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The Senate Foreign Relations Committee began hearings yesterday to debate the Bush administration's conclusion that Saddam Hussein must be removed from power in Iraq. That conclusion is reasonable: With his sponsorship of terrorism, his single-minded effort to acquire nuclear weapons and his adamant hostility to the values and the allies of the United States, he poses a major threat to American interests.
In changing the Baghdad government, three distinct stages are involved: first, assembling the broadest possible international coalition, as the current president's father did so skillfully before the Gulf War of 1990-91; second, conducting military operations in Iraq to destroy Hussein's regime; and, third, providing for the governance of the country after he is gone. But the last issue should be addressed first. Minimizing the difficulties of the second task, winning the war, requires, among other things, assembling that broad coalition against Hussein. Other countries are likely to join such a coalition if the United States has made clear in advance its vision for a post-Hussein Iraq. That vision should include four major elements.
The first is to maintain a substantial American and international presence in Iraq after the war for as long as is necessary to assure stability. This would make the prospect of a war more palatable to virtually every country with an interest in Iraq, especially the Europeans, who fear instability in the region from which their supplies of oil come.
Second, the United States should announce its commitment to keeping Iraq a single country within its present borders. This would help gain the acquiescence of Russia, China and India, each of which confronts a secessionist movement at home and worries that the disintegration of Iraq would encourage these movements. Most important, such a commitment would reassure Turkey, a neighbor of Iraq and an indispensable ally in any conflict there. Like Iraq, Turkey has a large and restless Kurdish minority. If Iraq's Kurds manage to gain independence, the Turks fear, their own Kurds will seek to follow.
That fear is not groundless. The goal of unity in post-Hussein Iraq is potentially at odds with the goal of stability. Iraq is an artificial creation, assembled after World War I by the British and French, which consists of three distinct communities: Kurds, Shiite Muslims, and Sunni Muslims, the group to which Hussein belongs and that, especially under his rule, has dominated the other two.
One way to reconcile territorial integrity with political stability is with a third commitment - to the postwar decentralization of governmental authority. Iraq should become a federation, with the three different communities enjoying considerable powers of self-government.
A fourth commitment that the American government should make - involving the distribution of the proceeds from the sale of Iraq's most valuable resource, its oil - can also help to keep the country together after Hussein's departure. The potential revenues are enormous: The country's petroleum reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia's. Now, Hussein monopolizes them. After he is gone, they should be divided fairly among the three communities.
The prospect of sharing this revenue would provide a powerful incentive for Kurds and Shiites to remain within an Iraqi federation. And the promise that their own oil companies will have the opportunity to participate in developing Iraq's reserves will increase French and Russian enthusiasm for removing Hussein; at the moment, their governments suspect Washington of planning to give American firms exclusive postwar access to Iraqi oil.
While prewar American commitments to a continuing presence in Iraq, to preserving the country's territorial integrity, to the decentralization of power and to an appropriate disposition of the country's oil will help to broaden the anti-Hussein coalition, they will probably not suffice to win the support of three of Iraq's neighbors. The current governments of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are likely to resist a war against Hussein on the unstated grounds that the removal of one brutal, corrupt, unpopular and illegitimate Mideast government would set a precedent that would jeopardize the stability of other, similar, regimes - specifically theirs.
So it might. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein might indeed set in motion forces that would threaten the rule of the Islamic clergy in Tehran, the Assad family in Damascus and the Saudi tribe on the Arabian peninsula. Insofar as such a scenario is plausible, it provides yet another reason for the Bush administration to move to replace the present government of Iraq.
Michael Mandelbaum is a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
