America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Amid the sirens and explosions, a puzzlement occurs. With 5.3 billion people on the planet, how can one of them cause so much trouble for all the rest?

What's more, this particular troublemaker seems a travesty of the great-man theory of history and an insult to the modern world's sense of itself. Just when we were getting serious about the 21st century, along comes this atavistic menace. With his 1930s brand of aggression and his medieval tirades, Saddam Hussein has succeeded beyond his dreams and our nightmares in tying our lives in knots. Even if he can't get us with his Scuds, we're in range of his terrorist "commandos." And a Saddam recession, if not depression, may be with us longer than he will.

There is nothing new in the phenomenon of a single audacious individual grabbing humanity by the throat. But Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan and Napoleon all started near the center of the world they set out to conquer. Not too long ago, Saddam would have been a peripheral nuisance -- a pirate or a warlord meriting the dispatch of an expeditionary force from some imperial metropole.

Part of what empowers Saddam is technology. Advanced weaponry can be a great equalizer. Iraq is a Third World country that was well on its way to acquiring a First World arsenal.

Driving Saddam's hardware is the most lethal software. He is a master of 20th century totalitarianism. In Republic of Fear, reissued last year by Pantheon, Samir al-Khalil argues that Saddam's political forebears include not just Adolf Hitler -- the precedent George Bush likes to stress -- but Joseph Stalin as well. A corollary to the cult of personality is the principle that everyone but the leader is expendable. In addition to ensuring obedience, terror reminds the followers that they are cannon fodder in the struggle ("the mother of battles," as Saddam would have it) against all who oppose Numero Uno. The state itself becomes an instrument for achieving his goals, no matter how devastating to the interests of the people.

Hence, when it comes to getting their way and making their mark, totalitarians have a perverse advantage over even the most strong-willed democrats. At some point in their careers, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson and Margaret Thatcher all unwillingly became private citizens because their constituents decided it should be so. Ending Hitler's chancellorship required a global conflagration.

There is, in the annals of totalitarianism, one spectacular anomaly -- the strange case of Mikhail Gorbachev. He drew on the powers vested in him by the Stalinist system to liberate the foreign satellites and liberalize the internal order of the U.S.S.R. That was the miracle of Gorbachev I.

Sadly, a totalitarian trait has survived in Gorbachev: the delusion of his own indispensability. He could have been the hero of Baltic independence and of reform in its triumph over reaction. But that might have meant yielding to other, democratically elected leaders. So now he is the villain. That is the tragedy of Gorbachev II.

Last week his new Foreign Minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, was at pains to deny that there is any backsliding in Soviet support for the anti-Saddam coalition. Of course there is. The more a state relies on repression at home, the more likely it is to regard intimidation and invasion as the norm abroad.

Totalitarianism often gets the jump on democracy when the two clash. The leader of free people cannot move them to fight except by persuasion and consensus. Hence movement is often belated, after war has already started. So it was with the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and so it was in the present conflict, which began on Aug. 2, when Saddam attacked Kuwait, not on Jan. 16, when the alliance finally struck back.

Once the battle is joined, the ruthlessness gap continues to favor the aggressor. A leader who will stop at nothing tends, naturally, to go a long way against adversaries who observe certain restraints and conventions of decency. The law of the jungle is called that because the beastly threaten, by their sheer beastliness, to prevail over the civilized. That is why, as Saddam's neighbors await his next move, they don their gas masks.

The U.S. and its partners are trying to limit casualties in their ranks and among civilians in Iraq, while Saddam boasts of his willingness to lose tens of thousands of his own troops in a single engagement, and deliberately targets cities. The moral equivalent of his dumping oil into the Persian Gulf would be poisoning the Tigris and Euphrates or tampering with the dams at their headwaters. Yet both measures are out of the question. By the same token, if Saddam had nuclear weapons, he might very well use them; the U.S. does have nukes, but it will never use them.

That difference is the essence of why this war had to be fought, why it must be won and why winning it will not be easy.