Why Invade? The truth about Iraq.
nationalreview.com
September 30, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Let me tell you the truth about our reasons for invading Iraq. We are not invading Iraq to protect the credibility of the United Nations. We are not invading Iraq to bring democracy to the Arab world. We are not invading Iraq to save the Iraqi people from poverty and oppression. The reason we are invading Iraq is to prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons.
It is true that Saddam's defiance of the United Nations is important. That defiance does help to undermine the credibility of international agreements. But what really destroyed the credibility of our multilateral agreements was the willingness of countries like France, Russia, and China to violate international trade sanctions against Iraq that they themselves had agreed to. Quite simply, these countries — supposed pillars of multilateral legality — allowed themselves to be bought off by Saddam's oil. The real importance of Saddam's defiance of the international sanctions is what it reveals about Saddam's intentions. In fighting the sanctions, Saddam Hussein has sacrificed $180 billion dollars in oil revenue, thrown his people into impoverishment, and even allowed his conventional military forces to deteriorate, all in an effort to obtain a nuclear bomb.
It is true that after we conquer Iraq, we may succeed in bringing the Iraqi people a measure of democracy and prosperity. Many cultural barriers stand in the way of that goal, and the speed and direction of the transformation cannot be predicted. In other circumstances, the sacrifices and dangers of trying to remake an alien society from the bottom up would speak against conquest and transformation. But we now need to take on the task of gradual democratization and economic liberalization. We must do so because, in a world filled with weapons of mass destruction, it is no longer safe to allow an aggressively anti-Western or anti-American rogue state to survive.
But why can't we allow Saddam Hussein to obtain nuclear weapons? After all, the Soviets had nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War, yet none were used. The reason we cannot allow Saddam Hussein to obtain nuclear weapons is that Saddam cannot be deterred. That is proven beyond any reasonable doubt in Kenneth Pollack's vitally important new book, The Threatening Storm. Saddam has a nearly 30-year history of defying the logic of deterrence. Saddam regularly and radically miscalculates the dangers of his aggressive actions. He is ignorant of the outside world, and punishes or kills those who come to him with bad news. He is apt to seek revenge (as in the assassination attempt on former president Bush), even when revenge could cost him his life. And Saddam is possessed by a driving wish to dominate the Middle East. He also holds a vision of taking down his enemies when he goes, if go he must, with a terrible act of destruction that will permanently impress his "glory" into the pages of history.
These propensities are real, not some caricature devised for political purposes by a war-obsessed Bush administration. Read The Threatening Storm, and you will believe.
There are two reasons why Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons: First, because he may pass them to terrorists, or his own intelligence agents, for use against the United States. Second, because once in possession of nuclear weapons, Saddam will move to take control of the Gulf and subject America to nuclear blackmail. Some believe that Saddam's fear of nuclear retaliation will make him hold back from another move on Kuwait. But Saddam sees the matter in reverse. If he takes Kuwait before we can stop him, he will force the United States to decide between ceding him control of the region's oil supplies, and an invasion that would surely result in a nuclear strike by Saddam against either our troops, our cities, the Saudi oil fields, or all of these. Thus threatened, the United States may indeed be forced to back down and grant Saddam control of the world's oil. This is why Saddam has sacrificed all in pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
But wouldn't Saddam know that if he were to strike the Saudi oil fields with a nuclear weapon, we would surely wipe him out with our own nuclear arsenal? That is precisely the kind of gamble that Saddam has been willing to take. What would you do if you were forced to choose between saving the populace of New York City from a possible nuclear strike, and ceding control of the world's oil to Saddam Hussein? Saddam knows that you would hesitate to risk New York, so he is willing to gamble that he can get away with an invasion of Kuwait. In fact, he has already told his aides that his big mistake in Kuwait was not waiting until he had a nuclear device to invade.
And Saddam might be right. He just might be able to get away with invasion and nuclear blackmail. You can bet he's three times more confident that he can safely pull it off than he ought to be. That is exactly why we must fear him.
If we do attack and attempt to throw a nuclear-armed Hussein out of Kuwait, the least bad response we could expect would be a nuclear strike on the Saudi oil fields. Saddam might refrain from a nuclear attack on our troops or our cities, in hopes that we would withhold nuclear retaliation on Baghdad. But a nuclear strike on the Saudi oil fields would destroy and contaminate the world's main oil supply, precipitating a world-wide depression, and leaving Saddam's own oil wealth that much more valuable. Again, read The Threatening Storm, and you will believe.
The real reason we are invading Iraq is to prevent Saddam from carrying out this scheme — to prevent him from attempting to seize control of the oil resources of the Persian Gulf, and a subsequent attempt to hold us off with nuclear blackmail. (Again, the somewhat lesser likelihood of Saddam's passing a nuclear device to terrorists for use against an American city is also a key concern.)
Yet the American public does not really understand this. We are in the middle of a great national debate on a war against Iraq, yet the public does not have a clear understanding of the reasons for the war.
There are several reasons for this. Had the president gone to the United Nations and spoken openly of the need to prevent Saddam from moving on the Gulf and subjecting the United States to nuclear blackmail, he would have been derided as a paranoid, oil-hungry cowboy willing to sacrifice the peace of the world to his nation's selfish interests. (Even though, in truth, the entire world, and not just the United States, could easily be plunged into a lengthy depression by Saddam's aggressive schemes.)
So instead the president, in a judo move, turned the U.N.'s own multilateral principles against its hesitations. That worked brilliantly for a while, but at the cost of the whole truth about our reasons for invading Iraq. And the desire of many Democrats to frame our attack in terms of international law, rather than national interest or balance of power calculations, continues to make it difficult for the president to place the real issue before the country.
Another problem is the connection between the need to remove Saddam and the war on terror. The truth is, the need to remove Saddam is both related to, and independent of, the war on terror. If Saddam believed that he could pass weapons to al Qaeda for use against American cities, then he just might do so. And as I argued in "Beyond Deterrence," Saddam has every reason to think that detection of his role might fail. So the connection between the need to oust Saddam and the war on terror is real.
In the short term, however, Saddam is more interested in conquest in the Gulf, under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail, than in a direct nuclear attack on an American city. Yet, because the political momentum for an invasion of Iraq comes from 9/11, the administration has tended to frame the threat from Saddam more in terms of the war on terror than in terms of Saddam's designs on the Gulf.
It's not as though the administration has remained entirely silent about the core reasons for an invasion. In his recent appearance on Meet the Press, for example, the vice president noted how difficult it would have been to plan the Persian Gulf war had Saddam been in possession a nuclear device. And the president himself has said on a number of occasions that he will not have the United States subjected to nuclear blackmail. But between the pressure from the United Nations and the Democrats to speak in multilateral terms, and the critical political momentum provided by the war on terror, the true nature of the threat from Saddam has gotten lost.
That is why intelligent Democratic opponents of the war, from Stanley Hoffman to Michael Kinsley, seem genuinely puzzled by the need for an attack. The Democrats complain about the "constantly shifting" justifications for an invasion given by the administration. The implication is that there is no real reason for an attack — that the whole invasion idea is nothing but a scheme cooked up for political reasons. Nothing could be further from the truth. But rhetorical traps laid by people and events have made it difficult to speak frankly about the reasons why we must invade.
As I have said before — and will say again — Kenneth Pollack's extraordinary book, The Threatening Storm, does tell the truth about the need to invade Iraq. Pollack himself, I think, slightly underplays the danger of Saddam handing a nuclear weapon to terrorists for use against the United States (although Pollack certainly doesn't entirely neglect this issue). Pollack's focus is on how Saddam's regional ambitions are likely to escalate to a nuclear exchange. Of course, as the previous administration's chief expert on Iraq, Pollack has realized for years — long before September 11 — that an invasion of Iraq may be necessary for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism, per se.
Here is the truth. While September 11 was a horror that ought never to have happened, something good has come of it. Prior to September 11, Saddam was moving ever closer to nuclear capability, yet there was almost no political prospect of an American president being able to mount an invasion. A number of American observers (like the Clinton administration's Pollack, and like Paul Wolfowitz, now of the Bush administration) understood the mounting danger of a nuclear armed Saddam. Yet these men had little chance of waking the country up to the need to invade. September 11 has woken all of us up.
But the (partial) distinction between the threat from Saddam and the threat from al Qaeda has sewn confusion and skepticism. If the invasion of Iraq is part of the war on terror, ask the critics, why not attack Iran — an even greater sponsor of terror? Or why not wait till we find Osama and destroy al Qaeda? Or why not produce a "smoking gun" of cooperation between Saddam and al Qaeda? All of these questions miss the point — a point that the administration has not been entirely free to emphasize. We need to invade Iraq regardless of all these other considerations. Even for a moment, we cannot allow Saddam Hussein to obtain atomic weapons, because aggression and nuclear blackmail will quickly follow.
Last Saturday, Turkish police reportedly seized a cache of weapons-grade uranium from two men smuggling the material — perhaps into nearby Iraq. We need to understand that time is running out. Saddam knows that we are coming for him. No doubt he has stepped up his effort to commandeer material for a bomb. Even if these smugglers were not headed for Iraq, or if the uranium turns out to be less threatening in quality or quantity than feared, Iraqi agents with greater prospects for success are certainly in the field. The hour grows late. Our lives, quite literally, are at stake. Even the risk of isolated wartime chemical or biological attacks by Saddam's agents on U.S. territory is nothing compared to the danger of a fight after Saddam has obtained his bomb.
The Democrats are right about one thing, though. We must now put party aside. But to do so, we must unite around the president and unite against Saddam Hussein. History will judge harshly those who hesitated at this moment. We must arm ourselves with the truth — and strike quickly. |
