Your argument presupposes that the US would stand by and allow sanctions to fail.
They didn't. They invaded. That was the only other option.
Sanctions are a multilateral measure, and are completely useless if only one country tries to uphold them, while all the other countries flout them. This was rapidly becoming the case with the Iraq sanctions. The US did not have the power to uphold a meaningful sanctions regime without the cooperation of the Turks, the Syrians, the French, the Russians and the Chinese. This cooperation was not forthcoming, to put it mildly.
But if you do, then you are saying that Bush and his administration would fail, were powerless, could not obtain international support to fix a relatively simple problem -- in effect you are saying that they are mental midgets and incapable
So if they were unwilling to pay France bigger billions than Saddam was paying them, that makes them "mental midgets"? Bullshit. The problem of collective security against a ruthless dictator who could care less about the welfare of his people is not a simple problem - indeed, it's failed almost everywhere it's been tried - and Europe's general flight from responsibility for security questions, together with France's opinion that it should lead Europe in opposition to the United States, do not make the problem any simpler.
Yet no concerted effort was made by the administration to address and fix these shortcomings.
False. One of Colin Powell's first actions as Sec of State was to go to the UN to try and beef up the sanctions, and take the "dead baby" propaganda pressure off the US by passing "smart sanctions". He got his head handed to him; the Security Council completely refused to cooperate. We now know who was being paid billions to refuse.
Had there been any feasible sanctions regime that could actually have contained Saddam, it was absolutely in George Bush's interest to go that route. Everybody knew that the Iraq war would be costly and was a very risky venture. The Clinton administration had discussed it seriously several times but always shied away from the costs in the end. But the idea that there was another option that could actually have contained Saddam, and whose price wasn't steadily rising (remember, US troops in Saudi Arabia was OBL's original cause de guerre) is foolishness. |
