Wide open secret coup.

LEAKS about PsyOps (psychological warfare operations) and other American covert operations to bring about a palace coup in Iraq are reaching flood tide. If there is anything in these leaks from unnamed American officials, no covert operation has ever been more overt. This is not one of your sneaky secret operations (like the Iran affair). Anonymous officials want everyone to be clear that it hasn't preceded, it has followed, a formal presidential "finding" and notification of Congress.

On December 15, Saddam took formal notice of the "daily" Western reports about an imminent military coup against him in an Iraqi TV broadcast. Noting that the West was seeking agents for such a coup in his inner circle, he volunteered himself to be its leader. And Ibrahim Izzat, one of the military officers seated with him, could act as deputy.

Neither Saddam nor any of his inner circle would be likely to win an election. He doesn't need to. Saddam rules by fear. And maybe the most terrified are "the tense-looking military men," to quote the Reuters dispatch, on whom he pinne "'Mother of All Battles' sashes and medals" at this same TV conference.

The daily leakers have tried to make clear that their PsyOps aim only at a palace coup. They expresly avoid talk of replacing the dictatorship by some democratic alternative of the sort that dissident Iraqis, representing Sunni and Shia Arabs as well as Kurds, have been trying to organize since before Desert Shield.

A coup replacing Saddam with another dictator chosen from his inner circle will not be easy. Saddam, as some of us have pointed out for over a dozen years, is no great military strategist. He is, however, an expert on internal coups and their prevention and cure. A cunning and brutal dictator, he is wholly unimpressed by hardships imposed on innocent Iraqi civilians by the UN embargoes. Embargoes are blunt, indiscriminate instruments. The narrower the ruling circle at which embargoes are aimed, the easier it is to insulate that ruling circle from their effects. A totalitarian dictator can tolerate pain inflicted on his civilian subjects more easily than democractic rulers can inflict it.

It should have been apparent during Desert Shield to the many who opposed authorizing the use of force by President Bush that the embargo by itself was quite unlikely to get Saddam out of Kuwait; or even to get him to accept only the part of Kuwait which many proponents of the embargo were willing to offer him. Iraq began the eight-year war that followed its invasion of Iran with $35 billion in credits and ended ti $85 billion in debt, a net loss of $120 billion; and emerged as the dominant military power in the Gulf, ready to wipe out that debt by coercion and conquest. No one familiar with that record, or the huge human losses Iraq suffered during the war, or the horrific gassing of Iragi Kurds carried out immediately after the war by the Ba'ath leadership, should have believed that the pre-Desert Storm embargo alone would get Saddam out of Kuwait. And none of President Bush's men who understood very well the inadequacy of the embargo before Desert Storm should have been under any illusion that an embargo after Desert Storm would be enough to get Saddam out of power.

There he stands, one year later. He may outlast our elections. He may even outlans President Bush.

So it is only natural if, once again, the Administration, and possibly the Saudis, are thinking about psychological operations appealing to the Iraqi people, an especially to Saddam's inner circle, to risk a coup.

Such appeals might be successful. But we shouldn't count on it. Saddam has recently repeated one of his most cruel and effective strategems directed at keeping his inner circle in line. In 1979, while French, American, and other intelligence agencies were describing Iraq's supposed move toward moderation, he filled a large auditorium with his aides, and he himself made a videotape, which has been circulating ever since, of the proceedings. As his tense captive audience watched and perspired, he announced that he could tell when an aide was about to betray him, even before the aide knew it himself. He then called out successive imminent traitors, and invited others members of the audience to take part in their execution.

More recently, Saddam has allowed the circulation of videotapes showing some of the aftermath of the coalition PsyOps during Desert Storm. Saddam, of course, had used the artillery, tanks, and other heavy combat equipment which we had left undestroyed to annihilate the rebellion of the dissident majority and minorities. The tapes that have recently appeared on Western TV display some of the most prominent members of Saddam's inner military circle, the one we're trying to penetrate, slapping, kicking, and otherwise abusing and torturing some of the dissidents who responded to our PsyOps. Saddam counts on such displays to have a sobering affect on prospective dissidents. At the same time, it implicates them in the suppression of the widespread dissidence in the population as a whole.

Nonetheless, if the leaks are accurate, this wide-open secret coups aims to replace Saddam but not the dictatorships. It seems to exclude an Iraqi provisional government that would hold elections and could be counted on to recognize the rights of the Sunni Arab minority (of which Saddam's tribe is a part) as well as the Kurds and the dissident Shia Majority.

That may make it easier for Saddam to evade assassination and continue to hold on to power. Bad for the population of Iraq and extremely bad for its neighbors like the Saudis, traditional Bedouins still, who obviously fear the ultimate tribal revenge by Saddam.

But Saddam's cunning might fail him. His bloody craft and luck might both run out.

If We Succeed

THAT COULD be even worse. Suppose we do manage a coup and achieve Saddam's replacement by some reckless member of his inner circle. In the process, we would find ourselves with a substantial responsibility for the new dictator's suppression of the dissident population.

We've been down that road before--with General Za'im in Syria, Colonel Nasser in Egypt, and General Big Minh in South Vietnam. And it has never led us where we want to go. In this case we would find it hard to support the continuing embargo on Iraq's export of oil. And much harder to press for continuing drastic intrusions into Iraq's closed society by UN inspectors. Dictators, by necessity, are more serious about secrecy than democracies.

We might then find ourselves with a new Ba'ath dictator sitting on top of the world's second largest reserve of low-cost oil, one better able than Saddam to use oil revenues to rebuild the Iraqi military, including its capability for producing weapons of mass destruction. The coalition vastly overestimated the reliability with which one could uncover and exclude (by reconnaissance and bombing or by ground inspections and seizures) all substantial elements of programs for making nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Under the more relaxed regime that would follow when we have replaced Saddam with our own selected member of his inner circle, keeping our new man under control would be chancy if not impossible.

Why Not Overt Operations?

IT JUST MIGHT be better to work overtly, since it's not very shameful, with the Iraqis who have been trying (without much help) to draft plans for a more open and tolerant society in which individuals can communicate with one another and with the outside world without the prospect of torture and death. Instead of clandestine broadcasts (or the open Voice of America, whose job is to tell the world about the U.S. and U.S. policy) we might try broadcasts that are an open surrogate for broadcasts from inside the country about those Iraqis who want a free Iraq. Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and many brave citizens of the former Soviet Republics have said the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were crucial for them. "If we can reach Baghdad," says a leader of the Kurds, who have been using short-range TV stations they seized in northern Iraq, "it will be more effective than bombing Saddam." A Radio Free Iraq seems a worthwhile gamble.

The diverse Iraqi factions seeking a free Iraq to replace the Baghdad dictatorship want a federal democratic republic, not its disintegration. Since the British, some seventy years ago, put together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul to form Mesopotamia (now Iraq), their populatios, which had had little interest or experience in living together, have intermarried extensively and have developed educated professional and business classes. The free Iraqis have been issuing newspapers and newsletters and holding conferences in several foreign cities avowing a strong interest in the rights of minorities, in the rule of law, and in the institutions of democracy. They plan another conference in San Francisco in April to draft an Iraqi Bill of Rights.

The prospects for such a regime in Iraq look a lot better than for a similar regime among some of its neighbors. They are more plausible than the prospects for a benign military dictatorship, compliant with UN demands and friendly to the West. That's what the West thought had emerged in Iraq after Iraq's war on Iran.

There are risks in supporting democratic self-rule, but they're a lot smaller than the risks undertaken in many of our previous adventures as "apprentice sorcerers" (to use Elie Kedourie's phrase), trying to replace one dictator with another in Syria, in Egypt, and elsewhere. If we're going to gamble and perhaps make mistakes, we might as well try some new departures. Instead of the secret wide open coup we might avoid self-contradiction altogether, and aim at opening Iraq to Iraqis--to democracy and the rule of law. That would be consistent with the values of our own flawed, but wide open, society.

Mr. Wohlstetter, University Professor, Emeritus, University of Chicago, directed a several-year study in the late Seventies on interests and power in the Persian Gulf. It included analyses of potential invasions by Iraq of Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, and of Afghanistan by the USSR.