Part IV:
A better case can be made that Mr. Hussein was deterred from launching Scud missiles tipped with chemical or biological agents at Israel for fear that the Israelis would retaliate with nuclear weapons, but even here the evidence is hardly perfect. After the war, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that the Iraqi engineers knew that their warheads were awful and probably would have done little damage. For this reason, Mr. Hussein might have considered the conventionally armed Scuds to be the most potent arrows in his quiver.
After the gulf war, moreover, United Nations inspectors and Iraqi defectors revealed a set of secret plans and orders, issued by Mr. Hussein, that are disturbing at best. First, he had set up a special Scud unit with both chemical and biological warheads that was ordered to launch its missiles against Israel in the event of a nuclear attack or a coalition march on Baghdad. Since no one outside Iraq knew at the time about this unit and its orders, it was clearly intended not as a deterrent but simply as a force for revenge.
Second, in August 1990 -- after he realized that the United States might challenge the invasion of Kuwait -- Mr. Hussein ordered a crash program to build one nuclear weapon, which came close to succeeding. (It failed only because the Iraqis could not enrich enough uranium in time.) His former chief bombmaker has said that Mr. Hussein intended to launch the bomb as a revenge weapon at Tel Aviv if his regime started to collapse. His former chief of intelligence has said that he believes that Mr. Hussein wanted to build a nuclear weapon in order to deter the United States from launching Desert Storm.
Third, Iraqi defectors and other sources report that Mr. Hussein told aides after the war that his greatest mistake was to invade Kuwait before he had a nuclear weapon, because then the United States would never have dared to oppose him.
What all this suggests is that if Saddam Hussein is able to acquire nuclear weapons, he will see them as tools to achieve his goals -- to dominate the Arab world, destroy Israel and punish America. He might not launch such weapons immediately in pursuit of these aims, but that is cold comfort. There is every reason to believe that he would brandish them to deter the United States from interfering in his efforts to conquer or blackmail neighboring countries.
With 1990's-style containment fading quickly and unlikely to be revived, both of the remaining Iraq policy options -- invasion and deterrence -- carry serious costs and risks. But a well-planned invasion, one that mustered overwhelming force and the support of key allies, could keep those risks to a minimum.
On the other hand, staking our hopes on a policy of deterrence would cost little now (except a loss of face), but it would run the much greater risk of postponing the day of reckoning to a time of Iraq's choosing. Given Mr. Hussein's history of catastrophic miscalculations and his faith that nuclear weapons can deter not him but us, there is every reason to believe that the question is not one of war or no war, but rather war now or war later -- a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them. |
