Iraq: Seeds of Destruction

By Lisa Beyer

To listen to young Jabar and Hussein, privates in the Iraqi army, was to know the story of their country last week. A bag of spoiled dates -- "food for cattle," Hussein called it -- was their only sustenance as they plodded down a rain-sodden highway littered with ravaged tanks in southern Iraq. They had come from Basra, where a popular uprising against Saddam Hussein's government was under way. At one point in the fighting, Jabar and Hussein shed their uniforms and joined the revolt, but they grew fainthearted when loyalist troops began shelling rebel positions. "We are for the people," said Jabar, "but if we desert, they will kill us." And so the dispirited soldiers changed clothes again and rejoined the army, which by the middle of the week had retaken most of Basra.

Still, rebellion smoldered in the hearts of the two soldiers, and it continued to flicker in more than a dozen southern cities. Also threatening Saddam's regime were simultaneous insurrections in the north, organized by Iraq's Kurds. From every indication, Saddam was preparing to avenge the transgressions mightily. "Everybody who tries to undermine security," said the Baghdad newspaper Al Thawra, "shall regret it. They will pay." But by lashing out at his own people, said Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, the Pentagon intelligence chief, Saddam "may be sowing the seeds of his own destruction."

That ought to sound like an answer to the allies' not-so-silent prayers. More than once President Bush has publicly exhorted the Iraqis to topple their leader. Yet what he and the allies had in mind was a palace coup, a change of regime "from the center in Baghdad," as one Saudi official put it, not a free-for-all in the provinces that might rip the country asunder. Such an outcome might be even less desirable, from the allied point of view, than an Iraq with Saddam still in control.

It remains unclear just where the agitation began, or when. But by early last week it had spread through the Shi'ite heartland, which was ripe for trouble. The Shi'ites constitute 55% of Iraq's population of 19 million, but the minority Sunnis, who constitute only 20%, including Saddam and nearly all his aides, have long dominated the country politically.

At the height of the fighting for Basra, Western intelligence officials say, some 5,000 defectors from the regular army, angered that their leaders had brought them such inglorious defeat, faced 6,000 loyalists from the Republican Guard. The rabble-rousers also included a large number of Shi'ite fundamentalists, some of whom paraded portraits of Mohammed Bakr Hakim, Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric. Hakim lives in exile in Iran and aims to install a Tehran-like revolutionary government in Baghdad; Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani last week called on Saddam's regime to "surrender to the will of the people." Hakim cheered the insurrection but denied assertions that he had orchestrated it. "What we're seeing," said a senior Western envoy in Riyadh, "is a case of spontaneous internal combustion."

By Iraqi standards, the rebels' acts of defiance were extraordinarily bold. Public portraits of Saddam were defiled. Protesters scrawled DOWN WITH THE DICTATOR on walls. Several jails were stormed, and their inmates freed. In Amarah the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party was reportedly torched.

Just what was happening in the north, home to most of Iraq's 3 million Kurds, was murkier. Kurdish rebels claimed to have taken Erbil, a provincial capital, as well as four other towns. They added that an entire army division had surrendered to them. Their assertions could not be confirmed, but intelligence photos did indicate ongoing fighting in the area.

Saddam bolstered support among his troops by hiking the pay of Republican Guard units a third and giving regular troops and police volunteers smaller raises. He also offered amnesty to army deserters, who would normally face death.

But at the same time, Saddam showed that he was as ready as ever to clamp down hard on his restive populace. He fired his Interior Minister and replaced him with a cousin, Ali Hassan Majid, who not only served as the governor of occupied Kuwait during Iraq's rape of the country but also allegedly supervised the gassing of rebellious Kurds in Halabja in 1988, killing 5,000. Baghdad also expelled all foreign journalists from the country, perhaps to eliminate witnesses to a coming bloodbath. Opposition leaders were terrified that Saddam would use chemical weapons against his own people once again. U.S. officials last week warned Iraqi diplomats in Washington and New York against such action. The diplomats said their government had no intention of using gas, but one Shi'ite leader claimed it had already been used.

All the while, the victorious allies watched from the sidelines. Their paralysis was in part a political necessity. U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney noted that the coalition's U.N. mandate for action did not cover moving "inside Iraq ((to)) deal with their internal problems."

But even if the allies had had the freedom to maneuver, they lacked the will. "I'm not sure," said Cheney, "whose side you'd want to be on." Not the Shi'ite mullahs, certainly. The West has no interest in seeing Iran II in Iraq; nor do the gulf states, which have their own problems with Shi'ite restiveness. Supporting the Kurds would create a stewpot of problems as well. Turkey, an important constituent in the anti-Saddam team and a NATO member, fears that any gains made by Iraq's Kurds would embolden Turkey's own 8 million-member Kurdish minority, which has fought a bloody secessionist campaign for seven years. Syria, the Soviet Union and Iran also have large Kurdish communities that they prefer to see quiescent.

If the uprisings succeed, Iraq could find itself dismembered, with the Kurds running the north, the Shi'ites the south, and Saddam's Sunni faction relegated to the strip in between. That in turn might invite neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iran to take a bite out of the country. Thus the Lebanonization of Iraq would become part of the unhappy legacy of foreign involvement in the Middle East, a result the West is anxious to avoid.

Iraqi exile groups last week were busy trying to win backing for the uprisings, in part by playing down the threat of partition. The Joint Action Committee, an umbrella group linking 17 disparate organizations, asserted that its members were united in wanting a democratic, unified Iraq -- though many of them want no such thing. The association, which includes several Shi'ite and Kurdish groups, communists, Sunni nationalists and pro-Syrian Baathists, is riven with strife.

One hopeful scenario, from the West's vantage point, was that the chaos would provoke the army, or perhaps one of Saddam's Baathist associates, to grab power. "At some point," says a Bush Administration official, "somebody is going to say, 'The country is coming apart, and we have to put a stop to it.' And the way to do that is to remove Saddam himself." His would-be deposer, however, may have to move fast, while there is still a country to run.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, Dean Fischer/Riyadh and Scott MacLeod/Damascus