Would Saddam Simply Leave?

BROOKS KRAFT/CORBIS FOR TIME
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, leaves the White House after meeting with President Bush

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Either option Saddam's voluntary departure or a coup would leave the U.S. with hard decisions and expose divisions among the allies. To satisfy the Bush Administration's ultimate aim of neutralizing the threat from Iraq, the Saudis propose that, as a condition for amnesty, Iraqi officials would have to unambiguously accept the removal of all weapons of mass destruction. Pentagon officials say the U.S. would probably still push for American troops to enter Iraq, in part to hunt down those weapons, a proposition that might inflame Arab opinion. What's more, the Saudis propose that however Saddam might be removed, the structure of his regime would remain essentially intact its secret police, its soldiers, its allies all over Iraq. The Saudis want a central authority strong enough to avert an Iraqi civil war, which could lead to incursions from Turkey or Iran, possibly destabilizing the region.

That is not exactly the vision Bush has sold of a new, democratic Iraq. Arab diplomats, however, believe that the White House has come to see the advantage of replacing Saddam with a friendlier strongman rather than with a rainbow coalition of supposed Iraqi democrats. Their calculation: a stable Iraq would be easier for the U.S. to manage after the war ends, require less messy nation building and reduce the chances that whole U.S. Army divisions would have to occupy Iraq for years. "Saner heads are prevailing," says a Western diplomat in the region. "All the talk about remaking the Middle East was harming relations with the Arabs. The political situation is too complicated to be promising Iraqis democracy."

But going along with an acceptable tyrant would eliminate much of Bush's rationale for the war the goal of establishing not only peace but freedom and progress in the region. After all the American promises of planting democracy where it has not grown, it would be hard to walk away content with supplanting one despot with another who promises to repress only his subjects and not the rest of the region.