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If Saddam does go, finding an acceptable successor will be a formidable challenge. Saddam's shoot-first, ask-questions-never policy of dealing with perceived challengers has eliminated virtually everyone who knows anything about running the country and is not marred by complicity in his roguery. Neutralizing the many close relatives Saddam has placed in high positions would also be difficult.
While the Bush Administration concentrates mainly on winning a military victory, other nations in the region are keenly interested in the shape of postwar Iraq. The country's three northern neighbors -- Syria, Turkey and Iran -- may have designs on Iraq. Syria's President Hafez Assad has long claimed to be the sole legitimate leader of the Pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, rival factions of which rule his country and Saddam's. Turkey has historical claims on Iraq's oil-rich Mosul province in the north. And Shi'ite-led Iran could easily justify a land snatch as a means of liberating the Shi'ite majority in Iraq, which is dominated by a Sunni minority. Should moves to sunder Iraq begin, the country's Kurdish minority might rise up to carve its own state out of the north. That, in turn, might spark a rebellion among Turkey's Kurds.
The partitioning of Iraq would be a tragedy not only for the Iraqis but for the entire Middle East as well. Each of the borders in the region is as arbitrary as the next, and once one frontier is successfully challenged, all the others will be up for grabs. No regime will feel stable, no state secure.
SYRIA. Before the gulf crisis, Hafez Assad was most closely associated in Western capitals with major-league terrorism abroad and savage repression at home. Since he contributed 19,000 troops to the anti-Saddam front, however, Assad has become a comrade-in-arms. President Bush held talks with him last November in Geneva, becoming the first U.S. President since Jimmy Carter, in 1977, to meet with the Syrian leader. Meanwhile, Britain restored diplomatic ties and the European Community resumed economic aid.
The gulf crisis came at an opportune moment for Assad, who has wanted to edge closer to the West anyway since his old patron, the Soviet Union, was no longer able to keep his military outfitted in the style to which he had grown accustomed. Still, Assad has kept his newfound allies at arm's length. While joining forces with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam, Assad has been careful to maintain his nationalistic credentials within the Arab world by periodically bashing Washington and Israel in his public statements.
The aloofness is mutual, and for good reason: it is not easy to forget Assad's actions, like the 1982 massacre of some 20,000 civilians in the Syrian town of Hama while routing out Muslim fundamentalists, and his sponsorship of terrorists. "Assad's grisly record makes him unfit to serve as anything more than a temporary and tactical ally," says Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.