Posted on 10/09/2002 2:40:25 PM PDT by KsSunflower
I don't mind people hearing both sides of the argument. As long as people keep fact and opinion separate.
Seriously tho, we are so blessed. And thankful for FR too!
September 30, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Why Invade?
The truth about Iraq.
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.
— Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
ANYBODY but Granholm!
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020301faessay7970/kenneth-m-pollack/next-stop-baghdad.html
".......Thanks to Washington's own missed opportunities and others' shameful cynicism, there are no longer any good policy options toward Iraq. The hawks are wrong to think the problem is desperately urgent or connected to terrorism, but they are right to see the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam as so worrisome that it requires drastic action.
The doves, meanwhile, are right about Iraq's not being a good candidate for a replay of Operation Enduring Freedom, but they are wrong to think that inspections and deterrence are adequate responses to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.
After the more immediate danger posed by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network has been dealt with, the Bush administration should indeed turn its attention to Baghdad. What it should do at that point, however, is pursue the one strategy that offers a way out of the impasse.
The United States should invade Iraq, eliminate the present regime, and pave the way for a successor prepared to abide by its international commitments and live in peace with its neighbors....."
September 26, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Consider This
Clinton’s chief Iraq expert announces his reluctant belief that an invasion is needed.
I want to take the unusual step of discussing a book that I have only partially read. I do this because I believe that it is likely to be a book of utmost public importance. In effect, I am inviting you to pick up this book along with me to see if it delivers on its extraordinary promise.
The book is The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, by Kenneth Pollack. The book's importance rests, in part, on the fact that Pollack was a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, and the principal working-level official responsible for implementing U.S. policy on Iraq. Pollack has grudgingly concluded that the post-Gulf War policy of containment deployed against Saddam by the United States has irretrievably broken down. Pollack believes that Saddam can no longer be safely deterred by our military might, and instead must be deposed by invasion. You might have seen the publication of this book touted as an important public event last Sunday on ABC's This Week.
Again, I have only read selected chapters of this large and important book. I cannot offer a definitive summary, much less a thorough analysis or review. Yet I have already been profoundly impressed by the book's fairness, depth of knowledge, powerful argumentation — and by its very frightening conclusions. Imagine that a friend found you engrossed in a book that seemed to be life changing, even as you were reading it. Although you could not be certain until you were done about the real effects of the book, you would want to tell him what you were experiencing. I want to tell you about The Threatening Storm. It may not exactly be life changing, but I do believe it will change our national debate on Iraq. (Something on which, come to think of it, your life may actually hinge.) I am more concerned right now that this book be read and debated as soon as possible, than that my own account of it be definitive.
Pollack was one of the very few intelligence officials to warn his superiors in the first Bush administration about Saddam's imminent invasion of Kuwait. The State Department in particular accused Pollack and his colleagues of exaggerating the threat of Saddam's massing troops, but Pollack encountered many other officials at the CIA, and throughout the government, who refused to believe that Saddam would do anything so foolish as to invade Kuwait. The problem, says Pollack, is "mirror-imaging" — the belief that Saddam will behave as you would if you were in his shoes. But Saddam, Pollack argues, because of the tribal culture in which he was reared, and because of his own personal peculiarities, does not act in the way that Americans expect him to act.
I know it's been said before that Saddam is "irrational" — a "megalomaniac who cannot be trusted. Many dismiss these statements as bias against non-Westerners, or as hysteria by those who want to invade Iraq, and who therefore paint an unreasonably lurid picture of Saddam Hussein. Others simply credit the portrayal of Saddam as a "maniac," but perhaps wonder how a crazy man can hang onto power so successfully and for so long.
Pollack explains all this by presenting a detailed, balanced, and persuasive portrayal of Saddam's decision making. What emerges is a frightening pattern of "bizarre decisions, poor judgment, and catastrophic miscalculations," of deeply dangerous moves made with "no assessment of risks or costs." Pollack traces this pattern back decades into the past, to incidents that predate well-known cases like the Gulf War or the war with Iran. The account of Saddam's 1974 abrogation of his agreement with the Kurds, his attack on Kurdistan, and his baseless belief that the shah of Iran would not intervene against him, for example, is very powerful.
I can only begin to touch on Pollack's nuanced and well-supported portrait of Saddam, but the point of all this is that Saddam cannot be deterred. Yes, Pollack does believe that the one line Saddam is relatively unlikely to cross is direct and unprovoked attack on Israel or the United States. Although even here Pollack acknowledges important circumstances in which such attacks may indeed occur.
But what Pollack stresses is the terrible danger that, once in possession of nuclear weapons, Saddam will take this as a license to invade Kuwait, and otherwise terrorize the Middle East. The real danger from Saddam's possession of nuclear weapons is the conviction they will create in Saddam that he can act with impunity in the region, safe in the knowledge that the U.S. or Israel will not dare attack him (for fear of risking nuclear annihilation of their troops).
The frightening scenario described by Pollack, in which Saddam could seize Kuwait and threaten to nuke the Saudi oil fields if we attack, is something I've never seen publicly discussed. But as Pollack lays it out, the scenario is all too realistic. A nuclear-armed Saddam taking over Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia leaves us with a choice between ceding him control of the world's oil supply, or of seeing that supply destroyed and contaminated for decades by a nuclear strike, sending the world's economy into radical shock, perhaps for years.
You might not believe that Saddam Hussein would dare to contemplate such an action, given all the attention now focused on him. Read this book, and I wager you'll think differently. Saddam, as Pollack shows, "is generally not deterred by the threat of sustaining severe damage." Instead, he has a "tendency to invent outlandish scenarios that allow him to do whatever it is he wants to do, no matter how dangerous." Again, these generalization become real in Pollack's book. For example, even though Iran had again and again demonstrated its superior ability to harm Iraq with retaliatory missile strikes, Saddam nonetheless repeatedly ordered air and missile strikes against Iranian cities. This was a clear breakdown of ordinary "rational" deterrence.
Of course, this book has grabbed my attention because it bears out much of what I have been arguing of late on NRO, although not entirely so. Above all, Pollack gives chapter and verse substantiating the argument I made in "The Future Is Now" and especially in "Brave New World." In those pieces I maintained that nuclear proliferation tends to embolden rogue nations, even as it cows "rational" nations. The prospect of a world in which our conventional power is effectively neutralized, while the bold (and foolish) exploit the fear of mutually assured destruction to launch dangerous adventures, finds its ultimate realization in Saddam Hussein. Read this book, and you will believe that a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein is an intolerable danger to the world — and danger that must be stopped before the cost becomes something truly horrifying to contemplate.
Pollack also drives home a point that I made in these earlier pieces — that allowing our fear of Saddam's current weapons of mass destruction to hold us back from an invasion would set off an arms race — effectively signaling every rogue nation in the world that the conventional power of the U.S. can be neutralized with even a small stock of chemical and biological weapons. This, says Pollack, would be "allowing our hands to be tied with very weak string."
What about the prospect of Saddam passing a nuclear weapon, or other weapons of mass destruction, to terrorists for use on the United States? Pollack sees this as "unlikely," but by no means impossible. One key, says Pollack, is traceability: "If Saddam believes it highly improbable that the attack could be traced back to him...he might well decide" to work through terrorists to attack the United States. (I argued in "Beyond Deterrence" that such an attack would in fact be quite difficult to trace.) Pollack also thinks it is unlikely, and certainly unproven, that Saddam had any direct involvement in either the first or the second attacks on the World Trade Center. But he does believe that the prospect of revenge, as in Saddam's attempt to assassinate former President Bush, sometimes tempts Saddam to throw even his own limited caution to the wind. So revenge and secrecy combined could in fact lead to a nuclear alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. (As I write, Condoleezza Rice has said for the first time that Saddam is sheltering members of al Qaeda and helping them to develop chemical weapons.)
I've covered only the issues on which my own interest has focused of late, and which seem to me to be most central to our national debate at this moment. (For these issues, see especially Pollack's chapters, "The Threat" and "The Dangers of Deterrence.") But Pollack's book goes far beyond these questions and touches on a large number of issues, such as the nature and risks of an invasion and the need to rebuild Iraq after an invasion is complete. I have not read these parts of the book, but after what I have read, I cannot wait to tackle them.
Let me also mention one final and more provisional response to the book. Much of the power of this book, of course, comes from the fact that President Clinton's chief Iraq expert is announcing his reluctant belief that an invasion is needed. I do detect what might fairly be seen as some defensiveness on the matter of the Clinton administration's conduct, although I would have to read much more to come to a balanced conclusion on this. Yet Pollack honestly acknowledges at the end of the book that we have not been tough enough with Saddam Hussein, and that this record of weakness is a part of what has gotten us into the current mess.
Setting aside, for the moment, the question of which political party is responsible for past missteps, Pollack's more politically significant point may be his concluding claim that "the members of the international community who bleat about the importance of collective security, multilateral diplomacy, and international law have gravely weakened all three (not to mention the U.N. Security Council) by allowing Iraq to flout them while chastising the United States (and our handful of allies) when we objected...." In other words, Pollack argues that the same nations now screaming about our invasion plans are the very ones who undermined the legal and multilateral policy of containment against Iraq.
That casts a very harsh light on those Democrats who continue to trust in the United Nations and international law to solve the problem of Saddam. Oh, for a Democratic party of men like Kenneth Pollack! I would fear them politically, even as I gave them my respectful thanks.
Perhaps this book, on fuller consideration, will be less than I have taken it to be. But I am willing to bet it will be everything that it promises, and more. This book, I believe, will change the course of our national debate on Iraq. The trouble with that debate up to now is that the war's opponents have not been forced to confront a detailed and realistic picture of what will happen if Saddam is not definitively stripped of his weapons of mass destruction and deposed. Yet no one, I wager, will now be taken seriously on this issue who has not come to grips with the facts and arguments of The Threatening Storm. Buy it. Read it. Like it or not, there will be a test.
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