Destroying Iraqi Military is Not in U.S. Interests, Congress Told

U.S. interests might not be served if Iraq’s military power is destroyed, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger told Congress this week.

“We know that the reduction of Saddam Hussein’s power will lead to other sources of instability,” Schlesinger said Tuesday at the first of a series of Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.

Israel wants Iraq’s military completely destroyed, because “that would reduce the Arab order of battle and they would be a principal beneficiary of that,” Schlesinger said.

But the United States “must think through the balance of power in the region without acting precipitously simply to achieve our current objective of inflicting punishment on Iraq,” said Schlesinger, who was secretary of defense from 1973 to 1975, under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who was to have testified Tuesday, was rescheduled for next week. Secretary of State James Baker also will testify next week, but before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

On Wednesday, retired Adm. William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee that the process of bringing peace to the Middle East “will be protracted with or without Saddam Hussein.”

Crowe, who served from 1985 to 1989, under President Ronald Reagan, said that to achieve such a peace, a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict is needed.

References to Israel were rare during the first two days of hearings, but Sen. Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) said, “With regard to Israel, it seems to me that a U.S. military incursion has an enormous downside for long-term stability, and we’ve made this situation more difficult by our unnecessary and unwise overtures to (Syrian President Hafez) Assad.”

DESTROYING NUCLEAR MIGHT JUSTIFIED

Listing reasons for not destroying Iraq’s military, Schlesinger cited the concerns of two of the key Arab members of the U.S. coalition against Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

“They would like to see (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein go, but they do not want to see Iraq removed from the balance of power,” he said.

The former defense chief expressed concern about any shift in the balance of power to Syria. He said that Assad “until quite recently was higher on our list of rogues than was Saddam Hussein.”

Schlesinger also rejected the possibility of a longer-term U.S. relationship with Syria beyond the Gulf crisis.”President Assad continues to lead a country that we describe as terrorist,” he said.

“Therefore we ought not to assume that these relationships are anything but ephemeral. Americans tend to develop toward other countries loyalties that extend over too long a period.”

Schlesinger said it would be strongly in the U.S. interest to attack Iraq for the purpose of destroying its nuclear capabilities.

He cited a New York Times poll published last week, which he said concluded that the only basis on which the American public would support a war in the Middle East “would be to eliminate Iraq’s nuclear capability.”

But he said destroying Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities would not be a strong enough justification for going to war.