Arab leaders hope to head off a war with a plan to facilitate Saddam’s overthrow by his own generals. Time magazine reports that it has exclusive information that the Saudis are trying to arrange a U.N.-brokered amnesty for all but the most upper echelons of the Ba’ath Party to encourage the Republican Guard and other powerful Iraqis to turn on Saddam Hussein and overthrow him, to avert a U.S.-led war and postwar chaos. Cooperating with disarmament in accordance with U.N. resolutions would be a condition of amnesty for coup leaders. But would Bush stand for being diverted from war by a Saudi-engineered coup? Who really believes that the weapons of mass destruction are anything more than the pretext for U.S. warmongering? Time‘s reporter writes:
“Politically, there would be nothing better for President Bush than to remove Saddam and disarm Iraq without firing a shot,” says a Western diplomat. “All along, Washington’s hope has been that as pressure gets high enough, the people around Saddam will take matters into their own hands.”
But this is not likely, on several counts. First, it would prevent a postwar U.S. occupation and seizure of Iraqi oil resources. If the U.S.’s investment in this war relates to any extent to attempting to extricate ourselves from our legacy of dependence on the Saudis, a coup would not be good enough. Moreover, it would fail to satisfy Bush’s goal in making this personal, getting back at the “guy who tried to kill Daddy” and surpassing his father’s shortcomings in not marching on Baghdad a decade ago.
If the Saudis’ goal is to reinforce regional stability, prevent chaos and prop up their own increasingly beleaguered regime, they’d do the minimum necessary to avert war. They’re certainly not going to be seen as supporting a significant opposition challenge to the status quo. Such a more limited “regime change” would probably not address the Ba’athists’ oppression of the minorities in Iraq, and, handy for both themselves and the Saudis, would exclude the opposition from more than token powersharing. An amnesty of many of the oppressors could leave the door open to private vengeance and a bloodbath unless an iron fist continued to restrain the opposition.
