UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Deterring Saddam Hussein's Iraq: Domestic Audience Costs and Credibility Assessments in Theory and Practice Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nr3c3tt Author Palkki, David Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Domestic Audience Costs and Credibility Assessments in Theory and Practice A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science by David Dean Palkki 2013 © Copyright by David Dean Palkki 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Domestic Audience Costs and Credibility Assessments in Theory and Practice by David Dean Palkki Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Deborah Larson, Chair The question of how leaders assess the credibility of threats and assurances is at the heart of scholarly literatures on diplomatic signaling, deterrence, and coercive diplomacy. It is also of enormous importance to policymakers. My dissertation addresses the degree to which leaders assess the credibility of others’ signals based on their expectations of whether others will pay domestic audience costs for failing to follow through on their commitments. Leading scholars have written that only democratic regimes can strengthen the credibility of their commitments by generating audience costs. Scholars have also written that personalist regimes, exemplified by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, cannot send credible signals by use of the audience cost mechanism and are unable to grasp the audience cost logic. Recent attempts to identify the audience cost mechanism at work in historical records have come up empty-handed, casting doubt on the empirical validity of Audience Cost Theory (ACT). ii I find important instances in which Saddam and his subordinates assessed the credibility of U.S. commitments within an audience cost framework. I also find that Saddam sought to increase the credibility of Iraqi messages by signaling that concerns about domestic audience costs tied his hands. American thinking and behavior were less consistent, though not always inconsistent, with ACT. My research draws heavily from captured audio files of private meetings between Saddam and his most trusted advisers. The thousands of hours of taped meetings involving Saddam and his inner circle provide unparalleled primary source material with which to test and refine scholarship on autocrats’ perceptions and decision-making. The first case study is on U.S.-Iraq signaling prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The conventional wisdom among scholars is that Iraq invaded Kuwait because April Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad, gave Saddam a “green light” to invade during a private meeting. Scholars fail, however, to address why Saddam would consider this private assurance credible, especially given his longstanding, intense distrust of the United States. I find that the “green light” interpretation is a myth. Glaspie provide no assurance of U.S. acquiescence to an Iraqi invasion, nor did Iraqi leaders believe that she had done so. Saddam and his advisers recognized that public threats and deterrent deployments of tripwire forces are commitment-generating, and, therefore, sought to deter such behavior by signaling that it was unnecessary and that it would lead to a conflict spiral. U.S. Arab allies, Glaspie, and other U.S. officials agreed that to avoid a conflict spiral, American warnings should be private rather than public. Concerns about domestic audience costs were far from a primary reason for why the United States went to war with Iraq over Kuwait, yet neither were they entirely absent from American leaders’ deliberations. iii The second case study is on why Iraq did not use chemical or biological weapons against U.S.-led forces during the 1991 Gulf War. Many scholars believe that Iraq refrained from using such weapons because the U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, issued an ambiguous deterrent warning that the United States would respond to Iraqi WMD use with nuclear weapon strikes. They fail to explain, however, why an ambiguous threat would be commitment-generating. Moreover, nothing in Baker’s ambiguous warning hinted of a U.S. nuclear response. Other scholars believe that Iraqi restraint stemmed from Baker’s threat that the United States would retaliate by pursuing regime change. Baker, however, repeatedly threatened that the United States would replace the Ba’athist regime in the event of any military conflict, whether or not Iraq used WMD. When war ensued and the United States failed to replace Saddam from power, Saddam opined that the administration’s public commitment to replace him, and failure to do so, led Americans to vote Bush out of office. Saddam also indicated belief that Iraq’s massive WMD evacuation drills generated domestic audience costs, thus signaling resolve to foreign leaders. The third chapter, on Iraq’s coerced disarmament, consists of a mini-case study on the crisis over UN weapon inspectors’ attempt in 1992 to inspect Iraq’s Ministry of Agriculture, a mini-case study on Iraq’s attempt to end the economic sanctions by deploying forces near its borders with Kuwait in 1994, and a review of how concerns about audience costs may have contributed to the ambiguous nature of Iraq’s disarmament. Saddam expressed belief that Iraqi demonstrations signaled resolve to foreign leaders and described U.S. calls to replace his regime within the context of American domestic audience costs. The U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and other senior Western diplomats expressed belief that Saddam could credibly commit to recognizing Kuwait’s sovereignty and borders by doing so publicly and iv unambiguously. Albright also predicted that if Saddam were to formally recognize Kuwait, thus clearly reneging on his longstanding commitment to incorporating the “Nineteenth Province,” that Iraqis would remove him from power. Considerations about domestic audience costs frequently played a less important role in my case studies than other factors. Even in Saddam’s Iraq, however, which supposedly exemplifies the type of personalist regime that can neither signal that it has generated domestic audience costs nor correctly assess the credibility of others’ signals within the ACT framework, audience cost considerations were far from irrelevant. v The dissertation of David Dean Palkki is approved. Albert Carnesale Marc Trachtenberg Deborah Larson, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 vi CONTENTS FRONT MATTER . ii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORY . 1 2. IRAQ’S INVASION OF KUWAIT . 53 3. IRAQ’S NON-USE OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION . 105 4. IRAQ’S COERCED DISARMAMENT . 161 5. CONCLUSIONS . 214 WORKS CITED . 226 vii Acknowledgements I am grateful to numerous individuals for their assistance and encouragement in completing this study. I thank Valerie Hudson, who mentored me as an undergraduate student, for encouraging me to go to graduate school. I have never had a finer teacher. I had the good fortune to work alongside dedicated and brilliant colleagues at UCLA. Deborah Larson, my PhD adviser, is all that a graduate student could ask for in a mentor. Marc Trachtenberg and Arthur Stein exert an intellectual influence on all students who study under them, and I was no exception. Albert Carnesale, who stepped down as Chancellor of UCLA in time to serve on my committee, strongly advised me to write the dissertation that I wanted to write—on America’s strategic interactions with Iraq. I may be deranged for finding credibility assessments and diplomatic signaling so fascinating, but have not regretted following Chancellor Carnesale’s timely counsel. My friendships at UCLA with Larry Rubin, Dane Swango, Melissa Willard-Foster, Chad Nelson, and many, many others helped make the penury and long nights of graduate school endurable—even enjoyable. Friends away from campus were even more important. I will look back on my days in Los Angeles with fondness. I wrote most of this study while working full-time in Washington, DC. It was a true privilege working under Kevin Woods at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). This dissertation would not have been possible without Kevin’s perseverance in establishing the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), without which scholars such as I would have had no access to the CRRC records. Scholars who have used the CRRC records owe Kevin thanks for sacrificing far more evenings and weekends, off of the clock, than they realize. This is equally true for Lorry M. Fenner, the former Director of the CRRC. Lorry and Kevin provided me with opportunities, encouragement, and superb (and frequent) mentoring. Scott Sagan provided me with a quite extraordinary opportunity to collaborate with him on a workshop series involving former Iraqi nuclear weapons scientists and other senior policymakers and scholars. Etel Solingen invited me to contribute a chapter to her newest book, and gave me excellent feedback. If only every young scholar had such opportunities! I am grateful to Christopher Alkhoury, Amatzia Baram, Leonard Binder, Hal Brands, Donald Caldwell, Albert Carnesale, Seth Center, Lorry Fenner, Deborah Larson, Jeffrey Lewis, Thomas Mahnken, Chad Nelson, Barry O’Neill, Lawrence Rubin, Scott Sagan, Etel Solingen, Shane Smith, Mark Stout, Dane Swango, Marc Trachtenberg, Kevin Woods, and Judith Yaphe for reading all or parts of the manuscript and for providing insightful comments. My apologies to anyone I may have forgotten to include on this list. At the CRRC, I benefited from conversations with countless researchers and scholars. I am particularly indebted to Charles Duelfer, Mike Eisenstadt, Ambassador David Mack, Norman Cigar, and Judith Yaphe. Though I completed this dissertation while working full-time at IDA and the CRRC, it should be fairly obvious that the conclusions presented in this study represent only my personal views and not necessarily those of IDA, the CRRC, or anywhere else within the U.S.