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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jcky who wrote (61001)	12/10/2002 11:16:27 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

What a great, sensible piece that refutes the complete authority of Kenneth Pollack about Iraq... Kenneth Pollack, former director for gulf affairs at the National Security Council and a proponent of war with Iraq, goes so far as to argue that Saddam is “unintentionally suicidal.” The facts, however, tell a different story. Saddam has dominated Iraqi politics for more than 30 years. During that period, he started two wars against his neighbors—Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. Saddam’s record in this regard is no worse than that of neighboring states such as Egypt or Israel, each of which played a role in starting several wars since 1948. Furthermore, a careful look at Saddam’s two wars shows his behavior was far from reckless. Both times, he attacked because Iraq was vulnerable and because he believed his targets were weak and isolated. In each case, his goal was to rectify Iraq’s strategic dilemma with a limited military victory. Such reasoning does not excuse Saddam’s aggression, but his willingness to use force on these occasions hardly demonstrates that he cannot be deterred.

To: jcky who wrote (61001)	12/10/2002 11:34:09 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Vigilant Containment is the way to go...IMO, Mearsheimer is very rational and right on target...I heard him on an NPR program the other day. Thanks for posting this excellent new Foreign Policy article... foreignpolicy.com <<...It is not surprising that those who favor war with Iraq portray Saddam as an inveterate and only partly rational aggressor. They are in the business of selling a preventive war, so they must 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 horrible things will happen if the United States does not act soon. It is equally unsurprising that advocates of war are willing to distort the historical record to make their case. As former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously remarked, in politics, advocacy “must be clearer than truth.” In this case, however, the truth points the other way. Both logic and historical evidence suggest a policy of vigilant containment would work, both now and in the event Iraq acquires 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 WMD to blackmail its neighbors, expand its territory, or attack another state directly. It only takes a leader who wants to stay 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. If the United States is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq, Americans should understand that a compelling strategic rationale is absent. This war would be one the Bush administration chose to fight but did not have to fight. Even if such a war goes well and has positive long-range consequences, it will still have been unnecessary. And if it goes badly—whether in the form of high U.S. casualties, significant civilian deaths, a heightened risk of terrorism, or increased hatred of the United States in the Arab and Islamic world—then its architects will have even more to answer for...>> John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he codirects the Program in International Security Policy. He is the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Stephen M. Walt is the academic dean and the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is faculty chair of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and is writing a book on global responses to American primacy

To: jcky who wrote (61001)	12/11/2002 12:59:20 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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?