QUESTION: is this a preventive war or an unnecessary
war?
Preview of Jan 2003 Issue, Foreign Policy: An Unnecessary War
By John J. Mearsheimer and
Stephen M. Walt @ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/wwwboard/walts.html
Excerpts:
In the full-court press for war with Iraq, the Bush administration deems
Saddam Hussein reckless, ruthless, and not fully rational. Such a man, when mixed with nuclear
weapons, is too unpredictable to be prevented from threatening the United
States, the hawks say. But
scrutiny of his past dealings with the world shows that Saddam, though cruel
and calculating, is eminently deterrable.
Should the United States invade Iraq and depose
Saddam Hussein? If the United States
is already at war with Iraq when this article is published, the immediate cause
is likely to be Saddam’s failure to comply with the new U.N. inspections regime
to the Bush administration’s satisfaction. But this failure is not the real reason Saddam and the
United States have been on a collision course over the past year.
Vigilant Containment
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.”
Contact me if you prefer a Word version of
this article.
Karen Watters Cole
East of Portland,
West of Mt Hood
Outgoing Mail
Scanned by NAV 2002
