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| 1 |
ID:
113056
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article uses captured Iraqi regime records to trace Saddam Hussein's strategic view of the United States from the time of his political ascendancy in the 1970s to his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What is remarkable about Saddam's view of the United States is how consistently and virulently hostile it was. From early on, Saddam believed that the United States was unalterably opposed to his Baathist project and that Washington was seeking to marginalize and weaken Iraq. These sentiments were rooted in Baathist ideology and the key personality traits that shaped Saddam's worldview, but they were repeatedly reinforced by Washington's policies in the Middle East. Tacit U.S. support for Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war aided Saddam's war effort but did little to ameliorate his fears. By the late 1980s and 1990, Saddam worried that American operatives were trying to assassinate him, and he saw the United States (and its ally, Israel) as the foreign powers most dangerous to his regime. This view of U.S. policy, in turn, seems to have had an important influence on Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait.
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| 2 |
ID:
105980
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Efforts to understand Saddam Hussein's strategic thought have long been hampered by the opacity and secrecy of the Baathist regime. Newly available, high-level Iraqi archival documentation demonstrates that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Saddam viewed nuclear weapons through a fundamentally coercive, revisionist lens. He had long hoped to wage a grinding war of attrition against the Israeli state, and he believed that Iraqi acquisition of the bomb would neutralize Israeli nuclear threats, force the Jewish state to fight at the conventional level, and thereby allow Iraq and its Arab allies (with their larger economic and population base) to prosecute a prolonged war that would displace Israel from the territories occupied in 1967. These findings have implications for the existing theoretical literature on the causes and consequences of nuclear proliferation, as well as for the growing body of work on "nuclear alarmism." The Iraqi case undermines the thesis that states proliferate primarily because of defensive concerns. Saddam certainly viewed possession of the bomb as a means of enhancing Iraq's security, but his attraction to nuclear weapons revolved around offensive objectives. Saddam hoped to exploit the deterrent balance with Israel to initiate a bloody conventional war that would have likely been immensely destructive and destabilizing for the Middle East as a whole. In other words, though Saddam never obtained nuclear weapons, his views on their potential utility give good cause for both pessimism and alarm.
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