They know this too, and the results of their desperation may not remain localized, especially once they have nukes. Do not romanticize the Cold War! The world lived for forty years on the knife edge of a US-Soviet war. Fortunately for us the Russian leaders were conservative thinkers and not fanatics. This is not true of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.
Trying to compare Saddam to the Soviet Union is absurd. The Soviets achieved strategic parity with us, a parity that, if tested, would have destroyed the world. They had a massive nuclear arsenal and delivery systems capable of overwhelming our defenses and reaching every corner of our country. Even in a worst case scenario Saddam will have nothing of the kind. We’re not talking about an enemy achieving strategic parity, we’re talking about a shift in the regional balance of power, and not such a grave one at that: other nuclear arsenals in the region or deployable there trump anything Saddam could obtain hundreds of times over.
There is no reason to suppose that deterrence will be ineffective; Saddam is a nut case but he’s not in any way suicidal. Since military action against Iraq will have no impact at all on al Qaeda, except to provide a horde of motivated recruits, Osama is irrelevant to this equation.
There’s a lot we can do to Saddam, short of invasion, that we haven’t done. Number one on the list would be use of military force to enforce sanctions. This means, in short, that the tankers of oil going out by road would become subject to air attack, and the port of Basra would be blockaded. Just for kicks, we could air drop food and medicine, all wrapped up in American flags.
Once we decided not to take out Stalin in 1946, we had no choice but to hope that deterrence would contain the USSR. It did at the end, but at very great cost.
One of the most irritating factors in this whole debate, to me, is the way that the verb “to take out” has penetrated common discourse. Once the exclusive property of mafiosi and scriptwriters, it now appears in common parlance with a frequency that triggers my gag reflex on a near-daily basis. OK, it’s only words, but words reveal thoughts, and the thoughts these words reveal are slimy ones. I hate the phase, hate its psuedo-macho bluster, its instant reduction of complex issue to simplistic solution. Get rid of a few nasty people, all the problems are gone. Just take ‘em out. Don’t like the way someone’s behaving? Take ‘im out. And the problems will go away. As the seventh graders say, “Yeah, right”.
So readers, be warned: from this point forth, use of this construction in posts to me – the only ones I read these days – will trigger nastiness. I’ve never been nasty on this thread, not that I can remember at least, and I’d rather not start now.
Let me reformulate your comment, in honest terms:
Once we decided not to go to war with the Soviet Union in 1946, we had no choice but to hope that deterrence would contain the USSR. It did at the end, but at very great cost.
Better, no?
First, let’s dismiss the notion that war with the Soviet Union was an option in 1946. It wasn’t. From a military perspective it might have been possible, though the Soviets had a pretty significant military force themselves, and the experiences of previous armies invading Russia are not reassuring. Politically it would have been impossible; the American people were not going back to war unless absolutely forced to do it. Outside of a Pattonesque fantasy, it was never a real possibility.
In any event, would the “very great cost” of the Cold War exceed the cost of a war with the Soviet Union?
We do not have to suffer the costs of deterrence in Iraq, so why risk waiting to see what a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein will think he can do?
What are the costs of deterrence? The apparatus is already in place, we just have to point it in their direction. The costs of regime change are significant in their own right, and they embrace far more than just the cost of the military operation that begins the process, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. |
