Mearsheimer and Walt, continued
Saddam's Past Use of Chemical Weapons
There is second line of argument that preventive war
advocates use to convince skeptics that Saddam is an
evil leader who cannot be deterred. Specifically,
they point out that Saddam has used WMD against his
own people (the Kurds) and against Iran, and therefore
he is likely to use them against the United States.
Thus, George Bush recently warned in Cincinnati that
the Iraqi WMD threat against America "is already
significant and it only grows worse with time." The
United States, in other words, is in imminent danger.
Saddam's record of chemical weapons use is deplorable,
but none of his victims had a similar arsenal and thus
they could not threaten to respond in kind. Iraq's
calculations would be entirely different when facing
the United States, because Washington has the
capability to retaliate with WMD if Iraq ever decided
to use these weapons first. Given what the United
States could do in response to any Iraqi attack,
Saddam has no incentive to use chemical or nuclear
weapons against America and its allies, unless his
survival is threatened. This simple logic explains
why he did not use WMD against U.S. forces during the
Gulf War, and did not fire chemical or biological
warheads at Israel. Furthermore, if Saddam is a
tyrant who cannot be deterred, what is stopping him
from using WMD against U.S. forces in the Persian
Gulf, forces that have bombed Iraq repeatedly over the
past decade? The bottom line: deterrence has worked
quite well against Saddam in the past, and there is no
reason to think that it cannot work equally well in
the future.
Given this historical record, President Bush's
repeated claim that the threat from Iraq is growing
ominously makes little sense, and should be viewed as
a transparent attempt to scare the American people
into supporting a war. CIA head George Tenet flatly
contradicted the President's scare tactics in a letter
to Congress, explaining that Saddam was unlikely to
initiate a WMD attack against any U.S. target unless
Washington threatened the survival of his regime.
Why? Because even if Iraq did acquire a larger WMD
arsenal, the United States would still retain a
massive nuclear retaliatory capability. And if Saddam
would only use WMD if the United States threatened his
regime, then one wonders why the advocates of war are
trying to do just that.
The hawks do have a fallback position on this issue.
Yes, the United States can try to deter Saddam by
threatening to retaliate with massive force, But this
strategy may not work, because Iraq's past use of
chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran shows that
Saddam is a deeply warped human being who might use
WMD without regard for the consequences.
Unfortunately for those who now favor war, this
argument is difficult to reconcile with America's past
support for Iraq, support that coincided with some of
the behavior that is now being invoked to portray him
as an irrational madman. The United States backed
Iraq during the 1980s-when Saddam was gassing Kurds
and Iranians-and helped Iraq use its chemical weapons
more effectively by providing it with satellite
imagery of Iranian troop positions. The Reagan
Administration also facilitated Iraq's efforts to
develop biological weapons by allowing Baghdad to
import disease-producing biological materials such as
anthrax, West Nile virus, and botulinum toxin. A
central figure in the effort to court Iraq was none
other than Donald Rumsfeld, who visited Baghdad and
met with Saddam in 1983, with the explicit aim of
fostering better relations between the United States
and Iraq. And in October 1989, about a year after
Saddam gassed the Kurds, President George H. W. Bush
signed a formal national security directive declaring
that "Normal relations between the United States and
Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote
stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East."
If Saddam's use of chemical weapons is such a clear
indicator that he is a madman and cannot be contained,
why did the United States fail to see that in the
1980s? Why were Rumsfeld and former President Bush
then so unconcerned about him having chemical and
biological weapons? It was hardly a secret that
Saddam was a brutal dictator guilty of widespread
human rights abuses, and Iraq's invasion of Iran was a
recent memory. So why were U.S. leaders so sanguine
about Iraq's WMD back then? The most likely answer is
that American policymakers correctly understood that
Saddam was unlikely to use those weapons of mass
destruction against the United States and its allies,
unless Washington threatened him directly. The real
puzzle is why they think it would be impossible to
deter him today.
Saddam with Nuclear Weapons
The third strike against a policy of containment,
according to those who call for war, is that it is not
likely to stop Saddam from getting nuclear weapons.
Once he gets them, so the argument runs, a host of
really bad things will happen. For some
officials-including President Bush, Vice President
Richard Cheney, and national security advisor
Condoleeza Rice-Saddam wants nuclear weapons so he can
blackmail his neighbors and establish regional
dominance. Indeed, President Bush has warned that
Saddam intends to "Blackmail the world," and Rice
believes he would use nuclear weapons to "Blackmail
the entire international community." Others fear that
a nuclear arsenal would enable Iraq to invade its
neighbors and then deter the United States from
ousting the Iraqi army as it did in 1991. Even worse,
Saddam might surreptitiously slip a nuclear weapon to
al Qaeda or some like-minded terrorist organization,
thereby making it possible for them to attack the
United States directly.
The administration and its supporters may be right in
one sense: a policy of containment may not be enough
to prevent Iraq from getting nuclear weapons.
Instead, only the conquest and permanent occupation of
Iraq can guarantee that it will not acquire a nuclear
arsenal. Yet there is no good reason why the United
States cannot contain a nuclear Iraq, just as it
contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War. None
of the nightmare scenarios invoked by preventive war
advocates are likely to happen in the real world.
Consider the claim that Saddam would employ nuclear
blackmail against his adversaries. That strategy
works only if the blackmailer's threat to use nuclear
weapons is credible. In other words, to force another
state to make concessions, the blackmailer must make
it clear that he would use nuclear weapons against the
target state if he does not get his way. This is a
feasible strategy only if the blackmailer has nuclear
weapons and neither the target state nor its allies
has similar weapons. In that situation, the target
state obviously cannot respond in kind to a
devastating nuclear strike by the blackmailer, which
gives the latter significant coercive leverage over
the former.
But if the blackmailer and the target state both have
nuclear weapons, the blackmailer's threat to use those
weapons if he does not get his way is an empty one.
The reason is simple: so long as the target state can
retaliate in kind, 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 and its
allies and did not even try to do so. Despite their
deep antipathy towards the United States and their
ideological commitment to spreading socialism, the
Soviets were checkmated by the American nuclear
deterrent.
Even if Saddam does manage to acquire a handful of
nuclear bombs, his arsenal would be far smaller than
the 40,000-plus nuclear weapons that Moscow had in its
heyday. He would thus be in an even weaker position
if he tried to blackmail the United States, or any
state in the Middle East for that matter. America,
after all, is not only deeply committed to preventing
Saddam from conquering any of his neighbors, but it
also has a massive nuclear arsenal that it would use
against Iraq if he struck first against another state
with nuclear weapons. Thus, the threat of Iraqi
nuclear blackmail is not credible. Not surprisingly,
hawks do not explain how Saddam could blackmail the
United States and its allies when a rival superpower
like the Soviet Union never seriously attempted to
blackmail Washington, much less did it.
But what about the argument that Saddam might invade
Kuwait again with his army, and then tell the United
States that if it attempts another Desert Storm, Iraq
will use its nuclear weapons to defend itself? This
claim is equally dubious for the same reason, because
America has its own nuclear weapons. If Saddam
initiated nuclear war against the United States or its
allies over Kuwait, he would bring American nuclear
warheads down on his own head. Given the choice
between withdrawing or dying, he would almost
certainly choose the former. Furthermore, the danger
of an Iraqi conventional invasion of Kuwait has
declined steadily over the past ten years. U.S.
conventional forces are even more capable now than
they were in 1991, while Iraq's military is a pale
shadow of the third-rate force we trounced back then.
Thus, Iraq is unlikely to resort to conventional
pressure on any of its neighbors, whether or not
Saddam gets his hands on WMD. And if it does, the
United States could do Desert Storm II against a
nuclear-armed Saddam without precipitating a nuclear
war. However, Washington would have to make clear, as
it did in 1991, that it had no intention of going to
Baghdad and toppling the regime. As emphasized, if
Saddam's own survival were threatened by U.S. forces,
he might well launch whatever weapons he possessed.
This scenario highlights the one thing that getting
nuclear weapons would do for Saddam: it would make the
United States think twice (or even three times) before
trying to overthrow him. Needless to say, that is the
main reason why he wants them.
Ironically, some of the officials who are now
advocating war used to recognize that Saddam could not
employ nuclear weapons for offensive purposes. In the
January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, for
example, national security advisor Rice described how
the United States should react if Iraq acquired WMD.
"The first line of defense,"she wrote, "should be a
clear and classical statement of deterrence-if they do
acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because
any attempt to use them will bring national
obliteration." If she believed that Iraq's weapons
would be unusable in 2000, why does she now think that
he must be toppled before he gets them? For that
matter, why does she now think that a nuclear arsenal
would enable Saddam to blackmail the entire
international community, when she did not even mention
this possibility in 2000?
What about a Nuclear Handoff?
In the wake of September 11, of course, the real
nightmare scenario is the possibility that Saddam
would give nuclear weapons secretly to al Qaeda, or
some other likeminded group. We have every reason to
believe that a group like al Qaeda would try to use
those weapons against Israel or the United States, and
so we have a powerful incentive to take all reasonable
measures to keep these weapons out of their hands.
Yet the likelihood of clandestine transfer by Iraq is
in fact extremely small.
First of all, there is no credible evidence that Iraq
had anything to do with the terrorist attack against
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or more
generally that Iraq is collaborating with al Qaeda
against the United States. Hawks inside and outside
the Bush Administration have gone to extraordinary
lengths over the past 14 months to make that link, but
they have come up empty-handed.
The lack of evidence of any genuine connection between
Saddam and al Qaeda is not surprising, because
relations between Saddam and al Qaeda have been quite
poor in the past. Osama bin Laden is a radical
fundamentalist (like Ayatollah Khomeini), and he
detests secular leaders like Saddam. Similarly,
Saddam has consistently repressed fundamentalist
movements within Iraq itself. Given this history of
enmity between Iraq and al Qaeda, the Iraqi dictator
is unlikely to give it nuclear weapons that it might
use in ways that he could not control.
It is possible, of course, that intense U.S. pressure
might eventually force these unlikely allies together,
just as the United States and communist Russia became
allies during World War II. Saddam would still be
unlikely to share his most valuable weaponry with al
Qaeda, however, because he could still not be
confident that it would not be used in ways that
placed his own survival in jeopardy. The United
States did not share all its WMD expertise with its
own allies, and the Soviet Union balked at giving
nuclear weapons to China despite their ideological
sympathies and repeated Chinese requests. There is no
reason to think that Saddam would act any differently
Second, Saddam could hardly be confident that the
transfer would go undetected. In the wake of
September 11, the intelligence agencies of the United
States and its allies have been riveted on al Qaeda
and Iraq, paying special attention to finding links
between them. If Iraq possessed nuclear weapons,
American monitoring of those two adversaries would be
further intensified. To give nuclear materials to al
Qaeda, Saddam would have to bet that he could elude
the eyes and ears of numerous intelligence services
determined to make sure that he gets caught if he
tries a nuclear hand-off. This would not be a safe
bet.
But even if Saddam thought that he could covertly
smuggle nuclear weapons to bin Laden, he would still
be unlikely to do so. He has been trying to acquire
these weapons for over twenty years, and at great cost
and risk. Is it likely he would then turn around and
give them away? Furthermore, giving nuclear weapons
to al Qaeda would be extremely risky for Saddam-even
if he could do so without being detected-because he
would lose all control over when and where they would
be used. And Saddam could never be sure that we would
not incinerate him anyway if we merely suspected that
he had made it possible for anyone to strike the
United States with nuclear weapons. The U.S.
government and a clear majority of Americans are
already deeply suspicious of Iraq, and a nuclear
attack against the United States or its allies would
raise that hostility to fever pitch. Saddam does not
have to be certain that we would retaliate to be wary
of giving his nuclear weapons to al Qaeda; he merely
has to suspect that we might.
In sum, Saddam cannot afford to guess wrong that he
will not be detected providing al Qaeda with nuclear
weapons; nor can he afford to guess wrong that Iraq
will be spared if al Qaeda launches a nuclear strike
against the United States or its allies. Nor is the
threat of U.S. retaliation as far-fetched as one might
think. The United States has enhanced its flexible
nuclear options in recent years, and no one knows just
how vengeful we might feel if WMD were ever used
against the U.S. homeland. Indeed, nuclear terrorism
is as dangerous for Saddam as it is for us, and he has
no more incentive to give al-Qaeda nuclear weapons
than we do. Unless, of course, we make it clear that
we are trying to overthrow him. Instead of attacking
Iraq and giving Saddam nothing to lose, the Bush
administration should be signaling that it might very
well hold him responsible if some terrorist group used
WMD against us, even if we cannot prove it.
The Need for Vigilant Containment
It is not surprising that those who favor a war with
Iraq have sought to portray Saddam as an inveterate
and only partly rational aggressor. They are in the
business of selling a preventive war, and that means
that they have to try to make remaining at peace seem
unacceptably dangerous. And the best way to do that
is to inflate the threat, either by exaggerating
Iraq's capabilities or by suggesting that horrible
things will happen if we do not act soon. It is
equally unsurprising that advocates of war have been
willing to distort the historical record in order to
make their case. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson
famously remarked, in politics, advocacy "must be
clearer than the truth."
In this case, however, the truth points the other
way. Both logic and historical evidence suggest that
a policy of vigilant containment would work, both now
and in the event that Iraq acquired a nuclear arsenal.
Why? Because the United States and its regional
allies are far stronger than Iraq, and because it does
not take a genius to figure out what would happen if
Iraq tried to use its arsenal to blackmail its
neighbors, to expand its territory, or to attack
another state directly. It only takes a leader who
wants to remain alive, and who wants to remain in
power. Throughout his lengthy and brutal career,
Saddam Hussein has repeatedly shown that these two
goals are absolutely paramount. That is why
deterrence and containment would work, and that is why
preventive war is unnecessary.
-----------------------------------------------------
John J. Mearsheimer is R. Wendell Harrison
Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science
at the University of Chicago, where he is Co-Director
of the Program in International Security Policy. He
is the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
(W. W. Norton, 2001).
Stephen M. Walt is Academic Dean and the Robert and
Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University. He is Faculty Chair of the International
Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs, and currently writing a book on
global responses to American primacy. |
