We have had twelve years of "Deadlines"
This allegation is made way too often, and with way too little attention to context. The regimes of inspection and sanction we had in place for those 12 years failed not because inspection and sanction were doomed to fail, but because nobody – including us – was placing any real priority on their enforcement. It’s easy to place the blame for this on Clinton, but when we get past the 20/20 hindsight syndrome, the truth is that there was no real interest on anybody’s part. The Democrats didn’t care, the Republicans didn’t care, and the American people most emphatically didn’t care. Everybody was too busy riding the bubble and trying to keep up with the miraculous (if temporary) expansion of net worth, and after the bubble they were all too busy trying to pick up pieces. If 9/11 hadn’t come along, I don’t think Bush’s Iraq policy would have been all that different from Clinton’s.
Of course an inspection/sanction scheme pursued with little attention and no enthusiasm failed. Policies pursued that way generally do fail. The appropriate course upon realization of failure was not to abandon inspections and sanctions, but to go back and do them right, the way they should have been done in the first place. This would not have succeeded in removing Saddam, but that wasn’t really part of the brief in any event. It might not have succeeded in disarming Saddam, but it would have forced him to freeze any development programs and put anything he had into deep, deep storage, preventing any increase in threat. War might still have been necessary, but we’d have been able to go before the world and make a real and convincing case for war. We would have been able to go before the world, and our own people, and honestly say that we tried every possible action short of war. We can’t do that now. It’s pretty obvious that our leaders wanted this war from the beginning, and that the ritual dealings with the UN were little more than a way of filling up time while we deployed our forces.
The need to visibly exhaust all possible alternatives before resorting to war is a lot more than just a matter of form. It’s a precise statement – framed in actions, not words – of who we are and what we, as a people, believe. The statement we are now making is one that I’m not sure will serve us well in the future.
You have convinced yourself that we should do nothing until he is in the same power situation that Clinton has left us to deal with in NK.
Sorry, but that’s a load of partisan bollocks. There’s nothing Clinton could have done, short of declaring war, that would have prevented the north Koreans from getting to where they are. The options then were as thoroughly constrained as the options now. People that are completely unfamiliar with the peninsula will doubtless pop up and claim that the absence of a (still hypothetical) nuclear weapon made “regime change” an option at that time, but they are wrong. If you study that situation seriously (the Korea article in the current FA is a good starting point), and avoid the partisan hype on both sides, you’ll see why. |
