Worthy Aim--Dubious Means : Destabilizing Iraq: Sounds good but . . .

President George Bush’s great hope in the weeks and months after the Persian Gulf War was that frustrated Iraqi military officers or ambitious Baath Socialist Party politicos would succeed in doing what America had been unable to do: topple Saddam Hussein. To Bush’s own frustration, his public appeals and covert support for such an uprising alike proved ineffective.

Bush has now gone into retirement, while the man known throughout the Middle East as the Butcher of Baghdad clings to power. But U.S. policy, Clinton Administration officials make clear, remains essentially unchanged: The worthy aim is to replace Hussein with a leadership that would be a lot easier to get along with, one that might even ease the repression that now holds Iraq in a grip of iron. But here is another of those cases in international affairs where the means chosen to achieve a hoped-for end had better be considered with great caution.

SHAKY COALITION: High Administration officials have recently met with the top leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, a loose alliance of Kurds, Shiite and Sunni Muslims and secular Arabs. All of the groups represented by the congress have suffered under Hussein’s rule. All have their own claims to political power. That is about the extent of their common interests and about the only reason for their current affiliation.

The Kurds, concentrated in northern Iraq, control a fair amount of territory under de facto protection from U.S. and other outside forces. The Shiites in the south are under steady attack from Hussein’s forces. Both of these groups, though now saying they favor the preservation of Iraq’s territorial integrity, have sought in the recent past to declare their independence from Baghdad. Fear of a dismembered Iraq--and a possible Iranian move into the southern Shiite area--led Saudi Arabia to pressure Bush to halt the war against Iraq when he did.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Any U.S. policy of actively aiding the Iraqi opposition has to keep the concerns of regional allies in mind, but even more so, the example of Afghanistan. There massive covert military aid sent to those President Ronald Reagan liked to call “freedom fighters” did indeed help wear down the Soviet invaders. But that aid also helped build up local strongmen and energize tribal and religious conflicts that are still raging, delaying indefinitely hopes for recovery and a stable national life. It’s well to remember too that some of that aid--including highly advanced Stinger antiaircraft missiles--ended up in the hands of Iran.

Frustration over Hussein’s survival must not become the occasion for pursuing a policy that could soon come to be regretted. Washington’s surest means for squeezing Hussein is to continue taking the lead in maintaining and tightening U.N. sanctions on Iraq and in insisting on the internationally supervised destruction of its weapons of mass warfare. But it ought to be wary indeed about involving itself too deeply in Iraq’s murky and unpredictable internal politics, where identifying the good guys isn’t always easy.