Iraq: The Failure of Containment and the Strategic Necessity of War

Far from being a war of choice or a strategic distraction, military action against Iraq was an American and international strategic imperative.

The U.S., in particular, could not fight the war against terrorism while allowing Saddam Hussein’s regime — in the heart of the Middle East — to break out from containment as was happening on the eve of the war.

The Iraq campaign was not a preventive war. U.N. resolutions foresaw the restoration of stability in the Middle East through the use of force against Saddam’s outlaw regime — if that regime continued to refuse to account for the Weapons of Mass Destruction it was known to have possessed, and would not verifiably disarm. Other mechanisms for restraining Saddam — economic sanctions and arms inspections — had already been successfully subverted by the Iraqi dictator.

This is precisely the argument which sold me on the war.

The anti-war argument was based on two pillars. One, the explicit assertion, was that containment had been working (for which various arguments of the form "Saddam had no WMD" and "Saddam had no ties to terror" were constructed). Two, the implicit assumption on which rests the relevance of One, was that containment could simply be continued indefinitely, for years and years and years....

One is perhaps debatable but Two is patently false. And most of the people making this argument not only knew it was false but only two years prior had been in the forefront of the movement to... end containment.

The *same people* shifted from a low but steady drumbeat of "End the sanctions NOW! We're killing 500,000,000 Iraqi babies a year!" pre-9/11 to "Oh come on, the sanctions are working, and will continue to work" when they realized invasion was a real possibility. It was one of the most startling and disingenuous about-faces I had ever seen.

The Gulf War did not end; it was put on pause. We left Saddam Hussein standing and belligerent. There are only two ways to end a war: You win it, or you lose it. We chose to win it. The anti-war faction pretends that there was a third option, to keep the Saddam Hussein regime (and the regime of his sons? and his sons' sons?) in indefinite "contained/sanction" status for all time, because (supposedly) that's less costly/painful than just ousting the Hussein dynasty once and for all.

Not only was this idea utter nonsense, but the people advancing it never sincerely believed it in the first place. It was simply a convenient pretext for trying to prevent US invasion, and had it succeeded the whole implicit of Indefinite, Infinite Containment would have been immediately jettisoned and we would have started hearing about the perennial 500 million dead Iraqi babies again, in no time at all.

The irritating thing is that ever since Bush agreed to go to the UN the argument became myopically focused on "WMDs" and how much we can prove Saddam had of what, which was never even really the point in the first place.

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