You certainly are disgusting, among your other attributes.
Nobody "called" me. I came to paste a letter.
FYI: This is a review in the Times Literary Supplement of a book by Kenneth Pollack offering the case for invading Iraq. The review is by Peter Baehr. I offer it to show that there are intellectually respectable cases to be made that Colonel Wright's assessment of what is best for her country is in error. They may be wrong cases for America, as may hers be. The free exchange of ideas among imperfect individuals is the way we in America try to arrive at the best conclusions we can, as a nation. It was a little idea the Founding Fathers came up with.
This piece was published in January.
The critical path;Politics;Books
Peter Baehr
31/01/2003
THE THREATENING STORM. The case for invading Iraq. Kenneth M. Pollack. 494pp. New York: Random House. $25.95. - 0 375 50928 3.
To understand the road to war, first consider the roads that are closed
Dispute over the future of Iraq has exposed a disturbing feature of contemporary pacific opinion: it loathes and distrusts the current Bush administration far more intensely than it abhors -or fears -Saddam Hussein. This explains why so many soundbites, and so much column space and ordinary conversation, are devoted not to the Iraqi Government's depredations but to the relentless unmasking of the US administration and to debunking its claims.
Stripped of a few intermediate statements and redundant or pious qualifications (Saddam is a bad guy, his past record is deplorable, the Iraqi people have suffered dreadfully -largely, of course, because of United Nations sanctions rather than because of Saddam's own behaviour), here are a few common non sequiturs: George W. Bush is a domestic conservative, even by Republican standards, who usurped a Democratic presidency; therefore, by political contagion, his policies on every dimension are suspect. Israel has nuclear weapons too (and so might North Korea soon); ergo, all the fuss about Saddam's ambitions is bogus or misplaced. America has an interest in "cheap" oil; so the Bush administration's Iraq policy is at root about economics rather than world peace. The US Government has a poor record in past foreign entanglements, propping up dictators including Saddam himself during the Iran-Iraq War -wherever they suited US global power; accordingly, its determination to remove Saddam now is hypocritical and indefensible. The link, trumpeted by Donald Rumsfeld and others, between Saddam and al-Qa'eda is tenuous at best; hence, so too, is the case against the Iraqi regime's weapons of mass destruction. Such everyday elisions and cartoons serve only to deflect attention from the specificity of the Iraq problem as it now exists, subsuming it under extraneous issues or motivations. Rarely have we been so in need of informed, discriminating discussion.
Out of this fog, Kenneth M. Pollack's The Threatening Storm: The case for invading Iraq emerges as a beacon of reason and responsibility. A military analyst on Iran and Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency who warned sceptical policy makers in July 1990 of the imminent Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; a former director for Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration; and now the Foreign Policy Studies Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, Pollack is one of the foremost American authorities on the Middle East. (His revised MIT doctoral thesis on Arab military effectiveness, 1948-1991, was published last year by the University of Nebraska Press.) The result is not only a rigorous analysis of Saddam's machinery of terror and of his military capability, but also a critical insider's view of the debate over Iraq that took place within the Bush Sr and especially the Clinton administrations. No apologist, Pollack unflinchingly documents the wishful thinking and culpability that has attended US and Western approaches to Iraq over the years.
Three positions on Iraq among American decision-makers are discernible. They differed -and continue to differ in attenuated form under the younger Bush administration -not in their abomination of Saddam but in their appraisal of what to do about him and what kind of place he should assume in the host of priorities that comprises American foreign policy. The first position, favouring a minimalist containment strategy, approached Saddam as a residual problem. For senior policy generalists (notably Bill Clinton) who subscribed to this view, the real issues and priorities lay elsewhere -influencing Russia's transformation and restructuring Central and Eastern Europe, expanding NATO, engaging China and India. To concentrate on Iraq in a putative zero sum game was to deploy diplomatic and other resources that were badly needed elsewhere to create a better world.
Against the minimalist strategy was a small group of individuals -Vice President Al Gore and UN Ambassador (later Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright were among them -who believed that Desert Storm had failed to dampen Saddam's expansionist ambitions, that containment would not work in the longer term, and that regime change was the only viable option for America to pursue. Shading into this coterie was a larger group, consisting principally of the Government's own Middle East specialists, who pressed for an aggressive version of containment. Their preference was to remove Saddam through covert action and support for Iraqi opposition groups, rather than direct military involvement, a radical measure they believed the American people, and their chief executive, would never countenance.
September 11 dramatically simplified the political landscape, lending a new legitimacy to regime change. This was not because of a specific al-Qa'eda connection, but because the outrage provided ordinary Americans with a stunning reminder of the price of global security. But what, then, is the nature of the Iraqi threat? And what, in Pollack's estimation, should be done to meet it?
A Ba'athist stalwart and de facto ruler of Iraq since 1975, Saddam began his presidential reign of terror in July 1979 by a purge of party and government that forced the core of its terrified survivors to take part in the firing squads that executed former colleagues. The dismal catalogue of crimes and campaigns that followed is now a matter of record. The invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was prefaced by Saddam's war against Iran, egged on and supported by the United States, that left around half a million dead and twice that number wounded, many of them victims of chemical weapons. Using similar means of mass destruction, also during the 1980s, Saddam's repeated attacks on the Kurds led to the slaughter of around 200,000 of their number, displaced 1.5 million more and razed 4,000 of their towns while the West looked on ineffectually. Yet the Kurds' ordeal was not over. During the Iraqi intifada that followed Saddam's expulsion from Kuwait, Kurds and southern Shi'ites were mercilessly suppressed by Republican Guard divisions. Faced with sporadic if stubborn resistance from guerrillas hiding in the Hawizeh and an-Nasiriyah marshes, Saddam's minions have been busy draining them to flush out the remnants of opposition. Iraqi Sunnis too, together with the Shi'a majority, have endured systematic terror and privation, incapable of deposing a man whose security apparatus protects him from all rivals and pretenders.
However grotesque, Saddam's past regimen of serial and mass killing is not the worst that can be expected of him. A leader with millenarian ambitions to become the Middle Eastern hegemon, Saddam fancies himself al-qa'id ad-darura, "the indispensable leader", or as al-ayyam al-tawila, "the man of the long days", who will lead the Arab world to a new golden, glorious age. Expansion is his raison d'etre, aggression his tool. A megalomaniac assailed by few obvious doubts, Saddam has none the less acknowledged that his big mistake in invading Kuwait in 1990 was to do so before he possessed nuclear weapons. Armed with the doomsday machine, the man of the long days could threaten others with the end of days if they challenged his conquest of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.
It is a threat that Pollack takes very seriously, and the reason why he reluctantly elects for regime change, spearheaded by an American invasion, in preference to renewed efforts at containment or a policy of deterrence. While the first option is likely to be as unsuccessful as its precursor turned out to be, the second option is too dangerous to test. Containment through a combination of sanctions, arms inspectors and No-Fly Zones was the solution anointed and reaffirmed by the United Nations Security Council in a number of resolutions since 1990. It remained, despite fits and starts, broadly workable until 1997; thereafter containment began to be undermined as Saddam exploited the growing lassitude within the coalition that was fragmenting into competing economic interests. Of the Security Council's permanent members, only the US and Britain stood firm. Not least of the ironies of 2002 was that the nations that were most vocal and sanctimonious in their defence of United Nations legality were the most sedulous in undermining it. Dead set against sanctions, lukewarm about inspections, and determined to acquire oil and military contracts and collect debts owed to them, the governments of France, Russia and China repeatedly ignored UN resolutions on Iraq where they proved inconvenient. In addition, the sanctions regime has been unable to stop rampant smuggling, worth more than $3 billion annually to Saddam, among states contiguous with Iraq - notably Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Iran -while it has badly hurt ordinary Iraqis who have absorbed the pain intended for the Saddam clique.
Containment, it transpires, can only be a short-term measure, a phenomenon of crisis management that, by definition, is quick to erode once vestiges of "normality" return. The unanimity of interest and the durability of resolve that are required to institutionalize it do not exist in the real world of geopolitics.
No-Fly Zones, effective as they have been thus far, cannot be patrolled for ever.
Sanctions, to the degree that they are enforced, are injuring the wrong people.
And inspections are unable to offer a comprehensive account of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This is not only because chemical and biological agents are mobile and hard to track down, but also because many of Iraq's weapons facilities are dual use, capable of both civil and military functions. In any case, short of a genuine threat of invasion, there is no firm incentive for Saddam to cooperate with weapons inspectors. Remove the imminent prospect of invasion and, as in 1996, Saddam will restrict their movement or, as in 1998, unceremoniously kick them out.
If containment is unworkable, deterrence rests on assumptions, Pollack argues, that are perilously implausible in the case of Iraq. For over a quarter of a century, Iraq has been engaged on a nuclear weapons programme assiduously encouraged by Saddam. Despite setbacks that led him to become more furtive -notably the June 1981 Israeli air raid on the French-built Osiraq reactor at Tuwaitha, near Baghdad preparations to develop nuclear weapons have proceeded apace. Western intelligence, arms inspections and the reports of emigre Iraqi scientists reveal that Saddam's laboratories have tried a range of methods -centrifuges, ion exchange, laser- isotope separation among others -to enrich the domestic uranium necessary for fissile material. They were close to success in 1990 when the Gulf War rudely interrupted Saddam's nuclear agenda. Since then, according to Khidhir Hamza, the former head of Iraq's weapon design programme who defected in 1994, Saddam's nuclear plans have become even more frenetic, camouflaged by his dispersion of teams of engineers around the country. Hamza estimates that over 14,000 workers are engaged in Saddam's nuclear efforts. Equipped with know-how, resources and backing, Saddam's nuclear engineers are between one and six years away from developing the Bomb, depending on whether they are able to acquire fissile material from abroad or are compelled to produce it themselves.
Why, then, cannot Saddam be deterred as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War? Nuclear deterrence works best for powers that agree on spheres of influence and who, at least in that respect, are conservatives. It is no coincidence that the closest the world ever came to a nuclear cataclysm was when Khrushchev -characteristically edgy and impetuous - led the Soviet Union, and even he was a traditionalist when contrasted with the gambler Castro. Like Castro, Saddam is openly contemptuous of the status quo.
Deterrence is also most reliable for powers that have good networks of communication and are able to determine, or at least make informed calculations about, the antagonist's intentions. In Iraq's case, however, the bulk of information acquired by the intelligence services is overwhelmingly focused on internal security, designed to protect Saddam's back. His understanding of the outside world, and particularly the Western world, is systemically deficient. Though not irrational, Saddam is unstable, surrounded by a court terrified to displease him with alternative ("disloyal") views.
Accordingly, Saddam has shown himself ready to take enormous risks that have always backfired but have not stopped him from taking more. Consider the attack on Israel in October 1973 that was repulsed at great cost to Iraqi forces on the Golan Heights. Consider also Iraq's abrogation in 1974 of the March Manifesto, granting limited autonomy to the Kurds, and negotiated by Saddam himself four years earlier, which ended in a rout and humiliating concessions when the Shah of Iran's armed forces intervened. Then there was the narrowly avoided war with Syria in 1976; the assault on Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. And even that debacle did not stop Saddam from threatening Kuwait once more in October 1994. In all these instances, Saddam made catastrophic miscalculations of which the most alarming was his view that while it was probable that the United States would seek to repel his 1990 Kuwait incursion, he would still be able to defeat American forces.
Aside from the moral capitulation that a shift towards deterrence would constitute -in the absence of No-Fly Zones Iraqi forces would quickly reoccupy the Kurdish heartland and once more brutalize its 4.5 million inhabitants -Saddam may conclude that a nuclear-armed Iraq would induce the West to deal with him or risk a strike on Tel Aviv or the Saudi oilfields. The destruction of Saudi oil which constitutes 15 per cent of global production -would not simply affect the United States; it would drive the world economy into a crisis comparable to, and possibly worse than, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recall that "the 1973 oil embargo withdrew only 2.75 per cent of global oil production from the market, and the Iranian revolution withdrew 5.68 per cent". Faced with such threats, would the West really venture to stop an invasion of Kuwait, Syria or Saudi Arabia itself?
Something else strengthens Pollack's overall argument about the dangers posed by a nuclear-equipped Iraq, even if The Threatening Storm does not mention it. Since 1990, key American policy-makers have warned Saddam that the use of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be met by overwhelming or ultimate force, code expressions for a retaliatory nuclear strike. How credible is this threat? And, if it is credible, has the US Government thought through what it would be doing? Today, the legitimacy of United States foreign policy rests on its central claim to defend human rights and human freedom. That its rhetoric and its practice have frequently been in collision is obvious, but in Japan, South Korea and Germany, American power implanted democratic institutions, just as American force and diplomacy, more recently, saved Bosnia and Kosovo from extinction. It is not clear, given the US's credal emphasis on human rights, how it could ever justify employing nuclear weapons -arms of mass and indiscriminate destruction par excellence -against a country the bulk of whose people are held captive by a ruthless dictator. During the Cold War, the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction succeeded because Soviet leaders accepted its premisses and because the Soviet Union was a status quo power. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated in an age that had had no time to reflect on the barbarity of nuclear carnage.
That age is past. A nuclear-weapon-equipped Iraq, hosted by a risk-taking leader for whom human rights and freedoms are intolerable infringements on his sovereign power, would face the United States with an impossible quandary. If the United States used nuclear weapons in retaliation, killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the process, it would expose itself as the brutal hypocrite its enemies have always insisted it to be. But if it desisted from employing them, Saddam would have his way. On both counts, he would win.
I have devoted considerable space to the options that Pollack rejects - containment and deterrence -because without appreciating their fragility one cannot appreciate why he settles on a United States-led invasion to de-fang Saddam. The "Afghan approach", in which American forces cede much of the fighting on the ground to indigenous opposition, Pollack effectively scotches, noting that there is no equivalent in Iraq to the Northern Alliance. The expatriate Iraqi opposition is a shambles. The Shi'a are demoralized, while the Kurds simply lack the organization, military clout and leadership to best the Republican Guard.
Moreover, many ordinary Iraqis are adopting a wait-and-see posture. Having seen past American efforts fail to topple Saddam, and having witnessed the retribution meted out to those who dared confront him, few among the domestic opposition are willing to risk open revolt.
Nor can Iraqi forces be vanquished from the sky. Pollack observes that the success of precision-guided munitions and B-52 strikes have been greatly exaggerated. Even during the Gulf War, when the United States flew more than a thousand sorties against each of the Republican Guard heavy divisions, they remained intact.
Experience shows that disciplined troops, fortified by supplies, are exceedingly hard to break by air assault alone. And since 1991 the proportion of such troops in Iraq, battle-hardened from past campaigns, has grown, accounting for twelve of Saddam's twenty-three divisions. The extensive road network in central Iraq will facilitate logistical support to the bulk of its 430,000 troops; though Saddam's army is less than a third of its size in 1990, it still remains formidable.
Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units, impregnated with military and tribal values of honour, valour and sacrifice, will be no pushover if they choose to fight. And, unlike the Kuwait theatre of operations, conducted in open desert, combat in Iraq will take place in an environment with much more cover for the defenders: buildings, trees and even mountainous terrain. American force must be speedily mobilized and decisive if Iraqi civilians are to be spared the worst of the bloodshed.
But it is not only superior strength of arms that the United States requires; it desperately also needs regional cooperation. Pollack is highly critical of those among his own countrymen who believe that the United States can fight this war alone, accusing them of political as well as military naivety. Allies in the Middle East (and beyond it) will be required both to station coalition forces and to help rebuild a post-Saddam Iraq. If Kurdistan is to be defended, Turkey's support minimally, use of the Incirlik air base on the Mediterranean -is vital. Equally, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are important staging posts, while without Egyptian permission to use its air space or the Suez Canal, US forces will be severely hamstrung.
In contrast to the Arab "street" with which they must episodically contend, most Middle Eastern governments privately condone an invasion -provided American forces finish the job, oust Saddam for ever, and do so as quickly as possible. These governments are well aware that containment has failed and that deterrence is unlikely to work. A post-Saddam environment would dramatically reduce their own sense of insecurity. Concomitantly, a relaxation of regional tension would create the conditions for the withdrawal of American troops from their soil -a potent source of resentment among many ordinary Arabs. At the same time, a successful invasion plan would need to do its utmost to keep Jordan, the most domestically vulnerable state, out of the fray and restrain Israel's involvement in it. Once an invasion began, Saddam's key objective would be to provoke Israel into joining the attack, probably by firing Scud missiles at it, so as to widen the conflict, inflame Arab sentiment and raise the price of moderate Arab government support of the US. Under those circumstances Israeli wrath would be hard to contain, which is why the Americans already have special forces inside Iraq to interdict and destroy its ballistic capability.
So far my account might make it seem that Pollack is a master Machiavellian of whom Henry Kissinger could be proud. In fact, The Threatening Storm concludes on a strongly idealistic note. An invasion of Iraq is justified, Pollack contends, not simply to remove an immediate threat or to find a despot more sympathetic to American interests, but to regenerate Iraqi society as a whole. Invasion requires a Wilsonian commitment to help build an Iraqi democracy with Arab characteristics, genuinely responsive to its many constituent interests.
The "pragmatic" approach -eject Saddam, find a more sympathetic replacement and leave the broader status quo intact -is opposed by Pollack on moral grounds but also, fittingly, because it is not even pragmatic. A power vacuum that prompted civil war and warlordism would also bring regional insecurity, thereby recreating the very conditions the invasion was supposed to eliminate.
Only what Pollack calls the Reconstruction Approach can avert a humanitarian disaster and, by sidelining extant political arrangements, create a new framework capable of harnessing Iraqi talent while leaving its people free. The initial costs for the US to install an extensive security presence, to facilitate the rebuilding of Iraq's shattered economic infrastructure and to support its ravaged people, would be considerable: perhaps as much as $45 billion over the first three years, significantly less if, as is likely, other countries contributed. Thereafter expenditure could be expected to decline steeply. As Pollack remarks, "Iraq . . . is the best endowed of any of the Arab states. In addition to its vast oil wealth, it also has some of the best agricultural conditions in the Middle East. Likewise, prior to the Gulf War, it had probably the best educated, most secular . . . population of all of the Arab states. In other words, Iraq has all of the raw materials to be a prosperous state and to make an economic transformation viable." The optimum solution would be for the US to guarantee the military and economic conditions for reconstruction, while leaving the details of reform to the United Nations, non-governmental organizations and the Iraqi people themselves.
Towards the end of the book, Pollack appears to draw back somewhat from the logic of his own argument, as if he has become unsettled by its implications and the burden they impose on him. The previous narrative leads the reader to expect him to counsel imminent invasion. Instead, hesitatingly, Pollack recommends caution. Two factors particularly disturb him. The first is the continued existence of al-Qa'eda. Rehearsing an argument that has since become familiar, Pollack worries that an Iraqi conflict would divert vital diplomatic, military and intelligence resources from the war on terrorism. Eradicating al-Qa'eda must remain the priority, he says; before we are reasonably sure of its success, "we should not indulge in a distraction as great as toppling Saddam". But what would count as success? Pollack acknowledges that "we" are unlikely ever to destroy all of al- Qa'eda's terrorist cells or capture all its personnel, so these cannot be the criteria enabling us to evaluate the group's final evisceration. We can, he notes, "cause the organization as a whole to wither" away just as the West did, during the 1970s, in the cases of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army Faction.
Yet if, as Pollack concedes, it was only much later that it was clear that these groups had expired, this is little help in knowing when to confront Iraq -especially if, as Pollack has previously insisted, Saddam will soon be in possession of a nuclear arsenal. Faced with that anomaly in his argument, Pollack offers a curious thought experiment to deal with it. He asks us to imagine that while the United States was in the process of invading Iraq, al-Qa'eda committed another major outrage on American soil. If, under those circumstances, the President were able to tell the American people candidly that "there was nothing else the US Government could have done to prevent the attack and there was nothing about the operations in Iraq that distracted or diminished the nation's vigilance against al-Qa'eda", then one could be satisfied that the invasion of Iraq was justified. "Only when the administration can meet this standard should we embark upon so large an additional endeavour as invading Iraq." The lameness of this scenario should be obvious. There is always something a government could have done to prevent an attack; the problem is that only hindsight reveals what it was. A president and public who waited for Pollack's impossibly stringent standard to be met would be waiting for Godot.
A second factor that disturbs Pollack, rightly, is the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not only that the violence is harmful in itself and is the open sore on which terrorist legitimacy festers. It is also that Arab public opinion is incredulous, when not apoplectic, at the plight of dispossessed Palestinians daily confronting Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships.
That Pollack does not accept a Manichaean explanation of this conflict is evident from all he says. But Arab publics are less inclined to make subtle distinctions, agitated by a media and educational system that reproduce the worst anti Semitic stereotypes and that depict the United States as Israel's implacable ally, an enemy of Arabs everywhere. That perception continues to damage American credibility in the region and is Saddam Hussein's best defence. It allows him spuriously to pose as the protector of the Arab world. Before Iraq is invaded, Pollack avers, it is of signal importance that the United States does everything in its power to abate the violence and assume a role -and profile -as honest broker.
At the heart of The Threatening Storm is a pathos that cannot have escaped its author. If Pollack's recommendation is followed, and Iraq is invaded, his central argument can never be proved, for then history will thankfully be unable to record Saddam's nuclear aggression. Yet if Pollack's argument is vindicated by events it will be because his prognosis was tragically ignored. We are still left, however, with a question that deserves an honest answer: what would prove invasion to be a mistaken strategy, and those of us who now support it to be guilty of a gross misjudgement? The most damaging single piece of evidence would be the revelation that Iraq had abandoned its weapons of mass destruction programme after 1998 (the year that the International Atomic Energy Agency was last able to verify that "most" of Iraq's nuclear inventory had been eliminated). And a "victory" that came through the use of American or Israeli nuclear weapons against Iraqis would be worse than any of Saddam's crimes. The cruel dilemma is that, without an invasion, a nuclear confrontation later is more likely than it is now.
Since her founding over two centuries ago, the United States has been blessed with presidents who were willing to make difficult but vital decisions in hazardous times. No one is going to elevate George W. Bush to the pantheon of Washington, Lincoln and FDR, but I for one am grateful that providence has seen fit to place him, and not a Jimmy Carter, in the Oval Office at this fateful moment. Iraq is sui generis. One can oppose Bush on many other issues -domestic and international -while believing that invasion is the correct course of action. Saddam Hussein is a sinister and menacing tyrant who has violated sixteen United Nations resolutions since 1990. American power is the only means by which he can be finally unseated.
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