It seems to me the writer is leaning over backwards to give Saddam the best of all possible interpretations of events. Some facts seem to be ignored in the discussion of the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars.
In discussing the Iran-Iraq war, he neglects to mention Saddam's claim that Iran's Khuzestan province, which contains all of Iran's oil, was Arab territory and should be annexed to Iraq. Mentioning this would have suggested that Saddam's purpose in starting that war was not a defensive move as the writer claims but rather an imperialist attempt to annex Iran's oil reserves at a time when Iran was isolated and weakened.
Coincidentally, Saddam made a similar claim - that Kuwait legitimately should be a province of Iraq - before invading that country. The writer doesn't mention this either. These stated Iraqi justifications for the Kuwait invasion are evidence that Saddam's purpose was to annex the country not just to deal with alleged Kuwaiti over-protection or negotiate favorable financial arrangements.
His best argument is that Saddam may have been deterred from using chemical WMD's against us during the Gulf War. Of course, it also possible that Iraqi forces were simply unable to deploy these weapons given the sustained and effective air campaign waged against Iraq. So how can we be sure this was a valid example of Saddam being deterred?
Also, even if Saddam was deterred from using chemical weapons by our threats to retaliate with our own (presumably nuclear) weapons of mass destruction, that doesn't seem to me to be something we really want to have to rely on very often.
The administration and its supporters may be right in one sense: Containment may not be enough to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons someday. Only the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq could guarantee that. Yet the United States can contain a nuclear Iraq, just as it contained the Soviet Union. None of the nightmare scenarios invoked by preventive-war advocates are likely to happen.
Consider the claim that Saddam would employ nuclear blackmail against his adversaries. To force another state to make concessions, a blackmailer must make clear that he would use nuclear weapons against the target state if he does not get his way. But this strategy is feasible only if the blackmailer has nuclear weapons but neither the target state nor its allies do.
If the blackmailer and the target state both have nuclear weapons, however, the blackmailer’s threat is an empty one because the blackmailer cannot carry out the threat without triggering his own destruction. This logic explains why the Soviet Union, which had a vast nuclear arsenal for much of the Cold War, was never able to blackmail the United States or its allies and did not even try.
Would today's opponents of threatening Iraq with conventional war really prefer that instead we should rely upon the threat of nuclear war in the future? The people who are so adamantly opposed to the possibility of conventional war with Iraq would be OK with threatening the "nuclear obliteration" of that country to deter future aggression like that against Kuwait? That's what the writer is calling for. Playing a game of nuclear chicken with Saddam doesn't sound very inviting to me. And it seems amazing to me that anyone would consider this a better choice than avoiding the potential nuclear threat to begin with.
But what if Saddam invaded Kuwait again and then said he would use nuclear weapons if the United States attempted another Desert Storm? Again, this threat is not credible. If Saddam initiated nuclear war against the United States over Kuwait, he would bring U.S. nuclear warheads down on his own head. Given the choice between withdrawing or dying, he would almost certainly choose the former. Thus, the United States could wage Desert Storm II against a nuclear-armed Saddam without precipitating nuclear war.
So Americans shouldn't be concerned with someday having to send their troops into a conflict with a nuclear power? One thing that didn't happen during the Cold War is armed conventional conflict between the US and another power who also possessed nuclear weapons. How could we know the conflict wouldn't go nuclear? |
