future would probably look a lot like its recent past: authoritarian, militaristic, confrontational -- and perhaps more isolated than ever.

If Saddam does go, finding an acceptable successor will be a formidable challenge. Saddam's shoot-first, ask-questions-never policy of dealing with perceived challengers has eliminated virtually everyone who knows anything about running the country and is not marred by complicity in his roguery. Neutralizing the many close relatives Saddam has placed in high positions would also be difficult.

While the Bush Administration concentrates mainly on winning a military victory, other nations in the region are keenly interested in the shape of postwar Iraq. The country's three northern neighbors -- Syria, Turkey and Iran -- may have designs on Iraq. Syria's President Hafez Assad has long claimed to be the sole legitimate leader of the Pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, rival factions of which rule his country and Saddam's. Turkey has historical claims on Iraq's oil-rich Mosul province in the north. And Shi'ite-led Iran could easily justify a land snatch as a means of liberating the Shi'ite majority in Iraq, which is dominated by a Sunni minority. Should moves to sunder Iraq begin, the country's Kurdish minority might rise up to carve its own state out of the north. That, in turn, might spark a rebellion among Turkey's Kurds.

The partitioning of Iraq would be a tragedy not only for the Iraqis but for the entire Middle East as well. Each of the borders in the region is as arbitrary as the next, and once one frontier is successfully challenged, all the others will be up for grabs. No regime will feel stable, no state secure.

SYRIA. Before the gulf crisis, Hafez Assad was most closely associated in Western capitals with major-league terrorism abroad and savage repression at home. Since he contributed 19,000 troops to the anti-Saddam front, however, Assad has become a comrade-in-arms. President Bush held talks with him last November in Geneva, becoming the first U.S. President since Jimmy Carter, in 1977, to meet with the Syrian leader. Meanwhile, Britain restored diplomatic ties and the European Community resumed economic aid.

The gulf crisis came at an opportune moment for Assad, who has wanted to edge closer to the West anyway since his old patron, the Soviet Union, was no longer able to keep his military outfitted in the style to which he had grown accustomed. Still, Assad has kept his newfound allies at arm's length. While joining forces with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam, Assad has been careful to maintain his nationalistic credentials within the Arab world by periodically bashing Washington and Israel in his public statements.

The aloofness is mutual, and for good reason: it is not easy to forget Assad's actions, like the 1982 massacre of some 20,000 civilians in the Syrian town of Hama while routing out Muslim fundamentalists, and his sponsorship of terrorists. "Assad's grisly record makes him unfit to serve as anything more than a temporary and tactical ally," says Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Not everyone agrees. "It's possible that the West can work with Assad to make a better Mideast," says a senior Western diplomat in Damascus. What is not in dispute is the notion that, with or without the West's friendship, Assad would jump at the chance to become the unrivaled leader of the Pan- Arabists following Saddam's fall. Considering Assad's success in asserting Syrian control over Lebanon late last year, his room to maneuver already appears greater than it was before the crisis erupted.

SAUDI ARABIA AND THE GULF STATES. Once Saddam is defeated -- assuming he is -- the Saudis and their gulf neighbors will enjoy only momentary relief. Saddam's easy conquest of Kuwait showed how vulnerable Saudi Arabia is to aggression, a weakness that must be redressed.

Some improved arrangement for collective security is sure to be worked out, possibly within the framework of the Gulf Cooperation Council, created in 1981 to promote economic integration in the region. But even if Saudi Arabia and the gulf states pool their resources, they will remain weak. Egypt could, in exchange for vast infusions of aid, agree to field large numbers of troops to help defend these countries.

Egypt's help, however, will not be enough. Security arrangements with the U.S. will undoubtedly be strengthened. As in the past, King Fahd and the gulf Emirs will seek to make those ties as invisible as possible. There may be more ships just off the coast; large caches of American tanks, planes and weaponry will probably be maintained in the event that U.S. troops must return in massive numbers.

In bolstering those ties with foreigners, the gulf and Saudi rulers must carefully balance external threats with internal ones. Even the smallest step toward the Western camp risks a backlash from the religious right, especially in puritanical Saudi Arabia. From the beginning of the gulf crisis, there have been ominous rumblings in the Saudi mosques -- and indeed throughout the Muslim world -- about the apostasy of having infidels defend the country that is host to Islam's holiest places. There could be increased demands on the oil sheikdoms to share more of their wealth with poorer states in the region.

A related worry is that the presence of Western forces has encouraged local proponents of democracy to press gently for more openness. The progressive reforms expected in a liberated Kuwait will bring still more pressure on the Saudis. Religious hard-liners would resist such moves, perhaps violently, thereby adding to the pressure on the Saudi royal family.

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS. Both have much to win and much to lose in the gulf confrontation. Israel's gain would be the defeat and containment of its strongest Arab foe. Its loss -- at least in the eyes of many citizens -- would be heightened pressure, from the U.S. among others, to resolve the Arab- Israeli conflict by giving the Palestinians a homeland. If that does not happen, the Palestinians, having lined up behind Saddam Hussein, will find themselves poorer, weaker and more alienated than ever before.

While Palestinian support for Saddam confounds many Americans, the U.S. may have no choice but to seriously address their plight soon after the liberation of Kuwait. Reason: the U.S. will owe at least that much to its Arab allies, who, though infuriated by the Palestinians' crowing for Saddam, remain publicly committed to the idea of a Palestinian homeland.

The prospects for progress are small, given Jerusalem's strong opposition even to discussing the idea of withdrawing from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, much less allowing a Palestinian homeland. The U.S., whose $3 billion annually in aid accounts for 7% of Israel's GNP, could bring definitive pressure on Jerusalem to relent, but the Palestinians do not expect that to happen.

If the Palestinians feel let down again, they will almost certainly become still more militant. Among the likely results are an aggravation of international terrorism and more bloodshed in the occupied territories. Already the moderate elements of the P.L.O. have been hit hard. Chairman Yasser Arafat has managed to lose both the backing of his wealthy Arab patrons (for supporting Saddam) and that of the street (for not supporting Saddam enough). Last week Arafat's faction suffered a crushing blow when a Palestinian, apparently working for P.L.O. dissident Abu Nidal, assassinated Abu Iyad, the organization's No. 2 leader, and Abu Hol, its chief of internal security.

JORDAN. King Hussein's worst fear is that Iraq and Israel will use his country as their battlefield. The most dangerous threat is that Israel will fly through Jordanian airspace to retaliate for Iraqi missile strikes. Hussein has vowed to repulse any intrusion, but that would draw him into a conflict in which he has nothing to gain. Even if Jordan manages to stay out of the actual fighting, there are other possibilities for its destabilization. Aggravated by the gulf conflict, tensions between the country's Palestinian majority and Bedouin minority, to which the King belongs, could spark an uprising.

Many Palestinians are concerned that Israel will use a war to expel thousands of them, though this is unlikely unless Israel and Jordan become involved in a major conflict. Some Israeli right-wingers have long advocated the creation of a Palestinian homeland in Jordan. The current government realizes that wholesale deportations would inflame world opinion. But should they occur nonetheless, they would provoke unrest on the east bank of the Jordan River.

The failure to deal with the Palestinian problem could likewise stir rebellion in Jordan. Even if Hussein weathers such storms, the Jordanian economy has been wrecked by the cutoff of trade with Iraq prescribed by U.N. sanctions; the specter of the 1989 riots prompted by government austerity measures still looms large.

As much as the King is cursed among Saddam's opponents for his neutrality in the gulf conflict -- often miscast as support for Baghdad -- the probable alternatives to his rule would scarcely suit their interests. Among the leading contenders would be a radical Palestinian administration or a fundamentalist regime.

THE U.S. In swatting one obnoxious troublemaker in the person of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. runs the real risk of seeing others take his place. To whatever extent it may seem irrational to Western minds, Saddam has made himself a hero to many Arabs by confronting the West and Israel -- no matter how corrupt and selfish his motives. Thus smiting the Iraqi leader could make him a martyr and fertilize the ground for his successors, who would do their best to thwart U.S. interests in the region.

"The new ideology of the Middle East is anti-Americanism," says Asad Abdul Rahman, a political scientist at Jordan University. "Regimes that are seen as nothing but stooges of the Americans could be toppled. That could be coupled with all kinds of violence, anti-American acts, the establishment of radical regimes." Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is considered particularly exposed because he has allied himself so closely with the U.S. Says Amos Perlmutter, a political scientist at American University in Washington: "Mubarak will be in the cross hairs of every terrorist."

Much will depend on how Washington behaves in the aftermath of war. A quick withdrawal of American forces would give the lie to a loony, but widespread, Middle East conspiracy theory: that the U.S. provoked the gulf crisis -- actually encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait -- in order to colonize the region. The degree to which Washington pressures Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and, ultimately, give the Palestinians a homeland will also determine the level of American credibility in the region.

However skillfully the U.S. and its allies manage their expected victory, the Middle East will not soon overcome the violence and instability that have plagued the region for the better part of this century. But the coalition must make every effort to turn the momentum of battlefield success into lasting political solutions. For the worst of the end-game scenarios will be avoided only if a new peace is sought as aggressively as the war was fought.

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/Jerusalem, Scott MacLeod/Amman and Christopher Ogden/Washington