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Is Saddam Another Hitler?
Those who now call for preventive war begin by portraying Saddam as a serial aggressor bent on dominating the Persian Gulf. Indeed, he is often compared to Adolf Hitler, who is history’s poster child for an inveterate aggressor with a limitless appetite for new conquests. The war party also contends that Saddam is either irrational or prone to serious miscalculation, which means that he may not be deterred by even credible threats to retaliate. Kenneth Pollack, a proponent of war with Iraq, goes so far as to argue that Saddam is “unintentionally suicidal.”
The facts, however, tell a different story. Saddam has dominated Iraqi politics for about thirty years. During that period, he has started only two wars against his neighbors. He invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. Now compare that with Hitler. Once he had rearmed Germany, Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France in 1940, and Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union in 1941. And to top it all off, Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, even though Nazi Germany was by then embroiled in a bloody campaign inside the Soviet Union and hardly needed additional enemies. By this standard, Saddam’s behavior seems rather tame.
Indeed, Saddam’s past behavior is no worse than that of several other states in the Middle East, and it may even be marginally better. Egypt fought six wars between 1948 and 1973 (five against Israel, plus the civil war in Yemen), and played a key role in starting four of them. Israel initiated wars on three occasions (the Suez War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon), and has conducted innumerable air strikes and commando raids against its various Arab adversaries. Iraq happens to be located in a rough neighborhood, and it is hardly surprising that Saddam plays hardball, just like his neighbors.
Furthermore, a careful look at Saddam’s two main wars shows that his behavior was far from reckless. In fact, both times he went to war because Iraq was vulnerable, and because he had good reason to believe his targets were weak and isolated. In each case, his goal was to rectify Iraq’s strategic dilemma with a limited military victory. This does not excuse Saddam’s aggression, but his willingness to use force on these two occasions hardly demonstrates that he cannot be deterred.
The Iran-Iraq War
Iran was the most powerful state in the Persian Gulf during the 1970s. Iran’s strength was partly due to its large population (roughly three times that of Iraq) and its oil reserves, but it was also due to the strong support that the Shah of Iran received from the United States. Relations between Iraq and Iran were quite hostile throughout this period, but Iraq was in no position to defy Iran’s regional dominance. In fact, Iran put constant pressure on Saddam’s regime during the early 1970s, mostly by fomenting unrest among Iraq’s sizable Kurdish minority. Iraq finally got the Shah to stop meddling with the Kurds in 1975, but only by agreeing to cede half of the Shatt al-Arab waterway to Iran, a concession that underscored Iraq’s weakness at the time.
Given this history of animosity, it is not surprising that Saddam welcomed the Shah’s ouster in 1979. Indeed, Iraq went to considerable lengths to foster good relations with Iran’s revolutionary leadership. Saddam did not try to exploit the turmoil in Iran to gain strategic advantage over his neighbor and made no attempt to reverse his earlier concessions, even though Iran did not fully comply with the terms of the 1975 agreement. The Ayatollah Khomeini, on the other hand, was determined to extend his revolution across the Islamic world, starting with Iraq. By late 1979, Tehran was pushing hard to get the Kurdish and Shi’ite populations in Iraq to revolt and topple Saddam, and Iranian operatives were actively trying to assassinate senior Iraqi officials. Border clashes became increasingly frequent by April 1980, largely at Iran’s instigation.
Facing a grave threat to his regime but aware that Iran’s military readiness had been temporarily disrupted by the revolution, Saddam launched a limited war against his bitter foe on September 22, 1980. His principal aim was to capture a large slice of territory along the Iraq-Iran border, not to conquer Iran or topple Khomeini. “The war began,” as Efraim Karsh writes, “because the weaker state, Iraq, attempted to resist the hegemonic aspirations of its stronger neighbor, Iran, to reshape the regional status quo according to its own image.”
The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years and cost the two protagonists over 1 million casualties and at least $150 billion. Iraq received considerable outside support from a number of other countries—including the United States, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and France—largely because these states all were determined to prevent the further spread of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Although the war cost Iraq far more than Saddam originally expected, it also thwarted Khomeini’s attempt to topple him and dominate the Gulf region. War with Iran was not a reckless adventure; it was an opportunistic response to a significant threat.
