BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR
DR. STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE has served as the
Strategic Studies Institute's Middle East expert since 1988
and travels frequently to the region. Prior to this
appointment, he was an intelligence officer in Washington
monitoring the Iran Iraq war. He has also held positions in
journalism and taught at the University of
California-Berkeley, Ripon College, and Union College. He
is the author of The Kurds—An Unstable Element in the
Gulf and The Iran-Iraq War—Chaos in a Vacuum, and is
currently writing a book on Iraq and the international oil
system. Dr. Pelletiere's current research deals with
America's Dual Containment policy. He holds a B.A. in
English from the University of Vermont, and a Ph.D. in
Political Science from the University of California-
Berkeley.


LANDPOWER AND DUAL CONTAINMENT:
RETHINKING AMERICA'S POLICY
IN THE GULF
The author of this study contends that America's Dual
Containment policy has failed. He outlines in what way he
thinks that it has, and suggests alternative polices, which
he believes might prove successful, and which would not
destablize the Gulf—the risk that (in the author's view) we
are now running.
By a combination of economic sanctions and more
forcible methods, America has sought, through Dual
Containment, to make Iran and Iraq ammend behavior that
the United States believes it cannot tolerate. In the case of
Iraq, America finds actions of the leadership so abhorent
that nothing less than a complete regime change is
demanded. The United States wants Iran to give up its
alleged support for terrorism.
The policy of Dual Containment was promulgated on
February 24, 1994 at a symposium of the Middle East Policy
Council by Martin Indyk, then the senior director for Middle
East Affairs of the National Security Council (NSC).2 This
means that the policy is over 5 years old. This is too long for
America to be focused on two states that really should not be
of such great importance to it.
Dual Containment failed, the study will argue, because,
unlike its namesake—the famous containment policy of
George Kennan-it does not respect the principle of
power-balancing.When Kennan devised his containment
policy, he deferred absolutely to the notion of balance.
Kennan argued that the Soviet Union and the United
States, inasmuch as both were superpowers, had
everything to lose and nothing to gain by going to war with


each other. On the other hand, both states had global
interests which they clearly felt they must maintain.
According to Kennan, the United States and Russia
should respect each other's spheres of interest. That way the
two could get along, building themselves up and developing
their societies. However, they must, under no circum-
stances, go to war with each other. To be sure, with two such
diametrically opposed systems, relations would never be
warm, or even, in some instances, cooperative. However, as
long as the two did not try to destroy each other, catastrophe
could be avoided.
What Kennan was expressing was the concept of
balancing—the idea that, in the world of international
politics, a proper balance could be struck between potential
adversaries and this would produce a stable situation which
could be prolonged for an indefinite period.”
In regard to the Gulf, the author of this study believes,
U.S. policymakers erred in not following Kennan's lead.
They confronted hostile states Iran and Iraq with what
amounted to a dictat—the two either gave in completely to
America's desires-remaking themselves as the United
States required—or Washington would simply keep up the
sanctions until they did.
Kennan would have regarded such behavior as
outlandish. Such a course of action risks creating the very
situation the policymakers should to be striving to
avoid—namely, destabilization of the Persian Gulf. This
study will show how the United States got itself into this
untenable situation. In the author's view, it was done out of
ignorance. The policymakers seem not to have understood
the nature of the societies they were setting themselves up
to oppose. Nor did they, seemingly, understand the context
in which the societies operate.


This is a mistake. The policy is having an extraordinary
effect on the Iraqi people. Indeed, it is engendering intense
hatred of the United States; not simply because the bombing
has gone on for so long, but because it was ever undertaken
in the first place.
Of all the tactics America could have chosen to use
against Iraq, this one was by the far the most ill-conceived.
To understand why, one must know something of the
history of the country.
It was against the Iraqis that the first known use of air
power as a policing instrument was recorded." The British
introduced the practice there in the 1920s when they had
the mandate over the country. (This was before the Italians
employed aerial attacks against the Ethiopians in
Abyssinia, or the Germans against the Spanish at
Guernica.)
At the time, bombing civilians was regarded-even
among upper class Englishmen—as a “barbaric practice.”56
Not only did the British strafe and bomb Iraqi tribesmen,
they deliberately burnt their crops using incendiary devices
dropped from planes.
Such was the international outcry over this that
Churchill, then Britain's Foreign secretary, was forced to
defend the bombing policy. He said,
Aerial action is a legitimate means of quelling disturbances
and of enforcing the maintenance of order but it should under
no circumstances be employed in support of purely
administrative measures such as the collection of revenue ...
(A reference to the fact that the R.A.F. was bombing Iraqis as a
way of softening them up before the tax collectors appeared.) 58
Over the years (and the British did not leave Iraq until
1958), thousands of Iraqis quit their farms in the southeast,
the area hardest hit by the bombing, to gather in shanty
towns in the capital of Baghdad and in other large cities. 59
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