The War Over Iraq: Saddam s Tyranny and America s Mission
Aman Annu
TheWarOverIraq_SaddamsTyrannyandAmericasMissionPDFDrive.pdf
LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN WILLIAM KRISTOL
the war Iraqover
Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission
E N CO U N T E R B O OK S S A N F R A N C I S CO , C A L I F OR N I A
LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN WILLIAM KRISTOL
Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission
the war Iraqover
Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol
94107-1951.
Published by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit tax exempt corporation.
Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaplan, Lawrence F., 1969- The war over Iraq : Saddamʼs tyranny and Americaʼs mission / Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol.
p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index.
Foreign relations—United States. 4. United States—Foreign relations—1989-. 5. Iraq—Foreign relations—1979-1991. 6. Iraq—Foreign relations—1991-. 7. United States—Military policy. I. Kristol, William. II. Title. E183.8.I57 K75 2003 327.730567—dc21
2003040784
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved, Encounter Books, 665 Third Street, Suite 330, San Francisco, California
ISBN 1-59403-021-9 1. Hussein, Saddam, 1937-. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Iraq. 3. Iraq—
The War over Iraq 4
Contents
Introduction
Saddam’s Tyranny
1. Tyranny at Home 2. Aggression Abroad 3. Weapons of Mass Destruction
The American Response
4. Narrow Realism (Bush I) 5. Wishful Liberalism (Clinton) 6. A Distinctly American Internationalism (Bush II)
America’s Mission
7. From Deterrence to Preemption 8. From Containment to Regime Change 9. From Ambivalence to Leadership
Notes
The War over Iraq 5
Introduction
A fter four decades of cold war, and a decade of rela-
tive peace and prosperity, we stand at the cusp of a
new historical era. Neither forty years of confron-
tation with the Soviet Union nor the decade-long sigh of relief
after its fall prepared us particularly well for this moment. For
all the arenas in which it was fought and the moments of high
drama that marked its history, the Cold War—as metaphors like
containment and the Iron Curtain suggest—presented an essen-
tially static challenge for American foreign policy. We thought it
would always be with us. And when we found during the 1990s
that it no longer was, we took a holiday from history, presuming
that we could rely on commerce and globalization to achieve
peace and stability. But the complacent assumptions of the
post–Cold War era were destroyed on September 11. That day
brought us to a new era, for which we need a new roadmap.
The new era is fluid, perilous and very much subject to the
The War over Iraq 6
contingencies of history that define those moments when one
epoch has died and another is struggling to be born. If America
does not shape this new epoch, we can be sure that others will
shape it for us—in ways that neither further our interests nor
reflect our ideals. For the United States, then, this is a decisive
moment. During the Cold War, Americans made choices in places
like Berlin and Korea whose implications continued to resonate
for decades. Now we face decisions of similar weight and conse-
quence in places like Afghanistan and, most of all, Iraq.
The decision about what course to take in dealing with Iraq
is particularly significant because it is so clearly about more than
Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and
the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States
intends to play in the world in the twenty-first century. And it
is about what sort of a world Americans intend to inhabit—a
world of civilized norms that is congenial to the United States,
or a world where dictators feel no constraints about developing
weapons of mass destruction at home and no compunction about
committing aggression and supporting terrorism abroad. Hence,
the reasons for choosing war against Saddam and the lessons we
The War over Iraq 7
draw from this war will be as momentous as the choice itself.
We believe it is vital to liberate Iraq and to liberate ourselves
from the dangers that Iraq presents. But we also believe that the
principles that have persuaded the Bush administration to pursue
this course should guide our foreign policy more broadly. That
is the argument of this book.
Iraq has been the arena in which competing American
approaches to foreign policy have been most visible in the last
decade, and most visibly put to the test. The three post–Cold
War U.S. presidencies have possessed distinctive worldviews,
each of which has been epitomized by how that administration
has dealt with Iraq. And today the challenge that Saddam Hus-
sein poses has forced the United States to clarify its practical
objectives and moral obligations in the world.
Guided by a narrow realpolitik that defined America s̓ vital
interests in terms of oil wells, strategic chokepoints and regional
stability, the first Bush administration halted its war against
Saddam after expelling his armies from Kuwait. It then aban-
doned tens of thousands of Iraqis whom the United States had
encouraged to rise up against Saddam, leaving him in power to
The War over Iraq 8
bedevil us, and his own people, for the next decade. Then came
the Clinton administration, which subscribed to a post-Vietnam
brand of wishful liberalism that led it to recoil from the serious
and sustained assertion of American power. The one worldview
regarded Iraq as little more than a move on a diplomatic board
game. The other responded to Saddam s̓ provocations with bouts
of hand-wringing, with occasional pinprick missile attacks, or
by simply ignoring them.
Until recently, the record of American policy toward Iraq
has mostly been one of failure; but Iraq can now provide a
model for success. Having broken with the record of his prede-
cessors, President George W. Bush brings to the problem of Iraq
a worldview that reflects what he describes as “the union of our
values and our national interests.” With his history of aggression
abroad and tyranny at home, Saddam Hussein is an affront to
both. Thus, the president does not speak of merely containing
or disarming Iraq, as his predecessors did. Instead, he speaks
of liberating Iraq, and creating democracy in a land that for
decades has known only dictatorship. In short, President Bush
speaks of engaging Iraq in accord with American principles.
The War over Iraq 9
This will strike many as a tall order—but not nearly so tall as
the presidentʼs insistence on engaging the world in accord with
American principles. In his speeches, in his national security
strategy, and in the doctrine named after him, President Bush not
only demands that the United States dissuade potential adver-
saries from seeking to compete with the military might of the
United States. The president also speaks bluntly of exporting the
American creed “in keeping with our heritage and principles,”
which will in turn “create a balance of power that favors human
freedom.” By enshrining in official policy the tactic of military
preemption, the objective of regime change and a vision of
American power that is fully engaged and never apologetic,
the Bush administration hopes to accomplish this happy end.
We think it can. In the aftermath of September 11, we think it
must.
The War over Iraq wears its heart on its sleeve. In argu-
ing for the liberation of Iraq, we try to make the case for war
honestly and straightforwardly, so the debate can be joined. We
present a detailed account of Saddamʼs evil; a critical history
of Americaʼs policies toward Iraq and a description of the com-
The War over Iraq 10
peting philosophies that animated those policies; an analysis of
the Bush Doctrine; and an argument for making that doctrine
the basis of American foreign policy. The War over Iraq looks
back at how a brutal dictator was allowed to acquire so much
power on the world stage. But it also offers a roadmap for a
more hopeful future. The wisdom of regime change, the merits
of promoting democracy, the desirability of American power
and influence—these issues extend well beyond Iraq. So we dare
to hope that this work will prove useful even after Baghdad is
finally free.
T o cover so much ground, we have relied on dozens of
books and hundreds of articles that have been written
about Iraq, and more generally about American foreign policy.
For accounts of Saddam Husseinʼs crimes, we benefited greatly
from the following indispensable works: Saddam Hussein and
the Crisis in the Gulf, by Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie;
Republic of Fear, by Kanan Makiya; The Reckoning, by Sandra
Mackey; and With Friends Like These, by Bruce Jentleson. For
a somewhat different argument from ours in favor of invading
The War over Iraq 11
Iraq, we would refer readers to Kenneth Pollackʼs recent The
Threatening Storm. We draw in this book from articles that
Kaplan penned for the New Republic, and thank Laura Obo-
lensky of the New Republic for permission to do so; from one
article by Kristol in the Weekly Standard; and from an essay by
Kristol and Robert Kagan in the volume they edited, Present
Dangers.
We also relied heavily on the assistance of a few very able
researchers. Chief among them is Daniel McKivergan of the
Project for a New American Century, along with Christopher
Maletz, also of the Project, and Reihan Salam of the Council
on Foreign Relations. We could not have completed this book
without their aid. Elianna Marziani, Cheryl Miller and Monica
Tarantino of the Project for the New American Century also
provided crucial assistance for which we are grateful. Katherine
Mangu-Ward of the Weekly Standard contributed the index with
speed and good cheer.
The idea for this book originated with two friends and
colleagues: Gary Schmitt, director of the Project for a New
American Century, and Peter Collier, president of Encounter
The War over Iraq 13The War over Iraq 12
Books. Both have been invaluable in seeing this project through
from beginning to end, and in everything from helping us think
through big questions to correcting errors and improving prose.
We are most grateful to them both. We also would like to thank
Carolyn Wimmer of the Weekly Standard for her important
assistance.
Lawrence F. Kaplan would like to thank Peter Beinart, edi-
tor of the New Republic, for granting him a generous leave and
for reminding him why TNR is home. His friends and mentors
Andrew Bacevich and Joshua Muravchik provided wisdom and
encouragement. Donald and Gail Liscomb, John and Patricia
Meaney, Betty Edmiston, Joan Busner and Stuart Kaplan all
offered helping hands. As always, Sandra Kaplan offered even
more, and as always, he is extremely grateful. No amount of
gratitude and affection can repay Sarah Meaney, who consoled,
encouraged and kept Lawrence afloat during the writing of this
book.
The War over Iraq 13The War over Iraq 13
Saddam’s Tyranny ONE
Tyranny at Home
O f all the adjectives that George W. Bush has used
during his two years in office, none has elicited
more howls of derision than the four-letter word
“evil.” Just as Ronald Reagan was condemned for characterizing
the Soviet Union as evil, a chorus of leading opinion makers
has lampooned Bush for applying the same term to Americaʼs
new foes. But as the events of 9-11 remind us, evil exists in
this world, and it has consequences. Fortunately, evil can be
defeated. Just as Ronald Reaganʼs assault on the “evil empire”
was key to toppling Soviet communism, so has President Bush s̓
response to the evil of September 11 exacted a steep price from
the terrorists who orchestrated that horrible day.
As well as provoking a military response from the United
States, September 11 prompted the president to identify an “axis
of evil.” It consists of regimes whose records of aggression,
inventories of deadly weapons and support for terrorism pose
The War over Iraq 14 The War over Iraq 15The War over Iraq 14
a threat to the United States and the rest of the world. Chief
among them is Iraq under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein.
The more one learns about the Iraqi dictator, the clearer it
becomes that he epitomizes—no less than Osama bin Laden—
sheer malice. Here, after all, is a man who has imposed a violent,
totalitarian regime on the people of Iraq. He has imprisoned,
tortured, gassed, shot and bombed thousands upon thousands of
his own subjects. He has launched wars of aggression against
several of his neighbors, and still seeks to dominate the Middle
East. He has expended vast resources on the development of an
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. He is at once a tyrant,
an aggressor and, in his own avowed objectives, a threat to
civilization.
Alas, for many in the West, Saddam s̓ misdeeds seem not to
have made much of an impression. From Europe, whose coun-
tries have supplied Baghdad with much of its deadly inventory
and still seek to do business there, cynicism is perhaps to be
expected. From China, a dictatorship in its own right, indiffer-
ence hardly comes as a shock. And from the Arab countries,
whose regimes are concerned with their own grip on power,
The War over Iraq 14 The War over Iraq 15The War over Iraq 15
an aversion to change is no surprise. Even in the United States,
however, where 9-11 should have prompted a special vigilance,
there has been complacency. The debate over war with Iraq has
shown that too many opinion makers, elected officials and oth-
ers who guide the fortunes of the worldʼs sole superpower have
lost their capacity to identify evil and to act against it. Even
when it stares them in the face.
The tyrant whose depredations so many hesitate to inter-
rupt came into the world on April 28, 1937. The future dictator
was born near the town of Tikrit, in a poor village consisting
largely of mud huts. Saddamʼs birth, recounts one of his official
biographers, “was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aro-
matic plants bedecked his cradle.” Iraqi accounts gloss over the
details of his youth, except to say that he claims descent from
the prophet Muhammad. Western sources claim that Saddamʼs
father either died or left his mother before Saddam was born.
For their part, his former classmates remember that young Sad-
dam was a bully who, among other things, carried a gun to
school. But this much at least is clear: Saddamʼs uncle, Khay-
rallah Tulfah, took him under his wing at an early age, bringing
The War over Iraq 16 The War over Iraq 17The War over Iraq 16
him from his native Tikrit to Baghdad. Tulfah was a coup plotter
whose political leanings reflected the agenda of the Iraqi Baath
Party. He tutored the young Saddam in the blend of socialism,
fascism and pan-Arab nationalism that distinguished Baathist
politics. (A pamphlet that Tulfah authored, “Three Whom God
Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies,” captures
the flavor of his views.) As a teenager, Saddam followed in his
uncleʼs footsteps, attending Baath cell meetings, engaging in
street battles with university students, and spending nearly as
much time in prison as out.
His political education complete, at the tender age of
twenty-two, Saddam attempted but failed to gun down the prime
minister of Iraq, Abdul Karim Kassim. “Wounded during the
incident by the fire of one of his comrades,” one of Saddamʼs
official biographies boasts, “he extracted, in the car that sped
away from the scene, a bullet from his leg with his own knife.”
He fled briefly to Syria and then to Egypt, where he resided
for three years. According to the owner of a Cairo restaurant
that Saddam frequented, “He was really quite lonely. He didnʼt
have any friends. . . . I couldnʼt believe that such a bully who
The War over Iraq 16 The War over Iraq 17The War over Iraq 17
was picking fights all the time could grow up to be president of
Iraq.” Eventually Saddam returned home to marry his uncleʼs
daughter, and was put in charge of a Baath Party farmers ̓
organization. Then, after a coup briefly brought the Baathists
to power in 1963 and another coup just as quickly dislodged
them, Saddam wound up back behind bars. Rather than calm
his revolutionary zeal, the time Saddam spent in captivity only
seems to have fueled it, and he even converted prison guards
to his murky cause. Two years later, Saddam escaped from jail.
Returning to the Baath underground, he joined a party security
force, the Jehaz Haneen, an Iraqi equivalent of Hitlerʼs Brown
Shirts. Saddam, who later became a devoted fan of The Godfa-
ther, would visit Baath opponents and slaughter them along with
their families like a Mafia hit man, then dump their corpses in
the street. The brutality reached a new pitch when the Baathists
seized power again in 1968, and Saddam was installed as sec-
ond-in-command and the real power behind his cousin General
Ahmed Hassan Bakr. The tactics employed by Saddam and the
Jehaz Haneen now became official policy.
As often is the case with Third World coups, a bloodbath
The War over Iraq 18 The War over Iraq 19The War over Iraq 18
accompanied Iraq s̓ 1968 revolt. But this bloodbath never ended.
Changing in name only, Saddamʼs Jehaz Haneen became the
Mukhabarat, the intelligence and security force that terrorizes
Iraq to this day. It began its work immediately. Only three
months after coming to power, the new regime declared that
it had uncovered a Zionist spy ring. Fourteen of these “spies,”
eleven of them Iraqi Jews, were promptly strung up before a
crowd of thousands in a Baghdad square. “We hanged spies,”
Baghdad radio explained, “but the Jews crucified Christ.” Over
the following months, the regime executed not only Jews and
communists, but also hundreds of Muslims accused of being
linked to the “Zionist” plot. The executions were televised and
the dead hung from lampposts.
As the new regime consolidated its grisly hold on power, so
did Saddam. Not unlike Stalin, whose ruthlessness he admires
and whose methods of rule he has carefully studied, Hussein
proceeded to denounce and murder longtime colleagues on
both the left and the right. Years of struggle, note Judith Miller
and Laurie Mylroie, authors of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis
in the Gulf, “made him far more ruthless in his determination
The War over Iraq 18 The War over Iraq 19The War over Iraq 19
to hold on to power and to break all who stood in his way or
who might one day challenge his rule.” Using Iraqʼs security
services as a base, party vice chairman Saddam removed Bakr s̓
other possible successors one by one. In Iraq Since 1958, Peter
Sluglett and Marion-Farouk Sluglett detail how the aspiring
dictator eliminated his fellow members of the Revolution-
ary Command Council at a July 1979 meeting. One of them,
Muhyi Abd Husayn Mashadi, was tortured at Saddamʼs order,
forced to recite a confession, and then made to stand in front
of a Baath Party congress and implicate his fellow “plotters.”
As their names were mentioned, they were marched out of the
hall to be shot—with their mouths taped shut lest they blurt out
embarrassing last words, while Saddam sat watching silently,
a cigar in his mouth. In case others missed the point, Saddam
had the confessions videotaped and dispatched copies to Baath
Party offices throughout the country.
That summer, Saddam shoved aside his kinsman, General
Bakr, and by the end of the year he controlled all the levers of
Iraqi power. Gone was any pretense of decentralized rule. Gone,
too, was the ideological substance of Baathism. In its place arose
The War over Iraq 20 The War over Iraq 21The War over Iraq 20
a cult of personality, which, in its pervasive glorification of a
single man, would soon rival even those built up around Stalin
and Mao. (“To visit Iraq,” observe Miller and Mylroie, “is to
enter the land of Big Brother.”) A towering portrait of Saddam
hangs above nearly every village entrance, school, building
and store. The ubiquitous portraits of Saddam the peasant, the
soldier, the horseman; the wristwatches adorned with his mus-
tachioed face; the claim to be descended from Nebuchadnezzar;
the nineteen-volume official biography—these accoutrements of
totalitarianism may seem today like parody. In Iraq, however,
they reflect reality. The “Great Uncle,” as Saddam likes his
people to call him, has established one of the worldʼs premier
terror states.
“The Baath have saddled Iraq with two kinds of tyranny,”
writes Kanan Makiya in Republic of Fear, “the despot and his
means of violence on the one hand, and his bureaucracy on the
other.” As to the first of these, Saddam rules his closest aides
with the same brand of terror that he applies to Iraqʼs populace.
Whether by ordering his ministers to go on the “Saddam Diet,”
treating them to frightening weapons demonstrations at com-
The War over Iraq 20 The War over Iraq 21The War over Iraq 21
pany picnics, demanding that their foreign-language typewriters
be registered to identify possible dissenters, or simply executing
officials and their families as examples to the rest, “his excel-
lency, the victorious, the glorious Saddam Hussein” commands
a peculiar type of loyalty. And these are the privileged few. As
one Iraqi told the New York Times in 1994, “Today Iʼd say not
more than one million Iraqis are living in any real sense of the
word. They are those who uphold Saddamʼs rule and those who
protect him. They are given food and plenty of money.”
In fact, when the ranks of the armed forces, police, security
services and intelligence agencies are combined, the number of
Iraqis bearing arms for Saddam Hussein well exceeds one mil-
lion. Overlapping security organizations like the Military Intel-
ligence Department, the Presidential Affairs Department, Party
Security and State Internal Security spy on their own members,
on one another and, of course, on average Iraqi citizens. “We are
now in our Stalinist era,” Saddam announced proudly in 1989.
“We shall strike with an iron fist against the slightest deviation
or backsliding.” Even Saddamʼs military is suspect. During
much of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam kept his air force grounded
The War over Iraq 22 The War over Iraq 23The War over Iraq 22
for fear of a coup; he cancelled Armed Forces Day parades for
the same reason; and he regularly executed senior officers for
disloyalty or battlefield setbacks. As the Pentagonʼs Lieutenant
General Thomas Kelly put it during the Gulf War, Saddam “has
a fairly vigorous zero defects program.” Indeed, the Baath Party
investigates all officers, and three different security services are
charged with rooting out dissenters in the army. And just in case
his security services prove incapable of keeping the army away
from the palace gates, Saddam employs a Baath Party militia
armed with anti-tank weapons for the same purpose.
Iraqʼs guns, however, have mostly been reserved for use
on its citizens. “Saddam Hussein exists in every corner, every
place, every eyebrow and every heart in Iraq,” the dictator
(who habitually refers to himself in the third person) declared
in 1982. Networks of informers pervade the country, turning
in those—including their own relatives—who make jokes at
Saddamʼs expense or otherwise engage in what passes for dis-
sent in Iraqi society. Publicly insulting Saddam is punishable
by death. Britainʼs Index on Censorship reports a case where a
Baath Party member was arrested for being present at a gather-
The War over Iraq 22 The War over Iraq 23
ing where jokes were made about Hussein. For the crime of “not
informing the authorities” about the jokes, the party member
and all the males in his family were executed and the familyʼs
home was bulldozed. In another case documented by Amnesty
International, a manʼs tongue was sliced off for slandering the
Iraqi dictator and then the man was “driven around after the
punishment while information about his alleged offence was
broadcast through a loudspeaker.”
Instances of citizens disappearing are also routine. Human
Rights Watch reported in 1998 that Iraq had more unresolved
“disappearances” than any other United Nations member state—
over sixteen thousand, according to the U.N. special rapporteur.
Arbitrary and deadly edicts issue from Saddamʼs palaces on a
regular basis. In 1992, the Iraqi leader gave new meaning to the
phrase “command economy” when he arrested over five hundred
of Baghdadʼs most prominent merchants on charges of “profi-
teering.” Forty-two were executed and their corpses strung up in
front of their stores with placards that labeled them as “Greedy
Merchants.” Two years later, the government issued a decree
stating that anyone who stole an item worth more than $12
The War over Iraq 23
The War over Iraq 24 The War over Iraq 25The War over Iraq 24
would have a hand amputated and, if a repeat offender, would be
branded. The constant flow of edicts and regulations addresses
mundane matters as well. Everything from street names and
university admissions to work regulations and building permits
comes directly from the presidential palace.
Mostly, though, Saddam simply relies on terror to keep
his subjects in check. Marrying twenty-first-century technology
to medieval ruthlessness, his security apparatus has over the
years fine-tuned the art of torture and dismemberment. Although
Saddam s̓ lieutenants all have the same general objective—root-
ing out dissent—they tailor their tortures to their victims. For
women, who are often tortured to elicit confession from their
male relatives, the security services favor sexual assault and
humiliation. According to Omar Ismael, a captain in the
Mukhabarat who fled Iraq in 2000, security agents regularly
drug the female relatives of government or military officials and
film them being raped. The tapes are then used to blackmail or
extract confessions from the officials. In one instance, Ismael
was ordered to investigate Taha Abbas Hababi, the director of
one of Iraqʼs intelligence agencies. “We found nothing against
The War over Iraq 24 The War over Iraq 25
him after two months, so we made a tape of his daughter having
sex with a man,” recounts Ismael. “We had to drug her first.”
Soon after being sent the tape, Hababi was murdered anyway.
According to Amnesty International, female prisoners are “hung
upside down from the feet during menstruation. Objects have
also been inserted into the vaginas of young women, causing the
hymen to break.” Amnesty International reports that when the
security services torture women, interrogators routinely force
the womenʼs children to stay in the room and watch their moth-
ers being debased.
Even the taboo against torturing children is routinely
broken by Saddamʼs regime. Like many of the women the
security services maltreat, children are tortured to elicit con-
fessions from their families. Reports from defectors and human
rights organizations detail a catalogue of atrocities committed
against the young. Amnesty International explains, “Allega-
tions received have included the following: the extraction of
fingernails, beatings, whipping, sexual abuse, electrical shock
treatment, and deprivation of food and of the use of toilet facili-
ties.” Another human rights group, Middle East Watch, records
The War over Iraq 25
The War over Iraq 26 The War over Iraq 27The War over Iraq 26
the testimony of a former detainee: “Each hour, security men
opened the door and chose 3 to 5 of the prisoners—children or
men—and removed them for torture. Later, their tortured bod-
ies were thrown back into the cell. They were often bleeding
and carried obvious signs of whipping and electric shocks. . . .
At midnight, the security men took another three of the chil-
dren, but because they were so savagely treated they were
taken from the cell to a military hospital.” It was later reported
that twenty-nine of the children mentioned in this report were
executed, their bodies returned to their families with their eyes
gouged out. As for his own children, according to journalist
Mark Bowden, Saddamʼs own son Uday has boasted that he
and his brother Qusay were taken by their father to Iraqi prisons
to watch torture and executions as part of a “toughening up”
process.
While the regime visits unspeakable punishment upon the
wives and children of suspected dissidents, it reserves the worst
fate for the accused themselves. In recent years, several reports
of mass executions of adult males have leaked out of Iraq. One
of these concerns a mass killing that occurred in 1998 at Abu
The War over Iraq 26 The War over Iraq 27
Ghraib prison, an Iraqi jail that holds thousands of inmates
accused of “anti-government activities.” In interviews with
Radio Free Iraq and the London Observer, whose substance has
been corroborated by Western diplomats, a senior Mukhabarat
officer who served on the prisonʼs supervisory committee testi-
fied that on a single day in April 1998, his committee executed
two thousand dissidents: “Some were hanged. Others were shot.
Each victim was shot once in the head.” The executions have
gone on for years. According to Human Rights Watch, “Each
year there have been reports of dozens—sometimes hundreds—
of deaths, with bodies of victims at times left in the street or
returned to families bearing marks of torture: eyes gouged out,
fingernails missing, genitals cut off, and terrible wounds and
burns.” Here, for instance, is testimony from a mother who was
called to the morgue in 1982 to retrieve the body of a son who
had been held without charge: “I looked around and saw 9 bod-
ies stretched out on the floor with him. Anotherʼs body carried
the marks of a hot domestic iron. Another had his legs axed. One
of them looked hanged.”
If Saddam is capable of sinister cruelty toward everyday
The War over Iraq 27
The War over Iraq 28 The War over Iraq 29The War over Iraq 28
Iraqis, his treatment of Iraqʼs ethnic and religious groups—par-
ticularly the Kurds and Shiites—is virtually genocidal. When, in
1980, Saddam s̓ forces invaded Iran, most of whose citizens are
Shiites, their coreligionists in Iraq immediately became suspect.
Accordingly, Saddam began to empty Iraqʼs cities of their own
Shiite populations. He also embarked on a program of deporta-
tion, expelling some thirty-five thousand Shiites from Iraq by
the summer of 1980. That summer, too, the Mukhabarat arrested
Iraqʼs leading Shiite cleric, Mohammad Baqr al-Sadr. It then
murdered him by setting his beard on fire and hammering nails
into his head. As Iraqʼs eight-year war with Iran ground on, the
plight of the Shiites worsened. By warʼs end in 1988, Saddamʼs
regime had tortured, expelled or murdered tens of thousands of
innocent Iraqis for no reason other than their religious affilia-
tion. And worse was to come.
Three years later, during the closing days of Operation
Desert Storm, the Shiites of southern Iraq took a cue from the
first President Bush and rose up against Saddamʼs rule. “By
March 7, a little over a week after the rebellion had exploded,”
Sandra Mackey recounts in The Reckoning, “Basra, Najaf, and
The War over Iraq 28 The War over Iraq 29
Karbala as well as other Shia towns in the south were prime to
become killing fields.” As the American military stood on the
sidelines, Saddam dispatched his special forces to crush the
revolt. His troops fanned out across southern Iraq, threatening
to kill every Shiite, hanging clerics, looting religious shrines and
bulldozing Shiite graveyards. While the Iraqi media branded
the Shiites part of “a dirty, foreign conspiracy,” the Iraqi army
pillaged, raped and murdered its way through town after town,
killing thousands in the space of a few months. Many of the
survivors fled east to Iran. Others fled to the countryside and
nearby marshes, where, it was hoped, simple geography would
constrain Baghdad s̓ reach. Saddam, however, soon transformed
the waterways, islands and reed beds of southern Iraq into an
arid death pit.
Until the 1991 uprising, the southern marsh area of Iraq
had been home to hundreds of thousands of Shiites (known as
marsh Arabs) who lived in the surrounding towns and in the
marshes themselves. A videotape obtained by the U.N. shows
several Iraqi army generals being instructed in 1991 to “wipe
out” the local populations. The U.S. State Department later
The War over Iraq 29
The War over Iraq 30 The War over Iraq 31The War over Iraq 30
obtained an Iraqi army document, captured by anti-Saddam
forces, that instructed Iraqi forces in the area to “withdraw all
foodstuffs, ban the sale of fish, poison the water and burn the
villages.” The same year, full-scale military assaults on marsh
villages ensued, including “indiscriminate bombardments on
civilian settlements,” according to a 1992 U.N. report. In the vil-
lages of Adil, al-Salaam, Mainona and al-Majar, residents were
confined to their houses and then subjected to artillery attacks.
David Rose reports that Saddam s̓ forces may have murdered as
many as 100,000 Shiites during the campaign. “They brought
them in buses, and they left in lorries, dripping with blood,” a
senior Iraqi defector told Rose. “Every lorry we and the special
security agency possess was being used for dead bodies, taking
them to mass graves. We kept each grave open for days; when it
was full, weʼd dig another one.” Baghdad “held the marsh area
subject to an internal economic blockade,” said a U.N. report,
while also “restricting the inflow of basic foodstuffs and medica-
ments needed by the inhabitants.” Then it cut off the water.
While most governments drain swamps to build and popu-
late, Baghdad drains them for a very different reason. Ostensibly
The War over Iraq 30 The War over Iraq 31
in the name of creating a central waterway to irrigate the salted
flats of the area, Saddam ordered the construction of massive
dikes to channel the water of the Tigris and the Euphrates away
from the marshes. As a result, much of the marshland has been
transformed into a parched desert. When Shiite families aban-
doned their homes, Iraqi army units moved in. The U.N. called
the program “a method to facilitate government control over the
population in the area.” But human rights organizations made
clear the program s̓ true purpose when they reported that agents
of the Mukhabarat dumped poison into the now-diminished
streams that wind through the marshes—sickening villagers
and killing fish, turtles and other marsh life.
Iraqʼs Shiites, like the Sunni regime that persecutes them,
are mostly Arabs. That probably accounts for why their fate,
however cruel, pales beside the plight of Iraq s̓ Kurds, who enjoy
no such ethnic kinship. Dispersed between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and
Syria, the Kurds constitute a distinct ethnic group—non-Arab,
stateless, and persecuted by their host countries for centuries.
No regime has treated them more savagely than Saddam s̓. Most
Iraqi Kurds live in the north of Iraq, and it is there that some of
The War over Iraq 31
The War over Iraq 32 The War over Iraq 33The War over Iraq 32
the most horrendous crimes of the last part of the twentieth cen-
tury were committed. The Kurdish struggle for autonomy from
Iraq long predates Saddam Husseinʼs arrival in Baghdad. But
when Saddam seized power, the tactics used to quell the struggle
immediately became more violent—acquiring “the character
of a racist war of extermination,” as the Kurdish Democratic
Party put it. Not a year after the coup that brought Hussein to
power, the atrocities began. In 1969, the U.N. reported that Iraqi
agents in the Kurdish province of Mosul burned almost seventy
women and children alive in a cave. Soon the Baath regime had
launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing, deporting forty thou-
sand Kurds in 1971 and relocating Arab settlers in their place.
Such was Saddamʼs obsession with the Kurds that during the
October 1973 attack against Israel—which Iraq joined—he kept
the bulk of Iraqʼs military establishment in reserve, choosing to
fight the Kurds instead of the Jews.
The following year, the Iraqi military, equipped with heli-
copters, tanks and napalm-carrying jets, shelled Kurdish towns,
massacred one thousand surrendering Kurdish fighters, deported
the residents of entire villages to the desert and, according to
The War over Iraq 32 The War over Iraq 33The War over Iraq 33
The Times of London, left half of Iraqʼs Kurdish population
homeless. In one notorious incident during the 1974 offensive,
Iraqi bombers decimated a column of 250,000 Kurds desper-
ately fleeing toward Iran. In another, the army burned two major
Kurdish towns, Zakho and Qalaʼat Diza, to the ground. Amidst
the deathscape that Saddam created, mass arrests, public hang-
ings and summary executions became common events. The only
glimmer of hope the Kurds had came from Washington. At the
time, the United States, then allied with the shah of Iran, was
supplying them with arms to fight the Iraqi army. But in 1975,
after Henry Kissinger brokered an accord between Baghdad and
the shah, the United States cut off the flow of arms to the Kurds,
and their resistance collapsed.
With the Kurds subdued, Saddamʼs gaze shifted in the late
1970s toward Iran, where eight years of trench warfare would
soon ravage his army. Yet the Iran-Iraq War hardly gained the
Kurds a reprieve. On the contrary, Baghdad charged that the
Kurds, like the Shiites, had aided the Iranian war effort. For
this sin, the Kurds earned the distinction of being the first ethnic
group since the Holocaust to be gassed by their own govern-
The War over Iraq 34 The War over Iraq 35The War over Iraq 34
ment. In a tape obtained by Human Rights Watch, Ali Hassan
al-Majid, who directed the murderous effort, boasted to his
fellow members of the Iraqi regime: “I will kill them all with
chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The interna-
tional community? Fuck them!” He was right. While the interna-
tional community turned a blind eye, the Iraqi air force dropped
chemical weapons on the Iraqi towns of Halabja, Goktapa and
as many as two hundred other villages. Human Rights Watch
estimates that the assaults of the late 1980s claimed the lives
of about 100,000 Kurds. The Kurds themselves put the figure
closer to 200,000. Whatever the number, this much is evident:
Saddam s̓ “Al-Anfal” campaign reached near-genocidal propor-
tions. “Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were
not killed by poison gas,” Jeffrey Goldberg has written in the
New Yorker, “rather the genocide was carried out, in large part,
in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass execu-
tions, and anonymous burials.” Those not murdered instantly
either fled across the same routes they had traveled a decade
before, were expelled from Kurdish lands, or were herded into
The War over Iraq 34 The War over Iraq 35
filthy camps where they soon starved.
Nor have the survivors fared well in the years since. Having
encouraged the Kurds, along with the Shiites, to rise up against
Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, the first President
Bush abandoned them to their fate as soon as the United States
ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait. For the third time in two
decades, Saddam slaughtered Kurds by the thousands, while
survivors fled north over the mountains and into Turkey. This
time, televised images of refugee columns proved too much to
bear, and following a massive American relief effort, the United
States announced that northern Iraq would henceforth be a “no-
fly” zone—that is, Iraqi warplanes would no longer be allowed
to patrol and terrorize Kurdish Iraq. This allowed the Kurds to
establish a safe haven under an American umbrella. Then his-
tory repeated itself.
In the late summer of 1996, the Iraqi army struck north
toward the Kurdish city of Irbil. Other than directing a fusil-
lade of cruise missiles at targets south of Baghdad, the Clinton
administration did nothing. CIA officers and other U.S. officials
working with Kurdish leaders were pulled out of the region, and
The War over Iraq 36 The War over Iraq 37The War over Iraq 36
hundreds of their Kurdish colleagues were promptly executed.
Today, the Iraqi army routinely mounts attacks on Kurdish vil-
lages in northern Iraq, evicting families from their homes, forc-
ing Kurds to officially renounce their nationality, and relocating
Arab families in their place.
The War over Iraq 36 The War over Iraq 37
TWO
Aggression Abroad
S addam Hussein is a brutal dictator. But do his
crimes against his own people justify taking up
arms against him? There are some who claim that
no matter how horrific a governmentʼs treatment of its citizens,
outside powers have no legal basis for intervening in the affairs
of a sovereign nation. Even today, even after the Holocaust,
Pol Pot and Rwanda, many devotees of realpolitik believe that
a government, whether or not it is “legitimate” by Western
standards, should be able to do as it pleases within its borders.
Former House Republican majority leader Dick Armey supports
such a position, arguing that we should “let [Saddam Hussein]
bluster, let him rant and rave all he wants and let that be a mat-
ter between him and his own country. As long as he behaves
himself within his own borders, we should not be addressing
any attack or resources against him.”
So, for a moment, let us pretend that Iraq is the Netherlands
The War over Iraq 38 The War over Iraq 39The War over Iraq 38
of the Arab world: Its citizens enjoy unprecedented rights, speak
their minds and elect their leaders. There are no massacres, no
deportations, no disappearances or late-night knocks on the
door. Even if all this were true, Saddam Hussein s̓ regime would
still qualify as one of the worldʼs most dangerous, and one that
requires dealing with—not because of what it does at home, but
because of what it does abroad.
In international law, the corollary to the principle of
national sovereignty is the prohibition against aggression—the
use of force by one country against another, unless justified by
self-defense. Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter forbids “the threat
or use of force against the territorial integrity or political inde-
pendence of any state.” Saddam himself routinely appeals to the
Charter, complaining to the U.N. about American and Iranian
“aggression.” (Iraq is also a party to, among other international
agreements, the Geneva Protocol forbidding the use of chemi-
cal weapons and the 1948 Genocide Convention.) In fact, the
Charterʼs proscription against interstate aggression has largely
been observed: While there have been dozens of civil wars
since World War II, during the same period there have been a
The War over Iraq 38 The War over Iraq 39
relatively small number of wars between states. As it happens,
Saddam is responsible for quite a few of them. During the two
decades of his rule, Iraq has committed acts of aggression
against Iran, Kuwait and Israel. “Pyramids of skulls,” in the
words of Jordanʼs King Hussein, are what they produced.
Only months after seizing power in 1979, Saddam ordered
Iraqi forces to invade Iran. “Iʼm going to march into Teheran and
pull the beard off of Khomeini s̓ face,” the Iraqi dictator boasted
to Saudi Arabiaʼs King Fahd. The conflict that followed ranked
as one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars of the
twentieth century. The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years, claim-
ing the lives of at least a million people and maiming twice that
number. And when it was all over, Saddam had accomplished
exactly nothing. Despite billions of dollars spent in eight years
of bloodletting, the battle lines separating the two armies had
barely budged.
The minimal aim of the war, Saddam declared at its outset,
was to regain the Shatt al Arab waterway that Iraq had surren-
dered to Iran in 1975. So five days before invading Iraq, Saddam
announced that the 1975 treaty was no longer valid, and for good
The War over Iraq 40 The War over Iraq 41The War over Iraq 40
measure, he tore it up in front of the television cameras. Sad-
dam s̓ broader aim, which he spelled out in several speeches that
same year, was to bring about the collapse of Iranʼs theocratic
regime. The decision to invade Iran, wrote Michael Sterner in
Foreign Affairs while the war still raged, “must be ranked as one
of this centuryʼs worst strategic miscalculations.”
Exactly how badly Saddam had miscalculated became
apparent within weeks. At first, the Iraqi army pushed deep
into Iranian territory, taking Teheranʼs clerics by surprise and
achieving several battlefield victories. Indeed, Saddam believed
the war would be over within a month. But he soon confronted
unexpected resistance. Iranian commanders enjoyed a three-
to-one manpower advantage over the Iraqi army and began
employing those numbers to devastating effect, using “human
waves” to overrun Iraqi positions. As a result, Iraqʼs forces
quickly bogged down, and in 1981 Iran launched a series of suc-
cessful offensives, which ejected Saddamʼs forces from Iranian
territory. The following year brought more victories for Iran,
filling its prison camps with tens of thousands of captured Iraqi
soldiers. At one point during 1982, Saddam himself was almost
The War over Iraq 40 The War over Iraq 41The War over Iraq 41
captured. “While driving around the rear of the fighting,” write
Miller and Mylroie, “Saddam s̓ convoy was besieged by Iranian
troops. The only Iraqi force close enough to relieve Saddam was
commanded by General Maher Abdul Rashid, a Tikriti general
who was not on speaking terms with him.” Rashid refused to
relieve the cornered dictator until Saddam pleaded for help in
the name of Rashidʼs uncle, whom he had murdered several
years earlier.
By June 1982 his forces were faring so poorly on the bat-
tlefield that Saddam declared a unilateral ceasefire, proposing
instead that Iraq and Iran align themselves against Israel. The
Iranians responded by advancing into Iraq itself.
Needless to say, Iranʼs battlefield successes had little to do
with the tactical genius of its commanders, who relied on raw
recruits anxious for paradise to clear minefields with their bod-
ies. Rather, as one strategist observed at the time, the “primary
reason Iran was not defeated at the outset of the war lay in the
inept strategy and tactics of the Iraqis.” And those tactics came
directly from Baghdad. Throughout the war, Saddam routinely
The War over Iraq 42 The War over Iraq 43The War over Iraq 42
traveled to the front to direct battles himself.
In fact, Saddam bears responsibility not only for Iraqʼs
unlawful invasion of Iran, but also for the lawless and inhu-
mane tactics that it employed during the fighting. Those tactics
make up an encyclopedia of Geneva Convention violations. To
begin with, Saddam had no reservations about waging war on
Iranʼs civilian population. As part of his “War of the Cities,”
Saddam ordered his forces to launch missile attacks on Iranian
towns, mosques and schools. During the eight-year war, count-
less Iranian neighborhoods were wiped out by Iraqi rocket
attacks. According to U.S. intelligence reports, during three
months in 1988 alone, Iraq launched at least 189 Scud missiles
at Teheran. As for the tactics Saddam directed against Iranian
soldiers, a favorite was electrocution. (“We are frying them like
eggplants,” an Iraqi officer boasted.) Los Angeles Times reporter
Mark Fineman described a 1984 battle where the Iraqi army
“fried” the enemy: “Iraqi gun batteries fired just enough artil-
lery to force the Revolutionary Guards from their marsh boats,
and, when hundreds of them had been forced to continue their
advance through the lagoons on foot, the men manning the Iraqi
The War over Iraq 42 The War over Iraq 43The War over Iraq 43
generators flipped a few switches and sent thousands of volts
of electricity surging through the marshland. Within seconds,
hundreds of Iranians were electrocuted.”
Saddam s̓ army also captured and imprisoned tens of thou-
sands of Iranian soldiers. The brutal treatment of the Iranians,
which gained the Westʼs attention after reports filtered out of
Iraqi prison camps in the mid-1980s, spurred several U.N.
inquiries. In 1985, a team commissioned by the U.N. secretary
general to investigate the camps reported, “the allegations most
frequently heard related to blows on the head and other beat-
ings with batons, truncheons, or wire cables.” Prisoners “spoke
of being suspended upside down from ceilings or ventilators,
or having the soles of their feet whipped or beaten, or electric
shocks administered to various parts of their bodies, including
their genital organs, of burnings with cigarettes, and in some
cases, mock executions.” In 1990, two years after the Iran-
Iraq War had ended, Iraq was still holding as many as fourteen
thousand Iranian prisoners. Even then, Andrew Whitley of
Middle East Watch testified before the House Foreign Affairs
Committee that prisoners were being “systematically tortured
The War over Iraq 44 The War over Iraq 45The War over Iraq 44
to extract information, gain cooperation, mute opposition or to
set an example to discourage others.” As late as 2002, Iraq was
still holding up to three thousand Iranian captives in custody.
And, of course, Saddam gassed Iranian soldiers and civil-
ians. Between 1984 and 1988, six separate teams of U.N. inves-
tigators documented instances of Iraq using chemical weapons
on Iranians. In 1988, Iraqʼs foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, openly
admitted that poison gas was enshrined in official Iraqi war
policy. The same year, the Security Council released a report
that blamed Iraq for using mustard gas in attacks against Iranian
cities. It also voted unanimously to condemn Iraq for its “more
intense and frequent” use of chemical weapons in violation of
the Geneva Protocols. Baghdad escaped harsher censure only
because its foe was also a pariah state whose suffering evoked
little sympathy in Western capitals. But none of this made the
Iranians ̓suffering any less real. Beginning in 1984, Iraq bom-
barded Iran with chemical weapons for five consecutive years,
killing and injuring thousands and sending gassing victims to
Western Europeʼs hospitals for the first time since World War
I. A U.N. report details how an Iraqi infantry assault was pre-
The War over Iraq 44 The War over Iraq 45
ceded by a two-hour artillery barrage with nerve gas and cya-
nide shells. “The first symptoms consisted of a burning in the
eyes and various parts of the body,” the report stated. Then the
skin of victims turned violet and blisters and lesions formed,
and eventually the skin turned black. Heavily exposed victims
experienced lung and kidney failure, blindness and, for the
unlucky remainder, death. “If you gave me a pesticide to throw
at these swarms of insects to make them breathe it and die,” an
Iraqi general told the Washington Post in 1984, “Iʼd use it.” In
all likelihood, he already had.
Even though the war against Iran was a catastrophic failure
by any objective standard, its conclusion left Saddam giddy with
feelings of invulnerability. Two years after the last shot was
fired, he sent his forces rolling south toward Kuwait. As Iraqʼs
army dug in along the Kuwaiti border in late July 1990, world
leaders, including American officials, refused to acknowledge
the obvious. Among the reasons offered for Baghdadʼs “saber-
rattling” was that Saddam meant to pressure OPEC into raising
oil prices; that he sought to erase $2 billion in debt owed to
Kuwait; that he wanted to lease tiny Kuwaiti islands in the Gulf;
The War over Iraq 45
The War over Iraq 46 The War over Iraq 47The War over Iraq 46
and that he wished to persuade the Kuwaitis to reach an accom-
modation over a disputed oilfield along the border. In the days
leading up to the war, progress was made on all of these issues.
Yet, on August 2, Saddam invaded anyway. With the aid of
several armored divisions, amphibious landings and helicopters
ferrying special forces into Kuwait City, hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi troops poured across the border. In a matter of hours,
the country was theirs.
There were no mitigating issues, no diplomatic gray areas.
Rarely has the responsibility for a conflict fallen so clearly on
one side, and the international community promptly returned
a unanimous verdict. On the very day of the invasion, the
U.N. Security Council approved a resolution condemning the
aggression and demanding “that Iraq withdraw immediately and
unconditionally.” Over the following days, the Security Council
would vote unanimously to ban trade with Iraq; Arab leaders
would agree to dispatch a pan-Arab force to defend Saudi Ara-
bia; and the United States and the Soviet Union would demand
that Iraqi forces quit Kuwait. Finally, on November 29, the
Security Council authorized the use of force to eject Saddamʼs
The War over Iraq 46 The War over Iraq 47
army. None of this, however, seemed to make the slightest
impression on Saddam. On the contrary, he declared Kuwait
to be Iraqʼs nineteenth province and ignored a daily stream of
offers to mediate his dispute with the Kuwaitis—offers that
would have allowed him to save face. Instead, he railed publicly
about the “mother of all battles if the West sought to intervene,”
all the while assuring fellow Arab leaders that it would never
come to that. “My brother,” Saddam told Saudi Arabiaʼs King
Fahd, “donʼt worry about this. Itʼs not a big deal.” When others
warned Saddam that he risked the wrath of the United States,
he became downright delusional. “I was barking at the moon,”
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak recounted. “This man is
crazy,” echoed Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. “He thinks
because he fought the Iranians he can threaten the Israelis and
the Americans. He doesnʼt know what real military power is.”
As with the Iran-Iraq War before it, Saddamʼs conduct of
the Gulf War was brutal, ignoring any distinction between sol-
diers and civilians. He dispatched 7,000 Mukhabarat agents to
Kuwait City. Along with 430,000 regular troops in the country,
they proceeded to ransack the capital, establish interrogation
The War over Iraq 47
The War over Iraq 48 The War over Iraq 49The War over Iraq 48
and torture centers, and execute Kuwaitis in the streets. (A
1992 U.S. government report estimates that Saddamʼs forces
executed or tortured to death over 1,000 Kuwaitis during the
occupation.) At the same time, Saddamʼs agents conducted vast
sweeps throughout the city, in which thousands of civilians were
rounded up, imprisoned and carted off to Iraq. A State Depart-
ment report published in 1993 found Iraqi forces in Kuwait
responsible for the following crimes against Kuwaiti civilians:
“Electric shock was applied to sensitive parts of the body (nose,
mouth, genitalia); electric drills were used to penetrate chests,
legs, or arms. Victims were beaten until bones were broken,
skulls were crushed and faces disfigured. Some victims were
killed in acid baths. One hundred fifty-three children between
the ages of 1 and 13 were killed for various reasons and 57
mentally ill individuals killed simply because of their handicap.”
Such was the horror of this particular report that the first Bush
administration had refused to release it, fearing that it would
call into question the administrationʼs failure to oust Saddam
after Desert Storm.
As with the Iranians before them, hundreds of Kuwaiti
The War over Iraq 48 The War over Iraq 49
POWs disappeared into thin air. U.N. Resolution 686, passed
on March 2, 1991, as part of the Gulf War ceasefire agreed to
by Saddam, stipulated that Iraq “arrange for immediate access
to and release of all prisoners of war under the auspices of
the International Committee of the Red Cross.” Yet in Febru-
ary 1993, the Kuwaiti government submitted records to the
ICRC—many of them gleaned from captured Iraqi documents
detailing the arrest and transfer of Kuwaiti prisoners—showing
that 605 of the POWs taken by Iraq were still unaccounted for.
Two-thirds were civilians kidnapped from their homes or picked
up by Iraqi forces on the street. Seven were women, 24 were
elderly, and 124 were students. Baghdad denies their existence
to this day.
There were also Americans captured during the war. Their
Iraqi captors routinely beat American POWs, spat on them,
forced them to urinate on the American flag, examined their
genitals to determine if any were Jewish, and subjected them to
mock executions. And lest we forget Saddamʼs famous stab at
public relations during the Gulf War—when he asked a West-
ern child captive “Are you getting your milk and cornflakes
The War over Iraq 49
The War over Iraq 50 The War over Iraq 51The War over Iraq 50
too?”—the Iraqi dictator seized thousands of foreign hostages,
including American civilians, to be used as “human shields.”
Iraqʼs unlawful conduct during the war against Kuwait
extended even to the environment. According to a report by the
Environmental Protection Agency, Saddam Hussein systemati-
cally ignited or otherwise crippled 749 oil wells during Iraqʼs
retreat from Kuwait in February 1991, causing 610 well blazes.
By June, those fires were emitting roughly two million tons of
carbon dioxide daily into the atmosphere. “Soot falls like gritty
snowflakes, streaking windshields and staining clothes,” Time
magazine reported of the warʼs aftermath. “From the overcast
skies drips a greasy black rain, while sheets of gooey oil slap
against a polluted shore.” Making things worse, Saddam ordered
his forces to sabotage Kuwaiti oil production facilities, caus-
ing the discharge of nearly eight million barrels of oil into the
Persian Gulf. The resulting sludge killed thousands of seabirds,
turtles and other animals that inhabit the Gulf coastline. It also
poisoned salt marshes, swamps, creeks and streams throughout
the region. Recognizing the extent of the destruction, the U.N.
Security Council held Iraq directly responsible. Security Coun-
The War over Iraq 50 The War over Iraq 51The War over Iraq 51
cil Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, stipulates “that Iraq is liable
under international law for any direct loss, damage, including
environmental damage and the depletion of natural resources as
a result of Iraqʼs unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait.”
Needless to say, Saddam has not paid damages, and the Gulfʼs
ecosystem has yet to recover.
Kuwait was not the only nation to be attacked by Saddam
during the Gulf War. The Iraqi dictator also lobbed missiles
at Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel. In fact, the Jewish state
absorbed no less than thirty-nine Iraqi Scuds. Israel was not
even a member of the alliance arrayed against Baghdad—having
been persuaded by the Bush administration that its participation
would doom the Arab coalition. Nor, for the same reason, did
it retaliate against the missile attacks. Still, the bombardment it
endured was no mystery. Even though it does not share a border
with Israel, Iraq has participated in all of the Arab-Israeli wars.
As other Arab regimes do, Saddam uses Israel to divert atten-
tion from his own failings at home. But the ideology on which
Saddamʼs rule is based, Baathism, also includes a commitment
to the “liberation” of Palestine. It deems the Arab-Israeli conflict
“a life and death struggle” and “a question of to be or not to
The War over Iraq 52 The War over Iraq 53The War over Iraq 52
be.” As for Saddam, he routinely inveighs against “foul Jewish
usurpers” and likens Israel to “a cancerous tumor that should
be excised from Palestine.”
Unlike some of his fellow Arab leaders, Saddam really means
it. With the help of the French, he began construction on a
nuclear power plant shortly after his rise to power. Its purpose
was clear: foreign countries “should assist the Arabs to obtain . . .
the nuclear bomb in order to confront Israelʼs existing bombs,”
Saddam declared in 1981. When the Israeli air force laid waste
to the Osirak nuclear plant that same year, the Iraqi dictator only
stepped up his threats to destroy the Jewish state. “By God,” he
vowed in a 1990 speech threatening to use chemical weapons
against Israel, “we will make the fire eat up half of Israel if it
tries to do anything against Iraq.” Israel never did try. Nonethe-
less, Saddam launched missiles at the Jewish state during the
Gulf War, hoping to bring Israel into the conflict and thereby
rupture the U.S.-Arab coalition. A disaster was barely averted
when, according to U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler,
Iraq fired a missile at Israelʼs Dimona nuclear power plant. It
The War over Iraq 52 The War over Iraq 53
missed.
The Gulf War ended on February 27, 1991, but Saddamʼs
battle against Israel continues to this day. In the years since
Desert Storm, Iraqi officials have stated explicitly that Iraq
maintains biological weapons for use against Israel. Saddamʼs
son Uday boasts that Baghdad possesses “weapons of compre-
hensive destruction” for this purpose and that “the extinction
of the Zionist entity was a necessity dictated both by the will of
God, and the need to recover exclusive Arab rights in Palestine.”
Saddam has kept up a steady stream of invective, too. Nor did
the Arab-Israeli peace process of the 1990s make much of an
impression in Baghdad, whose media occasionally urged that the
“traitor” Arafat be dealt with just as Egyptian president Anwar
Sadat was—through assassination.
The most recent tactic Saddam has employed against the
peace process involves subsidizing the families of Palestinian
suicide bombers. On Saddam s̓ gruesome pay scale, the families
of gunmen who die in attacks on Israelis receive $10,000, while
relatives of suicide bombers earn $25,000. Exactly which sui-
cide bombers qualify for Saddam s̓ bounty has become a source
The War over Iraq 53
The War over Iraq 54 The War over Iraq 55The War over Iraq 54
of disagreement. Iraq stipulates that only those who blow them-
selves up with explosive belts receive full payment. According
to Londonʼs Daily Telegraph, “This has angered the parents of
six young men from Jenin who went to the nearby town of Afula
with a gun and opened fire, only to be shot dead themselves.
They merited only the reward for an ordinary martyr.”
Israel is not the only country against which the Iraqi dicta-
tor wields this peculiar brand of aggression. The United States
also has been affected by Iraqi-sponsored acts of terror. Contrary
to the claims of skeptics, evidence of a link between Saddam
and Al Qaeda is not limited to ambiguous accounts of meetings
between their emissaries said to have taken place in the Czech
Republic prior to September 11. American officials have recently
documented contacts between Iraqi and Al Qaeda agents, as well
as “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members,
including some that have been in Baghdad,” according to CIA
director George Tenet. For the past three years, a band of Islamic
radicals called Ansar al-Islam, led by a suspected Iraqi intelli-
gence operative, have waged a terror campaign against Kurdish
officials. According to a report in Time, the group was trained
The War over Iraq 54 The War over Iraq 55
by Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and returned to Iraq after the
battle of Tora Bora. As a result, U.S. officials now believe there
are hundreds of Al Qaeda cadres operating in Iraq. It is not plau-
sible that Saddam remains blind to their presence. “In a vicious,
repressive dictatorship that exercises near-total control over its
population,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out
last August, “itʼs very hard to imagine that the government is
not aware of whatʼs taking place in the country.”
Indeed, Iraqʼs ambassador to Turkey and a close Saddam
ally, Farouk Hijazi, traveled in 1998 to Kandahar, Afghanistan,
where he is reported to have met with Osama bin Laden and
invited him to seek refuge in Iraq. Before that, when bin Laden
was living in Sudan, Saddam was channeling funds to him and
the radical Islamic regime that ruled the country. “We were
convinced that money from Iraq was going to bin Laden, who
was then sending it to places they wanted it to go,” said Stanley
Bedlington, a senior CIA analyst who monitored bin Laden in
Sudan. In 1994, according to a report in USA Today, the CIA
obtained intelligence that one of those places was Algeria, where
Iraq was using bin Laden to funnel money to Islamic terrorists
who sought to overthrow that countryʼs government. And in
The War over Iraq 56 The War over Iraq 57The War over Iraq 56The War over Iraq 56
October 2002, George Tenet declared, based on credible reports,
that “Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the
areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.”
While we may never know the full extent of the murky ties
between Saddam and bin Laden, we do know that Saddam is
a terrorist. It was Saddamʼs operatives, not bin Ladenʼs, who
attempted to assassinate former President Bush in 1993. On
April 14 of that year, two Iraqi nationals, Raad al-Asadi and
Wali al-Ghazali, plotted to kill Bush while he was visiting
Kuwait. The Kuwaitis captured the two before they could carry
out their plan and handed them over to the FBI. Under interro-
gation, they admitted that Iraqi intelligence agents had supplied
them with a car bomb to kill the president. Indeed, the evidence
proved credible enough to persuade the Clinton administration
to retaliate with a missile attack against an Iraqi intelligence
facility. It was during 1993 as well that the first attempt to
destroy the World Trade Center occurred. As it happens, the
bombing s̓ ringleader, Ramzi Yousef, arrived in New York bear-
ing a phony Iraqi passport and an equally phony identity, which
some investigators believe was forged by Iraqi agents in Kuwait
The War over Iraq 56 The War over Iraq 57The War over Iraq 57
during the 1990–91 occupation. Another World Trade Center
suspect, Abdul Yasin, fled to Iraq after the bombing, where he
is believed to be still hiding.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of Iraqʼs involvement
in terrorism is that it harbors well-known terrorists. The death
in August of the notorious terrorist Abu Nidal in Baghdad pro-
vided a useful reminder that Iraq has become a state of last resort
for the pariahs of the international terror community. As White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer pointed out when news broke
of the death, “The fact that only Iraq would give safe haven
to Abu Nidal demonstrates the Iraqi regimeʼs complicity with
global terror.” In addition to figures such as Abu Nidal, Saddam
has extended his country s̓ hospitality to an alphabet soup of ter-
rorist organizations. According to the State Departmentʼs most
recent terrorism report, last year “Iraq provided bases to several
terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the
Kurdistan Workers ̓Party (PKK), the Palestine Liberation Front
(PLF), and the Abu Nidal organization (ANO).”
In 2001, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
The War over Iraq 58 The War over Iraq 59The War over Iraq 58
raised its profile in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by carrying
out successful terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. For this,
the Iraqi regime rewarded the PFLP with a series of ostentatious
receptions, including meetings with an Iraqi vice president and a
deputy prime minister. Hamas, too, has benefited from Saddam s̓
generosity, apparently receiving training in weapons and even
suicide bombing at Iraqʼs Salman Pak terrorist camp.
That camp is a school for terrorists, offering classes in
assassination, hijacking, kidnapping and sabotage. “We were
training these people to attack installations important to the
United States,” a senior Iraqi defector told the New York Times.
Salman Pak is best known to the Western media for the train-
ing it provides on an authentic Boeing 707, parked squarely in
the middle of the camp. A parade of defectors have described
how the plane is used to school terrorists—including Islamic
extremists from across the Arab world—in the art of seizing
commercial aircraft. “They are even trained how to use utensils
for food, like forks, and knives provided in the plane,” another
defector told Aviation Week and Space Technology. “They are
trained how to plant horror within the passengers by doing such
The War over Iraq 58 The War over Iraq 59The War over Iraq 59
actions.” The stories about the camp and the 707 have been cor-
roborated in recent years by, among others, Charles Duelfer, the
former deputy executive chairman of U.N. weapons inspections
in Iraq, who saw the plane on several occasions in exactly the
location the defectors had described. Space Imaging, the com-
mercial satellite firm, also photographed the plane on April 25,
2000, in the place specified by the defectors. With Saddamʼs
record of aggression and terror, none of this should have come
as a surprise.
The War over Iraq 60 The War over Iraq 61The War over Iraq 60
THREE
Weapons of Mass Destruction
A dictator who murders his own countrymen may
not be Americaʼs business. A dictator who threat-
ens his neighbors may not be America s̓ business.
Even a dictator who sponsors terrorism may not be Americaʼs
business. But a dictator who does all these things and not only
possesses but uses weapons of mass destruction—surely that
is Americaʼs business. “Predators of the twenty-first century,”
said Bill Clinton in a blunt 1998 warning, “will be all the more
lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. There
is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Husseinʼs
Iraq.”
Saddam has barely bothered to conceal the threat he poses.
Indeed, flaunting his destructive powers seems to be an intrinsic
aspect of his governance. Rarely before has a regime detailed
its own illegal arsenal so meticulously; and thanks largely to
UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons inspection program that was
The War over Iraq 60 The War over Iraq 61The War over Iraq 61
established to record and destroy Iraqʼs illegal arsenal in the
aftermath of the Gulf War, rarely before have those details
been so thoroughly documented and publicized. Iraqʼs efforts
to acquire WMD long predate the Gulf War, as the ravaged
Iranians and Kurds will attest. According to UNSCOMʼs final
report, submitted to the Security Council in January 1999, Iraq
began its effort to develop biological weapons in 1973 or 1974,
when Saddam was still vice president. Iraq itself concedes that
from 1974 to 1978 it conducted “research on micro-organisms
for military purposes.” In the mid-1970s, Iraq also began a cam-
paign to develop and acquire chemical weapons. It constructed
chemical factories, produced the raw materials required for the
weapons, and purchased chemical ingredients from reliable sup-
pliers like Germany and France.
France also helped Saddam construct a nuclear plant at
Osirak. Fearing that this facility might someday be used to pro-
duce nuclear weapons that would be employed against them,
the Israelis attacked it by air in 1981 and destroyed it. (For this
they received condemnation from around the globe.) Saddam
then resolved to diversify the weapons of mass destruction in his
The War over Iraq 62 The War over Iraq 63The War over Iraq 62
inventory. He went on a spending spree, purchasing tens of bil-
lions of dollars worth of military equipment from the Europeans,
establishing front companies to produce weapons components,
and accelerating Iraqʼs own research and production lines.
During much of the 1980s, Iraq was the worldʼs single largest
purchaser of weapons. According to the U.N., it imported 819
long-range combat missiles and then modified more than half
of them to reach even more distant targets. Through its “State
Establishment for Pesticide Production,” which happened to be
headquartered at Salman Pak, the camp where terrorists trained,
Iraq also acquired large amounts of biological agents. According
to statements made to U.N. inspectors by General Nizar Attar,
who presided over Iraqʼs biological research and development
programs, Iraq drew up plans in 1986 to convert these agents
into weapons. The deadly agents included anthrax, botulinum,
brucellosis and tularaemia. According to the U.N., “field tests
of BW [biological warfare] agents started in late 1987/early
1988,” and by 1989, biological agents were used in “field test-
ing aerial bombs, rockets and other munitions.” Among other
things, U.N. inspectors found that the regime had been employ-
The War over Iraq 62 The War over Iraq 63The War over Iraq 63
ing these agents in “aerosol dissemination studies,” spraying
toxins on monkeys and other small animals. By the end of the
decade, Iraq possessed some 200,000 “special munitions,” of
which some 100,000 had been filled with chemical or biologi-
cal substances.
Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, UNSCOM discovered that
Iraq had continued to amass bomb-making materials throughout
the 1980s. According to David Kay, who led weapons inspec-
tions in Iraq immediately after the Gulf War, Baghdad launched
an urgent effort to obtain nuclear weapons in the aftermath of
the Osirak attack. By the time of the Gulf War, writes Kay, Iraq
had acquired a considerable stock of enriched uranium, and
“design, component testing, and the construction of manufactur-
ing facilities for actual bomb production were well advanced.” It
was subsequently determined that over twenty thousand people
were employed in Iraqʼs clandestine nuclear weapons program,
an astonishing fact given that the very agency charged with
monitoring Iraqʼs nuclear program, the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), had no idea that this massive program
The War over Iraq 64 The War over Iraq 65The War over Iraq 64
even existed.
On April 18, 1991, as part of the Gulf War ceasefire agree-
ment, Iraq delivered to UNSCOM details about the quantity
and type of its missile and biological and chemical weapons
programs. By its own admission, Iraq possessed nearly 10,000
nerve gas warheads, 1,500 chemical weapons, 412 tons of
chemical weapon agents, 25 long-range missiles and numerous
aircraft drop-tanks filled with biological agents, and much else
besides. Yet during nearly a decade of U.N. weapons inspec-
tions, Iraq would routinely declare that it had only a fraction of
the nuclear, biological or chemical material it was later revealed
to possess. By the fall of 1991, for instance, weapons inspectors
had found nearly ten times the number of chemical weapons that
Baghdad had declared in its arsenal. The pattern of obfuscation
and revision would repeat itself every time inspectors stumbled
across a new cache. As one section in a typical UNSCOM report
notes, “In the original declaration of the contents of the Al-
Hussein missile warheads, in September 1995, no mention was
made of aflatoxin. Later Iraq stated that two had been filled with
The War over Iraq 64 The War over Iraq 65The War over Iraq 65
aflatoxin. Finally this number was adjusted to four.”
The bureaucratic understatement of the UNSCOM reports
obscures the frustration and harassment that inspectors regularly
endured in their search for the truth. Armed with U.N. Resolu-
tion 687, which allowed them “unconditional and unrestricted”
access to every corner of Iraqʼs missile, chemical, biological
and nuclear programs, the U.N.ʼs weapons inspectors arrived
in Baghdad in June 1991. Almost immediately they ran into
trouble. In September the Iraqis detained an inspection team
outside a Baghdad nuclear facility, seizing their documents and
holding the teamʼs members for four days in a parking lot. That
same year, chief weapons inspector David Kay reported that
“significant documentary material and equipment” had been
removed from several nuclear facilities on the eve of inspec-
tions. This set the stage for seven years of Iraqi concealment
and evasion. Rolf Ekeus has called UNSCOMʼs mission “the
equivalent of war in arms control.”
“To justify the absence of required data or documents, they
offered stories that were the equivalent of ʻthe dog ate my home-
work,ʼ” recounts weapons inspector Richard Butler. “One actual
The War over Iraq 66 The War over Iraq 67The War over Iraq 66
example: The wicked girlfriend of one of our workers tore up
documents in anger. Another: A wandering psychopath cut some
wires to the chemical-plant monitoring camera. It seems he
hadnʼt received his medicine—because of the U.N. sanctions.”
On other occasions, in plain view of UNSCOM teams waiting
to enter a weapons site, Iraqi trucks ferried incriminating docu-
ments in and out of the compound. In another, a weapons inspec-
tor seized a briefcase from Iraqi officials running out the back
door of a laboratory—and found it contained test materials for
anthrax and botulinim toxin. And, were it not for the 1995 defec-
tion of senior Iraqis, UNSCOM would never have made its most
significant discoveries: that Iraq had manufactured and equipped
weapons with the deadly chemical nerve agent VX and had an
extensive biological warfare program. Nor were these isolated
instances of Iraqi malfeasance. According to U.N. documents,
“The highest level of concealment-related decisions are made
by a small committee of high ranking officials. The committee
directs the activities of a unit which is responsible for moving,
hiding, and securing the items which are being concealed from
The War over Iraq 66 The War over Iraq 67The War over Iraq 67
the Commission.”
Responsibility for punishing Iraqi violations lay, of course,
with the United Nations. But not every member of the Security
Council shared Americaʼs interest in disarming Iraq. France
and Russia were particularly unhelpful. Both enjoyed extensive
commercial ties with Baghdad and both delighted in frustrating
U.S. foreign policy. Richard Butler recalls that when, in 1998,
UNSCOM presented the Security Council with proof of Iraqi
obstruction—including photos of Republican Guard trucks car-
rying away evidence—“French Ambassador Alain Dejammet
speculated that perhaps a truckers ̓picnic was taking place.”
France and Russia also seized every opportunity to scale back
the scope of the inspections regime, seconding Iraqʼs recom-
mendation that UNSCOM inspectors be accompanied by diplo-
mats (presumably theirs); refusing to accept the conclusions of
UNSCOM reports; insisting that inspectors be more “culturally
sensitive”; and, finally, condemning outright American efforts to
punish Iraqi violations under the terms of Resolution 687.
Those efforts climaxed in November 1997, when Sad-
dam ordered American members of UNSCOM out of Iraq.
The War over Iraq 68 The War over Iraq 69The War over Iraq 68
In reply, President Clinton ordered a buildup of U.S. forces in
the Persian Gulf, and the Iraqi dictator seemed to back down.
In early 1998, tensions flared up again when Saddam refused
to allow weapons inspectors access to his many presidential
palaces, which were suspected of housing evidence of Iraqʼs
weapons programs. Russia and France threatened to veto any
resolution that authorized force in response to the obstruction,
and the United States prepared to act on its own. Once again,
Iraq backed down. In August of 1998, however, Iraq announced
that it was ending all cooperation with weapons inspectors. In
November, it ended UNSCOMʼs remote monitoring of previ-
ously inspected facilities. A month later, without the support of
France, Russia or U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan—who
had announced the previous February that Saddam was “a man
I can do business with”—the United States launched Operation
Desert Fox, a four-day fusillade of missiles directed at Repub-
lican Guard sites throughout Iraq. In response, Saddam refused
to readmit the U.N. weapons inspectors he had ejected, and
declared that the era of weapons inspections had ended. So too
The War over Iraq 68 The War over Iraq 69The War over Iraq 69
had UNSCOM.
The U.N., however, left the door slightly ajar. In January
2000, it established the United Nations Monitoring Verification
and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), a sort of UNSCOM-
lite. Under the terms of UNMOVIC, Iraq no longer had to elimi-
nate its weapons of mass destruction in order to gain a reprieve
from U.N. sanctions; it merely needed to demonstrate “coopera-
tion.” UNMOVIC was also designed to be “more aligned with
the rest of the U.N. system, rather than being supported by the
major Western countries”—another way of saying that it was
designed to be less responsive to the United States ̓concerns
about Saddam Husseinʼs predilection for doomsday weapons.
Under American pressure, UNMOVICʼs mandate was
strengthened in November 2002, and Saddam, facing the threat
of war, decided to allow UNMOVIC teams back into the coun-
try. But as U.N. officials began their work, all signs were that
Saddam would pick up where he left off in 1998, playing what
defector Khidir Hamza calls “the same old game of hide and
seek.” Even if the inspectors do find evidence of weapons of
mass destruction, that will only begin what the former deputy
The War over Iraq 70 The War over Iraq 71The War over Iraq 70
chairman of UNSCOM, Charles Duelfer, calls the “salami-
slicing.”
Whatever U.N. inspectors do or do not find, the fact
remains that Saddamʼs WMD arsenal has gone unmonitored
since 1998. Even then, UNSCOM was unable to account for a
sizable chunk of Iraqʼs chemical, biological and nuclear inven-
tory. According to figures from UNSCOM, the International
Atomic Energy Agency and Richard Butler, compiled by the
Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in 1998, even after
seven years of weapons inspections Saddam retained enough
weapon-making material to wipe the Middle East off the map.
Among the items that Iraq admitted to possessing, but which
weapons inspectors could never locate, were: 3.9 tons of nerve
gas, 600 tons of nerve gas ingredients, 550 artillery shells filled
with mustard gas, 157 germ bombs, 25 missile warheads filled
with anthrax and aflatoxin, and 50 Scud missile warheads.
Then there are the items—such as components for at least three
nuclear weapons and equipment to process nuclear-grade ura-
nium—whose existence Iraq simply denied, though inspectors
concluded otherwise. One of them, American weapons inspec-
The War over Iraq 70 The War over Iraq 71The War over Iraq 71
tor Scott Ritter, summarized his findings in 1998: “Iraq has not
disarmed, and theyʼve lied across the board.” His colleague
Richard Butler recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee that, years of weapons inspections notwithstanding, “Iraq
is well into CW [chemical weapons] production and may well
be in the process of BW [biological weapons] production. With
more than 10 tons of uranium and one ton of slightly enriched
uranium, according to German intelligence, in its possession,
Iraq has enough to generate the needed bomb-grade uranium for
three nuclear weapons by 2005.”
Or sooner. Following the Gulf War, U.N. inspectors found
that Iraq was only months away from producing a nuclear
bomb. We know that Saddam possesses the means, as outlined
by UNSCOM, to rebuild his arsenal. According to a 2000 CIA
report, “Since the suspension of U.N. inspections in December
of 1998, Baghdad has had the capability to reinitiate both its
CW and BW programs within a few weeks to months. After
Desert Fox [the December 1998 U. S. strike], Baghdad again
instituted a reconstruction effort on those facilities destroyed by
the US bombing, including several critical missile production
The War over Iraq 72 The War over Iraq 73The War over Iraq 72
complexes and former dual-use CW production facilities.”
Elaborating on this assessment, the outgoing secretary of
defense, William Cohen, released a Pentagon report in January
2001 asserting that Iraq had rebuilt factories used to produce
chemical and biological warfare agents. Then, in December of
that year, a high-ranking Iraqi engineer named Adnan Saeed
defected to the United States and told American officials about
the locations and details of sites that Saddam was still using to
store chemical, biological and nuclear materials. According to
the New York Times, “Mr. Saeed said that several of the produc-
tion and storage facilities were hidden in the rear of government
companies and private villas in residential areas, or underground
in what were built to look like water wells which are lined with
lead-filled concrete and contain no water.” Finally, in Septem-
ber 2002, the Bush administration and the British government
presented further evidence that Iraq had been reconstituting
its arsenal, including satellite photos and documents detailing
Saddamʼs renewed effort to build long-range ballistic missiles.
Finally, in December 2002, the U.N. inspection team reported
that Iraq had failed to account for crucial elements of its deadly
The War over Iraq 72 The War over Iraq 73The War over Iraq 73
inventory.
The War over Iraq 74 The War over Iraq 75The War over Iraq 74
The American Response FOUR
Narrow Realism (Bush I)
H ow did the United States confront the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein during the 1990s? On
the whole, it did not. In the face of a tyrant bent
on conquest and the acquisition of weapons of mass destruc-
tion, the first Bush and the Clinton administrations opted for a
combination of incomplete military operations and diplomatic
accommodation. Rather than press hard for a change of regime,
President Bush halted the U.S. war against Iraq prematurely
and turned a blind eye as Saddam slaughtered the insurgents
whom the United States had encouraged to revolt. For its part,
the Clinton administration avoided confronting the moral and
strategic challenge presented by Saddam, hoping instead that
an increasingly weak policy of containment, punctuated by the
occasional fusillade of cruise missiles, would suffice to keep
Saddam in his box.
At one level, the explanation for Americaʼs responses and
The War over Iraq 74 The War over Iraq 75
nonresponses to Iraqi provocations during the 1990s is fairly
straightforward. The past decade confounded the widespread,
if much too sanguine, expectation that Americaʼs victory in
the Gulf War would lead to the collapse of Saddam Husseinʼs
regime. When this failed to happen, the Bush and Clinton
administrations were then presented with a series of challenges
that they could hardly have anticipated and to which they were
obligated to respond as best they could. But neither adminis-
tration was simply reacting on an ad hoc basis to events not
of its making. The worldviews held by the Bush and Clinton
teams shaped the way they dealt with Saddam. The fact that
both administrations dealt with him so poorly underscores how
defective their foreign policy approaches turned out to be.
Perhaps more than any other challenge facing the United
States since the end of the Cold War, Iraq has become a template
for various American approaches to the world. Among the truths
our odd dance with Saddam has revealed is that U.S. foreign
policy since the Cold War has been far from the incoherent
muddle that critics routinely depict. On the contrary, each of the
three post–Cold War presidencies has had its own fairly coher-
The War over Iraq 75
The War over Iraq 76 The War over Iraq 77The War over Iraq 76
ent worldview, each of which has been on display in Americaʼs
dealings with Iraq.
The first Bush administration brought to the Middle East
a worldview that prompted it to act aggressively in defense of
our vital interests in Kuwait, but also left it wary of regime
change in Baghdad and indifferent to the fate of Saddamʼs vic-
tims inside Iraq. This narrow realism descends from a brand
of realpolitik which counsels that American foreign policy
should be grounded in self-interest, narrowly understood. The
Clinton team entered office with a very different worldview.
Persuaded that America, after the Cold War, could achieve its
foreign policy aims through commerce, diplomacy and negotia-
tion, this administration embraced a kind of wishful liberalism
that, in the case of Iraq, meant following the lead of the United
Nations, employing American power fitfully and apologetically,
often ignoring Saddamʼs challenges, and eventually presiding
over the erosion of sanctions and weapons inspections.
During the first months of the current administration,
George W. Bush seemed to oscillate between the policies of
his predecessors, offering Iraq incentives for better behavior
The War over Iraq 76 The War over Iraq 77
one day, and threats of punishment the next. Then Al Qaeda
attacked. Within a few months, the Bush team had begun to
articulate a view distinct from either of the two previous admin-
istrations. Americaʼs new strategy would in a sense combine
the hardheaded approach of the first Bush administration with
the moralism of the Clinton administration—reflecting what
President Bush describes as “the union of our values and our
national interests.” The president had coined the term “distinctly
American internationalism” for this worldview in his campaign.
Now he began to act on it. And as with narrow realism and wish-
ful liberalism before it, the substance of “distinctly American
internationalism” will be tested in U.S. policy toward Iraq.
W e hardly knew him. Or at least that was the excuse
offered by U.S. officials when Saddam Hussein first
came to the attention of the broad American public in 1990.
There is a kernel of truth here, but no more. Though Saddam had
been a player in Iraqi politics since 1968 and had ruled the coun-
try since 1979, it was only during the early 1980s that American
The War over Iraq 77
The War over Iraq 78 The War over Iraq 79The War over Iraq 78
officials became intimately acquainted with the dictator. Iraq,
after all, had broken off relations with the United States in the
aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, charging that Washington
had been too supportive of Israel. Baghdad had also emerged
as the Soviet Unionʼs closest Arab ally. And Iraqʼs traditional
rival, Iran, was—until the shah was deposed in 1979—a close
friend to the United States.
All that changed in 1980 with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq
War. Initially, Americaʼs stance toward the conflict was one of
studied neutrality. In fact, many U.S. policymakers greeted news
of the hostilities with barely concealed glee. After all, here was
a Soviet client state, on the one hand, waging war against a
radical Islamic theocracy that was holding American hostages,
on the other. The prevailing wisdom of the time was embodied
in Henry Kissingerʼs comment, “It is too bad they both canʼt
lose.” That sentiment, however, generally gave way to a pro-
Iraq tilt during the first years of the Reagan administration.
When it came to Khomeiniʼs Iran, the logic of “the enemy of
my enemy is my friend” proved too compelling to resist. And
the Reagan administration hoped to wean Iraq away from the
The War over Iraq 78 The War over Iraq 79The War over Iraq 79
Soviet Union—a hope that Saddam bolstered by curtailing his
ties to Moscow.
By 1982, Americaʼs tilt began yielding concrete benefits
for Iraq, as the Reagan team removed Iraq from its roster of
terror sponsors. A year later, Undersecretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger sent a letter to Export-Import Bank chairman
William Draper “to bring to your attention the important role
EXIM can play in furthering long-range political and economic
interests of the United States” by lending to Iraq, while Vice
President George Bush added that “Eximbank could play a
crucial role in our efforts in the region.” By the end of the year,
the United States was supplying Saddam with hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars in credits, and by 1987 over half a billion dollars
annually. Nor was that all. A 1983 National Security Council
study, leaked to the New York Times, suggested that the United
States “encourage other countries to arm and finance Iraqʼs war
effort.” In 1984, the United States and Iraq resumed diplomatic
relations, and the list of items that America was exporting to
Saddam promptly expanded to include technology and materi-
als some feared might be useful for weapons of mass destruc-
The War over Iraq 80 The War over Iraq 81The War over Iraq 80
tion. Concerns about their possible military use gave the White
House little pause. According to Bruce Jentleson, talking points
prepared for a 1987 meeting between Vice President Bush and
the Iraqi ambassador stressed that delays in shipping these items
were “capricious” and that “a special look” would be taken to
see whether the delays could be eliminated. Among the items
that the Reagan team would eventually ship to Iraq were bacte-
ria, missile system components and explosives technology.
The relationship between Baghdad and Washington was
hardly a reciprocal one. Saddam was already well known for his
execrable conduct at home and abroad, and American influence
did nothing to moderate it. Not that the Reagan administra-
tion made much of an attempt to do so. Despite the warnings
of administration officials like Zalmay Khalilzad and Richard
Perle, who cautioned that “Iraq is a problem country” which
“continues to actively pursue an interest in nuclear weapons,”
the engagement with Saddam continued apace. Despite Iraqʼs
willingness to host Abu Abbas, ringleader of the 1985 Achille
Lauro hijacking, where terrorists dumped a wheelchair-bound
American into the sea, Secretary of State George Shultz insisted
The War over Iraq 80 The War over Iraq 81
that “Iraq has effectively disassociated itself from international
terrorism,” and the administration resisted congressional pres-
sure to return Iraq to its terrorism list. And despite overwhelm-
ing evidence that Saddam was gassing the Kurds, the Reagan
administration opposed congressional efforts to sanction Iraq.
Finally, despite a 1987 Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark that
claimed the lives of thirty-seven American sailors, the admin-
istration readily accepted Saddamʼs explanation that the attack
was a mistake. In these and other efforts, the administration was
buttressed by the arguments of, among others, the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce, which urged that detractors of Saddam Hussein
“set aside the emotions of the moment,” and Washingtonʼs
think-tank community, one of whose “experts” glimpsed over
the horizon the possibility of a “perestroika in Iraq.”
During the first two years of his administration, President
George H. W. Bush continued the Iraq policy of the Reagan
years, which was to deal with Saddam Hussein more or less
without condition and regardless of consequence. With the Iran-
Iraq War having ended in August 1988, the rationale for support-
ing Saddam—“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”—should
The War over Iraq 81
The War over Iraq 82 The War over Iraq 83The War over Iraq 82
have seemed less compelling. Nonetheless, the Bush team
pressed ahead, convinced that a conciliatory approach toward
the dictator could bring Iraq into the “family of nations” and that
Iraq could become “a more responsible, status-quo state work-
ing within the system, and promoting stability in the region.” To
this end, Bush expanded the flow of subsidies, agricultural aid
and advanced technology to Iraq (over the objections of his own
Commerce Department). And when, in 1989, the Agriculture
Department, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve suggested
that aid should be halted, Secretary of State James Baker, his
deputy, Lawrence Eagleburger, and National Security Council
advisor Brent Scowcroft all weighed in against them. On the
question of what leverage the United States could bring to bear
to modify Saddamʼs behavior at home and abroad, the Bush
team was without illusions. “Our efforts should concentrate on
slow, steady pressure and realistic appraisal of our leverage,”
argued a White House policy paper. “We should . . . be realis-
tic and demand of Iraq what we do of its neighbors—in tune
with our aim to rope Iraq into a conservative and responsible
alignment in foreign policy.” As for the Kurds, who were at
The War over Iraq 82 The War over Iraq 83The War over Iraq 83
that moment being slaughtered, the paper added, with italics to
emphasize the point, that “in no way should we associate our-
selves with the 60-year-old rebellion in Iraq or oppose Iraq s̓
legitimate attempts to suppress it.”
Lest anyone in the bureaucracy mistake the direction of
U.S. policy, in October 1989, President Bush issued National
Security Directive 26, which ordered the different branches of
the federal government to expand Americaʼs political and eco-
nomic ties to Baghdad. Not a month later, according to a declas-
sified State Department report, intelligence officials reported that
Iraq was diverting dual-use American exports to military proj-
ects and using front companies to acquire nuclear technology.
Undeterred, Bakerʼs State Department and Scowcroftʼs NSC
secured $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq that same month.
And when, early the next year, the Voice of America editorial-
ized against Saddamʼs human rights violations, Baker became
apoplectic, ordering all future VOA editorials to be cleared by
State, and cabling the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, April Glaspie,
“it is in no way USG [U.S. Government] policy to suggest that
the Government of Iraq is illegitimate or that the people of Iraq
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should or will revolt against the Government of Iraq.” Glaspie
immediately wrote the Iraqi foreign minister a letter insisting
that “President Bush wants good relations with Iraq, relations
built on confidence and trust, so that we can discuss a broad
range of issues frankly and fruitfully. I am sorry that the Govern-
ment of Iraq did not inform me of its concern about the editorial
sooner, so that I could have provided you with the official assur-
ance of our regret without delay.” A Senate delegation, including
Republican leaders Robert Dole and Alan Simpson, reinforced
the message on a trip to Baghdad a month later. “I believe your
problem is with the Western media, not with the U.S. govern-
ment,” Simpson groveled. “The press is spoiled and conceited
. . . they do not want to see anything succeeding or achieving its
objectives. My advice is that you allow those bastards to come
here and see things for themselves.” Having seen things for
himself, Simpson returned to Washington, where, echoing the
administration s̓ line, he opposed congressional bills that would
have sanctioned Iraq for Saddamʼs human rights violations.
Up to the eve of the Gulf War, the Bush team continued try-
ing to work with Saddam. Neither Saddam s̓ threats to incinerate
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Israel, his bellicose stance toward Kuwait, nor even his increas-
ingly strident anti-American rhetoric budged the president from
his hopes for the Iraqi dictator. On the contrary: In response to
Iraqi troop movements along the border with Kuwait, the State
Department dispatched Ambassador Glaspie to mollify Saddam.
At a July 25, 1990 meeting, the Iraqi leader predicted to Glapsie
that America would not oppose his aims because “yours is a
society that cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.” To which
Glaspie replied, “we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts
like your border disagreement with Kuwait. . . . James Baker has
directed our official spokesman to emphasize this instruction.”
Back in Washington, even State Department officials were
appalled. So the administration tried again. The task of replying
to Saddamʼs outburst, however, fell to State Department and
NSC officials who still believed in the Iraqi dictator. Principal
among these was Richard Haass, the NSCʼs Middle East point
man. Despite the fact that Saddamʼs troops continued to mass
on the Kuwaiti border, Haass, according to Michael Gordon
and Bernard Trainorʼs account in The Generals ̓War, “saw the
presidential message as an opportunity to acknowledge the
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easing of the tensions and reaffirm the policy of moderation.”
This he did by helping to craft a message from Bush, which the
president sent to Saddam. “Let me assure you, as my Ambas-
sador, Senator Dole and others have done,” the president wrote
on July 28, “that my Administration continues to desire better
relations with Iraq. We will also continue to support our other
friends in the region with whom we have had long-standing ties.
We see no necessary inconsistency between these two objec-
tives.” Saddamʼs reply came four days later, when he invaded
Kuwait.
Bushʼs declaration, soon after the invasion, that Saddamʼs
aggression “will not stand” brought the Bush team together
behind a new policy. Or almost together. The chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, thought the presidentʼs
statement was premature, and complained that he had not been
consulted first. In the warʼs aftermath, Lawrence Eagleburger
insisted, “I know personally that if Colin had had his druthers
we would not have fought the Iraq war. President Bush and
Brent Scowcroft pushed him into it.” This appears to have been
true from the outset. First, Powell opposed a show of naval force
The War over Iraq 86 The War over Iraq 87
to deter the threatened invasion. When the invasion did occur,
Powell steadfastly argued against reversing it. “The American
people do not want their young dying for $1.50 gallon oil,” Pow-
ell declared in internal deliberations. “We canʼt make a case for
losing lives for Kuwait.” Writing about the arguments of Powell
and others, Scowcroft recounts that he “was frankly appalled at
the undertone of the discussion, which suggested resignation to
the invasion and even adaptation to a fait accompli.”
Despite the reluctance of the Joint Chiefs chairman to go
to war against Iraq, the president acted to restore Kuwaitʼs sov-
ereignty. But the war aims were focused on expelling Saddam
from Kuwait, and Powell in particular was eager to enforce
this limitation. The day after the ground offensive began, he
was already pressing for its end. After only four days of fight-
ing, when American units had yet to encircle Iraqi forces,
Powell convinced President Bush to halt ground operations.
“The vaunted Republican Guard formations are no longer,” the
general announced. He was wrong. Their escape routes clear,
three largely intact Republican Guard divisions escaped back
to Iraq—where some of them began massacring Iraqi civilians
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whom the United States had encouraged to revolt. At the White
House, Secretary of State Baker, too, argued for a halt to the
American advance. “We have done the job. We can stop. We
have achieved our aims. We have gotten them out of Kuwait.”
On the ground, the situation looked a bit different. Gen-
eral Norman Schwarzkopf recommended continuing the assault,
arguing that he needed at least another day to destroy the
armored units that would later be turned against the Kurds and
the Shiites. Nonetheless, Bush agreed with Powell and Baker,
and after a hundred hours of fighting he called an end to ground
operations.
In fact, the decision to end the war once Iraqi forces were
driven from Kuwait had been taken two months before. At a
December 1990 White House meeting, according to Brent
Scowcroft, the Bush administration decided not to aim for
Saddamʼs removal. As the national security advisor recounts
in the memoir he co-authored with the president, A World
Transformed, “We would be committing ourselves—alone—to
removing one regime and installing another and if the Iraqis
themselves didnʼt take matters into their own hands, we would
The War over Iraq 88 The War over Iraq 89
be facing . . . some dubious ʻnation-building.ʼ” There was also
the fear that toppling Saddam could end in the splintering of
Iraq—an outcome that Baker described as the “Lebanonization
of Iraq.” Echoing Baker, Powell wrote in his own memoir, “It
would not contribute to the stability we want in the Middle East
to have Iraq fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd
political entities.” Moreover, he recalled, “our practical intention
was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an
Iran that remained bitterly hostile to the United States.” What
the Bush team wanted, in short, was Iraqi “stability”—even if
it had to be enforced by Saddam Hussein.
In Iraqʼs southern marshes and in its northern mountains,
the human cost of the Bush teamʼs narrow realpolitik rapidly
became clear. Relying on the Republican Guard divisions that
had escaped from Kuwait and on helicopter gunships, which
the Bush team had for some reason exempted from its prohibi-
tion on Iraqi military flights, Saddam proceeded to slaughter
thousands of Kurds and Shiites. “I frankly wish [the uprising]
hadnʼt happened,” Scowcroft later recalled. “I envisioned a post-
war government being a military government.” For his part,
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Bush claimed that “for very practical reasons there was never a
promise to aid an uprising.” But he had repeatedly and openly
encouraged a revolt, exhorting “the Iraqi people to take matters
into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator,
to step aside.” When the Iraqi people tried to do exactly that,
the United States turned a blind eye as they were ruthlessly put
down, sometimes within sight of American armored units.
In his memoirs, Powell mocks the notion that “if Saddam
had fallen, he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jef-
fersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read
The Federalist Papers along with the Koran.” But the issue was
not whether Iraqi rebels had any use for The Federalist Papers;
it was simply whether to stand with those we had encouraged
to overthrow Saddam Husseinʼs regime. In the end, the Bush
administrationʼs commitment to “stability” trumped any incli-
nation to aid those Iraqis who rebelled against their dictator
with American encouragement and in the name of American
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principles.
T he set of beliefs—we call them narrow realism—that
structured the Bush teamʼs decisions (and failures, we
would assert) in Iraq and elsewhere created precedents that
would shackle the next president and the one after that. To be
fair, one must acknowledge that the Bush policy toward Iraq
reflected a strong current in American foreign policy thinking.
That point of view was proud to use terms like “realpolitik”
or “realism” in describing itself. Though ostensibly a method
of analysis that eschews ideology, realism had by the time of
the Bush presidency become an ideology of its own, one which
counseled that foreign policy should be grounded only in vital
interests, not ideals or abstract principles. Bush heeded that
counsel in dealing with China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia
and, of course, Iraq. This worldview continues to be embraced
by much of the foreign policy establishment, which remains
wary of an overly moralistic American presence on the interna-
tional scene. Poring over maps and position papers, these narrow
realists never tire of cautioning policymakers about the perils
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of devising foreign policy on the basis of what they deride as
“moralism” rather than concrete interest.
At first glance, this repudiation of principle might seem
contrary to American temperament. In their defense, the adher-
ents of realism trace its American roots back to early American
statesmen such as John Quincy Adams, who famously said that
America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She
is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is
the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Yet the brand of
realism popularized in the United States after the Second World
War and still in vogue today owes more to the unsentimental
realpolitik practiced by nineteenth-century European statesmen
like Bismarck and Metternich—and articulated by their twen-
tieth-century intellectual heirs in Europe and in America—than
it does to our Founding Fathers.
Arguing against the “moralistic” strain in U.S. foreign
policy, these thinkers advocated a policy based on what the
father of academic realism, Hans Morgenthau, identified as
“interests defined in terms of power.” Morgenthau condemned
the effort to apply a nation s̓ principles abroad as itself evidence
The War over Iraq 92 The War over Iraq 93
of “immorality,” neatly exemplified “in the contemporary phe-
nomenon of the moral crusade.” Rather, the realists argued, a
hardheaded acceptance of a balance of power between states as
existed in nineteenth-century Europe would be more likely to
restrain nations ̓bellicose impulses than would an attempt to
improve the world. This in turn led to the realists ̓key recom-
mendation: A state must limit itself to the protection of its “vital
interests,” lest it disrupt the balance of power.
The realist obsession with “vital interests” never fully jibed
with Americaʼs definition of its national interest, which even
in the era of the Founders included more than purely material
or geographic considerations. “Repudiation of Europe,” novel-
ist John Dos Passos once said, “is, after all, Americaʼs main
excuse for being.” Repudiating Europe, however, is exactly
the opposite of what the realists had in mind. As a result, they
failed to take note of the special appeal and power of American,
versus, say, Soviet ideals. This became particularly apparent
during the Nixon presidency, when Henry Kissinger argued
against “the illusion of simple solutions” to the problem of
Soviet communism. Kissinger sought instead to maintain a
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balance of power, and to secure a “détente,” between Wash-
ington and Moscow. Accordingly, he opposed efforts to press
for the improvement of human rights and political freedoms
in the Soviet Union, and struggled for years to instruct Ameri-
cans on the futility of efforts to “transform the Soviet system
by pressure.” But while the United States may have been fol-
lowing Kissingerʼs admonitions about “restraint in the uses
of power, and abstention from efforts to exploit instability or
local conflicts,” the Soviets, as Kissinger himself now concedes,
were not. And the Soviets ̓steady ideological and geographic
advances were one reason that narrow realism came under broad
assault in the 1976 election.
From the left, Kissingerʼs approach was condemned by
Jimmy Carter, a Vietnam-era liberal who found power politics
so repugnant that his foreign policy shied away from promoting
anything resembling a national interest. From the right, realism
was repudiated in 1976 by candidate Ronald Reagan, a staunch
anticommunist who saw no contradiction between the assertion
of American power and American ideals.
First Carterʼs approach, then Reaganʼs, dominated the
The War over Iraq 94 The War over Iraq 95
next twelve years. But with the end of the Cold War, which
coincided with the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush,
narrow realism made a comeback. Members of the Bush team,
David Halberstam writes approvingly, saw the Cold War as “an
ongoing conflict between two superpowers,” unlike the Reagan
team, which saw it as “a clash between good and evil.” With the
globe convulsed by change, Bush, whose disdain for “moral cru-
sades” reflected foreign policy inclinations that put him closer
to Gerald Ford than to Ronald Reagan, placed a premium on the
maintenance of “stability.” But the Soviet Union was gone, and
in the absence of a rival superpower, “stability” came to mean
something quite different than it had in a bipolar world where
it had assumed, at minimum, an American willingness to check
the Soviet Union.
At times, the Bush teamʼs desire for stability even led it to
consider propping up regimes whose demise Americans might
be expected to cheer. “I was skeptical about the wisdom of pur-
suing German unification,” Bush national security advisor Brent
Scowcroft recalls. “What was wrong with a divided Germany
as long as the situation was stable? The very process of unifi-
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cation could be extremely destabilizing, and could even lead
to conflict.” This preference for order over liberty extended to
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, whose dictator, Wojciech
Jaruzelski, Bush found “charming.” It even extended to the
Soviet Union itself, where the Bush team embraced communist
leader Mikhail Gorbachev and was suspicious of the opposi-
tion movement led by Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, Scowcroft found
it “painful to watch Yeltsin rip the Soviet Union brick by brick
away from Gorbachev.” The concern for the Soviet Unionʼs
welfare led Bush in 1991 to warn the Ukrainian people, in what
would soon become known as the “Chicken Kiev speech,” that
America would “not support those who seek independence in
order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism.” The
Soviet Union collapsed anyway.
This was not the only instance when Bushʼs “realistic”
disdain for the “vision thing” was painfully apparent. In China,
the Bush team reacted to pro-democracy marches and the mas-
sacre in Tiananmen Square by excusing the communist regime
in Beijing. As the president confided in his diary a month after
Tiananmen, there was “nothing that I really want China to do in
The War over Iraq 96 The War over Iraq 97
order to solve the existing problem of strained relations.” The
“problem,” in the Bush team s̓ view, was our own. Hence, Bush
dispatched Scowcroft and Undersecretary of State Eagleburger
on a secret journey to Beijing in July 1989 to patch things up—
followed by yet another trip where the two officials exchanged
toasts with their Chinese hosts. Bush then vetoed legislation
allowing Chinese students to prolong their stays in the United
States, pressed to remove sanctions, and made other conciliatory
gestures to Beijing.
In Yugoslavia, where Slobodan Milosevic had begun to
pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing, the Bush teamʼs response
was much the same. Justifying American inaction, Bush likened
the war in the Balkans to a “hiccup.” Or as David Gompert,
then a U.S. official working on Bosnia, put it: “Following the
Gulf War, a leading role in Yugoslavia would have implied that
the United States could and would act as international police-
man.” This was something the Bush administration had vowed
it would not do. Hence, Secretary of State James Baker, who
spent months shuttling back and forth to jumpstart the Middle
East “peace process,” spent exactly a day in Belgrade trying
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to forestall the coming catastrophe. “Milosevic had Saddamʼs
appetite,” Baker recounts in his memoir, “but Serbia didnʼt
have Iraqʼs capabilities.” So America overlooked his aggres-
sion, instead declaring itself wedded to the “territorial integrity”
of Yugoslavia. No matter that the Bush team had put its faith in
the “territorial integrity” of a state that no longer existed; “We
donʼt have a dog in that fight,” Baker insisted.
It was in Iraq, however, that the Bush teamʼs foreign pol-
icy philosophy manifested itself clearly—and at greater moral
cost—than anywhere else. Its members still defend their “realis-
tic” approach toward Saddam. But exactly how realistic was the
decision to coddle an aggressive dictator in the weeks, months
and years before he invaded Kuwait? And, in the aftermath
of the Gulf War, how realistic was the preference for a stable
Iraq under Saddam Hussein as opposed to the nontyrannical
alternative? According to the worldview of the Bush team, the
decisions all made perfect sense. “The Lebanonization of Iraq,”
“nation-building,” “some sort of desert democracy where people
read The Federalist Papers along with the Koran”—these were
the phrases that justified halting the Gulf War prematurely and
looking aside while Iraqis were slaughtered by the thousands.
The War over Iraq 98 The War over Iraq 99
Twelve years later, as Saddam threatens the region and the world
with weapons of mass destruction, we are still living with the
consequences of such “realism.”
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FIVE
Wishful Liberalism (Clinton)
O ddly enough, given what would soon follow,
candidate Bill Clinton attacked the Bush team
for having “failed to learn from its appeasement
of Saddam Hussein” and for having “left the Kurds and the Shi-
ites twisting.” His administration, by contrast, would not “forge
strategic relationships with dangerous, despotic regimes.” The
new administration pledged to “contain” the Iraqi dictator with
vigilant enforcement of U.N. sanctions and a steady stream of
aid to Iraqi opposition forces. In August 1993, Vice President
Gore wrote to the Iraqi National Congress affirming Americaʼs
“solid commitment” to “your struggle” and pledging that the
Clinton team “will not turn our backs.” They would not turn
their backs, explained Clintonʼs Middle East point man at the
NSC, Martin Indyk, because “Our purpose is deliberate: it is
to establish clearly and unequivocally that the current regime
in Iraq is a criminal regime, beyond the pale of international
The War over Iraq 100 The War over Iraq 101The War over Iraq 101
society and, in our judgment, irredeemable.”
The Clinton team would act on this purpose by providing mil-
lions of dollars in aid to the Iraqi opposition, assistance from the
CIA, meetings with Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher
and national security advisor Anthony Lake, and promises of
still more help to come. Taking these assurances to heart, Iraqi
opposition forces launched an offensive in the spring of 1995
and bested two of Saddam s̓ crack army divisions. Fearing, how-
ever, that the assault might embroil the United States in a major
confrontation with Iraq, the White House abruptly ordered the
CIA to withdraw its support and warned Kurdish leaders directly
that “the United States will not support this operation militarily
or in any other way.” In newspaper interviews, members of the
Clinton team spun the betrayal as a calculated decision based on
the ineptitude of the opposition force. “These guys are a feckless
bunch who couldnʼt hold up a 7-Eleven,” said one. “They are
really more gnats and mosquitoes to Saddam rather than any-
thing serious,” echoed another. The administrationʼs about-face
concluded in 1996 when Saddam invaded the northern Kurdish
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“safe haven” that the United States had pledged to safeguard.
Far from protecting its inhabitants, American officials fleeing
ahead of the offensive left behind scores of the Iraqi leaders they
had been working with, at least 100 of whom were executed
on the spot. In the midst of the slaughter, Secretary of Defense
William Perry explained, “Our interest in the Kurds is not a vital
national security interest.”
Part of the problem with U.S. policy toward Iraq was
simply ambivalence about the use of force as an instrument of
policy. For members of the Clinton team, the value of American
power seemed to lay merely in its capacity to influence Saddam,
to prod him to see the error of his ways. Thus, terms like “sig-
nals” and “messages”—presumed after Vietnam to have been
banished forever from the lexicon of military affairs—returned
to favor in this administrationʼs dealings with Iraq. “Our mis-
siles sent the following message to Saddam Hussein,” remarked
the president in his statement announcing a 1996 strike in retali-
ation for Saddamʼs aggression in northern Iraq. “When you
abuse your own people or threaten your neighbors, you must
pay a price.” Missiles would inform Saddam that his meddling
The War over Iraq 102 The War over Iraq 103The War over Iraq 103
in northern Iraq was unacceptable, letting him know, according
to President Clinton, “that reckless acts have consequences.”
In this, the strike resembled nothing so much as Clintonʼs 1993
missile attack on a Baghdad intelligence facility in response
to the assassination attempt on former President Bush. That
attack, according to U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright, was
“a message directed at Iraq . . . a message about terrorism and
the fact that we will not allow it.” But as Vice President Gore
hastened to add, “It was not designed to bring down the regime
of Saddam Hussein.”
Clintonʼs sudden enthusiasm for stand-off missile attacks
against Iraq was ironic. After all, the Clinton national security
team had entered office persuaded of the merits of “assertive
multilateralism,” a doctrine based on employing American
power in concert with and on behalf of the international com-
munity. But the fiasco leading to the deaths of U.S. Rangers
in Somalia, where the Clinton team had placed U.S. troops at
the U.N.ʼs disposal, demolished the appeal of this theory. More
than that, it obliged Clinton to endure public ridicule—both for
expanding the mission in Somalia and for precipitously with-
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drawing U.S. troops after the firefight. Subsequently, the White
House retreated to another liberal paradigm for the use of force:
a doctrine permitting aggressive military measures only against
inanimate objects.
With its pinprick strikes against Iraq, however, the admin-
istration invited Americans to indulge in the conceit that the
United States needed no grand strategy in dealing with Iraq, that
its military prowess obviated the need to think seriously about
purpose and policy. Hence, in responding to the Iraqi attack on
the northern city of Irbil in 1996 by pummeling air defense sites
scattered about the desert south of Baghdad, the Clinton team
was not behaving the least bit illogically. Hardly had the missiles
struck their targets when the administration began making the
case that the action was a huge success. “Our mission has been
achieved,” Clinton declared within twenty-four hours of the first
strike, citing reports that “there has been a withdrawal of the
forces, a dispersal of the forces” to bolster his claim. Nor did the
ensuing strategic upheaval in northern Iraq and the near-collapse
of the allied coalition persuade the president to budge from that
claim. In fact, a comparable disconnect between claims and
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reality characterized almost every attack against Iraq that the
administration launched. Although it had only destroyed part
of one building along with its janitorial staff, the administration
had declared its 1993 strike “a devastating blow to Iraq s̓ ability
to plan and carry out [terrorist] operations in the future,” in the
words of Vice President Gore. If blowing holes in a building
counted as a “devastating blow,” it was also cheap, an after-
hours missile attack that not only precluded American casual-
ties but, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher hastened to
point out, also sought to “minimize the loss of [Iraqi] life.” The
strikes, however, did not modify Saddam s̓ behavior in the least,
but rather showed him that he enjoyed more room to maneuver
than American rhetoric suggested.
That this was the “message” that Saddam received from
U.S. policy became particularly clear during Clintonʼs second
term. Rhetorically, the administration accepted the goal of
regime change in Iraq, and in response to Saddamʼs defiance of
U.N. weapons inspectors, the White House ordered numerous
ostentatious buildups of U.S. forces in the Gulf during 1997
and 1998, accompanied by leaked details about the ominous
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comings and goings of aircraft carriers and the movement of
warplanes. As the pattern evolved, the administration would
devise a fig leaf to allow it to back down from the real action
these buildups seemed to portend. Then the process would begin
anew. An early 1998 confrontation with Saddam exposed the
true extent of the Clinton teamʼs confusion. When Saddam
refused to submit to further weapons inspections in late 1997,
Clinton vowed that if force was required this time, the United
States would “eliminate” Iraq s̓ capacity to produce weapons of
mass destruction. Yet even as the U.S. buildup proceeded, the
administration reverted to type. In order to insure the elimination
of Iraqʼs WMD program, would the administration use ground
forces? Absolutely not. Could air power destroy Saddamʼs
weapons? Not really, given that he had buried and hidden so
much of his arsenal. So the White House argued itself into a
“surgical” campaign of only four or five days, which would at
most “diminish” Iraqi capabilities.
As Clinton administration officials repeatedly reminded
the public (and Saddam), any use of military power against Iraq
would be designed to minimize the risk of casualties (whether
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ours or theirs), avoid collateral damage, preclude the danger of
a “quagmire,” skirt moral ambiguities, and achieve its desired
effect through suasion rather than overwhelming force. Thus,
the Clinton administration insisted that such an attack was not
to be confused with waging war, a concept that was antiquated
and obsolete. “We are talking about using military force, but
we are not talking about a war,” Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright argued. “That is an important distinction.” But the
administrationʼs insistence upon such distinctions, along with
the lengthening list of criteria to be met before military force
was used, fatally undercut its position. After all the huffing and
puffing was over, Albright flew to New York to cut a deal with
Kofi Annan that would permit the United States to back down.
Finally, in December 1998, when Saddam s̓ manipulations
became too much to bear, the Clinton team responded with
another round of missile strikes. Severely limited in purpose,
scope, duration and effect, the days-long campaign produced
nothing—apart from the collapse of weapons inspections.
Indeed, the Iraqi dictator emerged stronger than before. As a
result, during Clintonʼs final year in office, Iraq exported more
The War over Iraq 108 The War over Iraq 109The War over Iraq 108
oil than any other country save Saudi Arabia, earned more from
oil sales than it did prior to the embargo, and used those earnings
to help replenish its arsenal.
As for Saddamʼs opponents, with the administrationʼs
approval Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, commander of
U.S. forces in the Middle East, launched a public relations offen-
sive against them, arguing further in speeches and interviews
that “a weak, fragmented, chaotic Iraq . . . is more dangerous in
the long run than a contained Saddam is now.” For his part, Clin-
tonʼs national security advisor, Sandy Berger, publicly likened
plans to topple Saddam to another Bay of Pigs, and the White
House released only a tiny portion of the funds Congress had
allotted to support the opposition. Instead, the State Department
funded such pressing needs as a conflict management program
for Saddam s̓ opponents established by Roger Fisher, the author
of Getting to Yes.
In fact, the very officials responsible for supporting Sad-
damʼs opponents routinely denigrated them. On the strength of
an article in which he argued that rolling back Saddam Hussein
was a “fantasy,” Berger brought former CIA analyst Kenneth
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Pollack onto the National Security Council. According to the
Washington Post, Pollack had authored intelligence estimates
that “predicted fierce and effective Iraqi resistance” prior to
Operation Desert Storm, and, by his own account, once inside
the Clinton administration he “stopped trying to convince any-
one that the [Iraqi National Congress] was worth assisting.” In a
similar vein, Frank Ricciardone, the State Department coordina-
tor responsible for implementing the Iraq Liberation Act, said
the United States would not supply arms to the Iraqi opposition
until “we know that they represent fighters who are willing to
die” for regime change.
Meanwhile, in 2000, Baghdadʼs newly reopened Saddam
International Airport began disgorging a steady stream of poli-
ticians and businessmen on unauthorized flights from Russia,
France and the Arab world. All were there to do business with
the outlaw regime. Washington not only failed to condemn the
wholesale subversion of the U.N. sanctions, but negotiated with
the U.N. Sanctions Committee to revise the rules governing
flights into Iraq so it would not appear that the embargo was
being violated. While all this was going on, members of the
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Gulf War coalition one after another reopened their embassies
in Baghdad, sent dignitaries to commune with Saddam, and
lamented the injustice and immorality of sanctions.
In this atmosphere of slow-motion capitulation, the United
States agreed with the move to abolish altogether the U.N.-
imposed ceiling on Iraqi oil sales, winking at the fact that out-
side the auspices of the United Nations, Baghdad was smuggling
out an additional $2 billion of oil a year. On the military front,
as soon as the 1998 strikes ceased, Berger and Albright pressed
to ratchet down the war of attrition in which U.S. warplanes had
been engaged since the Gulf War. But Iraqi jets continued to
challenge the no-fly zones and Iraqi gunners continued to shoot
at American planes. So the air campaign continued, but it did so
in a curious way: The Pentagon devised a strategy whereby the
Air Force would fill 2,000-pound bombs with concrete instead
of explosives and drop them on Iraq. “The guidance equip-
ment is still there, but the cement is less expensive,” explained
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Waters, spokesman for the allied
air operation over northern Iraq. But cost was not the only rea-
son the United States was bombarding Iraq with construction
materials. “The way weʼre conducting this is kept within the
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parameters of political acceptability,” an administration official
told the New York Times. “We donʼt want things to go wrong.”
But things went wrong anyway. How badly wrong was
clear in the administrationʼs determination to avoid another
showdown with Saddam over weapons inspections. “During
a conversation about the regime change plan in early 2000,”
writes former Clinton administration official Kenneth Pollack,
“one senior administration official told me that ʻThe President
wants to finish his term by making peace between the Arabs and
the Israelis, he doesnʼt want to start a war between us and the
Iraqis.ʼ” This desire was complicated in the fall of 2000 when
the new chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, planned to
announce that his team was ready to return to Iraq. The decla-
ration was long overdue: “In the absence of inspectors on the
ground,” Assistant Secretary of State Edward Walker said at the
time, “we must rely on national technical means, which cannot
provide the same level of assurance.” Yet the administration,
intent on avoiding a confrontation, scuttled Blixʼs plan. A U.N.
diplomat told the Washington Post that the decision to obstruct
Blix derived from U.S. as well as Russian concerns “that this
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might create a climate of confrontation at an inappropriate time.”
Indeed, Secretary of State Albright publicly ruled out the use
of force in response to Saddamʼs intransigence. “There seem to
be many people who are guessing that not much might happen
before the American elections,” Blix commented after his travel
plans were altered. “I think that might be a good guess.”
O pponents of Clintonʼs foreign policy, loath to
credit the administration with coherence in any
enterprise apart from campaigning for reelection, dismiss any
suggestion that the administrationʼs policy in Iraq evidenced
consistency. But such a view is mistaken. When the Bush team
departed office in January 1993, taking with it the philosophy of
foreign policy realism, Bill Clinton criticized his predecessor for
failing to grasp that “in a world where freedom, not tyranny, is
on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply
does not compute.” In its place, Clinton pledged to conduct a
foreign policy that rejected this cynical calculus. He would start
with Saddam Hussein, about whom a newly inaugurated Presi-
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dent Clinton said, “I believe in death-bed conversions.”
What Clinton was proposing was, in short, the very oppo-
site of realism. Instead, he was guided by a brand of wishful
liberalism, a view that looks to the world community and its
institutions as the ultimate source of international legitimacy,
is profoundly uncomfortable with the unilateral assertion of
American power, and tends to favor policies that rely far more
heavily on the carrot than on the stick. As expressed in arms
control agreements, international treaties, and an aversion to the
use of force, this impulse has translated into a preference for a
foreign policy whose idealism is both quixotic and legalistic.
In the past, it has also shaded into utopianism, contributing to,
among other highlights of U.S. foreign policy, the creation of
the League of Nations, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing
war, and a persistent faith in Cold War arms control treaties that
were persistently violated by the Soviet Union.
This strain of liberalism was kept in check during the first
two decades of the Cold War by the dominance of muscular
liberals like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, who harbored
no illusions about the perils that existed beyond Americaʼs
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shores. But the liberal foreign policy consensus evaporated in
the jungles of Vietnam. For wishful liberals, and many others
besides, American power was now irredeemably tainted by
involvement in a “criminal” war. The suspicion of American
power inherent in contemporary liberalism now became a reflex-
ive opposition to the exercise of American power in the world.
That sentiment soon became common among some leaders of
the Democratic Party. In 1972, Democratic presidential nominee
George McGovern was caustically depicting the American effort
in Vietnam as “a policy of mass murder” and demanding that
America “come home” from Southeast Asia and the world. And
while such bluntness tended to be the exception rather than the
norm, by the early 1970s a conventional wisdom had emerged
among many liberal foreign policy types: Not only did the
United States share equal responsibility for the origins, excesses
and consequences of the Cold War, but its international conduct
was barely different from that of its communist adversary.
This reflexive suspicion of American power would be
enshrined in the Democratic Partyʼs platform in 1972 and
would shape opinion in its salons for the next two decades.
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President Carter thus congratulated America for having over-
come its “inordinate fear of communism” as well as the “belief
that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable and that it must
be contained.” Liberals during the 1970s would terminate aid
to South Vietnam and to pro-Western insurgents in Africa, and
preside over successive catastrophes in Afghanistan, Central
America and Iran. With the Cold War approaching its end game,
Democratic congressmen such as David Bonior, Jim Wright and
Christopher Dodd spent much of the 1980s directing the suc-
cessful drive to defund the Sandinistas ̓anticommunist oppo-
nents. Aptly summarizing this position, Senator Dodd advised
that, when it came to communist advances in Central America,
the United States “had to move with the tide of history rather
than stand against it.” Similarly, in 1984 presidential nominee
Walter Mondale impugned President Reagan for policies that
“ceded the moral high ground to the Russians.” And in 1988
presidential nominee Michael Dukakis assailed efforts to assist
the Contras, and denounced the bombing of Libya and the inva-
sion of Grenada.
Communism died, but these liberal qualms about Ameri-
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can power persisted. What had begun as opposition to the war
in Vietnam had, by the end of the Cold War, hardened into a
reflexive opposition to the use of force. Libya, Iran, Iraq—the
ideology of those who identified themselves as Americaʼs foes
no longer mattered. The Gulf War, fought more than a year after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, elicited all the old arguments. Senator
Robert Kerrey, for instance, advised that “rather than threaten-
ing war . . . we should tell Iraq and the world we believe the
wholesale loss of American and Arab lives is too great a price
to pay to liberate Kuwait,” while even moderates like Senators
Sam Nunn and Daniel Patrick Moynihan could not discern a
compelling reason to back the use of force against Iraqi aggres-
sion. A year later, Democratic senators like Ted Kennedy and
Joseph Biden were once again in full cry, condemning a leaked
Bush administration report that explained how America could
retain its military primacy. California senator Alan Cranston
sneered that the memoʼs purpose was to make the United States
“the one, the only main honcho on the world block, the global
Big Enchilada.”
During the 1992 Democratic primaries, as well, the
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presidential candidates recited the familiar litany. Paul Tsongas
lectured that Americans cannot “allow ourselves to continually
become the policeman of the world.” And Tom Harkin advised
voters, “If you want to carry on spending your money overseas,
then vote for George Herbert Walker Bush.” For his part, Bill
Clinton championed the creation of a “new, voluntary U.N.
Rapid Deployment Force” that could alleviate Americaʼs bur-
dens abroad.
Although President Clintonʼs foreign policy may not have
been the product of principled analysis, it did reflect certain
assumptions about Americaʼs role in the world. Clinton, of
course, entered the White House pledging to “focus like a laser”
on the domestic economy. This had a direct bearing on foreign
policy, for as Peter Tarnoff, Clinton s̓ undersecretary of state for
policy, explained, “we simply donʼt have the leverage, we donʼt
have the influence, we donʼt have the inclination to use military
forces, we certainly donʼt have the money” to settle global crises.
Hence, the administrationʼs early inaction on Bosnia—whose
destruction the Clinton administration regretted but for almost
three years did little to stop—signaled the arrival of a foreign
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policy premised, in Tarnoffʼs words, on “setting limits on the
amount of American engagement.” To this end, the Clinton
administration looked to the United Nations and a doctrine of
“assertive multilateralism” because, as the president explained,
“Weʼve simply got to focus on rebuilding America.” Cheering
the president on, the New York Times advised that “the new
administration also needs to ease America out of the costly role
of world policeman by helping to transform the United Nations
and regional groups into credible instruments for enforcing col-
lective security.” This the administration proceeded to do by
preparing a Presidential Decision Directive that amounted to a
blueprint for subordinating American power to the judgment of
the United Nations. Defense Secretary William Perry captured
its spirit a year later, solemnly explaining that “we are really
powerless to conduct air strikes” in Bosnia, because “the United
Nations has not been asking for air strikes.”
What followed over the next several years was a uniquely
Clintonesque brand of foreign policy liberalism. On the one
hand, the presidentʼs evident discomfort with the use of Ameri-
can power, his preference for action in concert with and on
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behalf of the “world community,” and his exuberant faith in
the liberalizing powers of commerce and technology all traced
back to a quintessentially wishful brand of idealism. “The forces
of global integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away
the established order of things,” Clinton exulted in 1997. In
the presidentʼs telling, that “great tide” reduced a complex and
dangerous world environment to a simple narrative of material
progress and moral improvement, the benefits of which could
already be glimpsed in a New Middle East, an African Renais-
sance and even a “strategic partnership” with China.
Among the detritus that “global integration” would wash
away were traditional considerations of power, which members
of the Clinton team derided as “yesterdayʼs preoccupations”
and “stratocrap and globaloney.” In place of traditional con-
cerns about aggression and power, the Clintonites discerned
new, more urgent threats—a catalogue of twenty-first-century
perils ranging from crime syndicates to global warming and the
flu. With a grand sweep, Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbot
located national security challenges “from the floor of the stock
exchange in Singapore to the roof of the world over Patagonia
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where there is a hole in the ozone layer,” while Vice President
Al Gore likened the struggle to contain global environmental
degradation to past American efforts against the Soviet Union.
All the while the administration was confusing these
worries with actual threats, it was ignoring the persistence of
behavior that did not accord with its worldview. “If the Ameri-
can people donʼt know anything else about me,” the president
reminded the public in 1999, “they know that I donʼt like to
use military force.” So, having apologized for the conduct of
his Cold War predecessors in Africa and elsewhere, Clinton sat
out the genocide in Rwanda, and for too long, the attempted
genocide in Bosnia—which, recalling Neville Chamberlain,
Secretary of State Warren Christopher infamously described
as “a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle
of another continent.” The administration dithered for nearly
three years while Bosnia burned and the president visited Holo-
caust memorials. And when, in 1994, North Koreaʼs effort to
produce nuclear weapons threatened to drag the United States
into a war, the Clinton team permitted Jimmy Carter to cut a
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deal and tried to bribe Pyongyang into abandoning its bid for
nuclear weapons with pledges of American assistance. Echoing
Carterʼs insistence that the upshot of his negotiations “was kind
of like a miracle,” Clinton boasted, “This agreement will help
achieve a long-standing and vital American objective: an end
to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula.”
(The “miracle” culminated in 2002 in the announcement by
North Korea that it had not abandoned its efforts to produce
nuclear weapons.)
In the meantime, just next door, the very men that candidate
Clinton had called “the butchers of Beijing” were modernizing
their armed forces and firing missiles off Taiwan, stealing and
then exporting American military technology, and threatening
the United States itself. In response, President Clinton show-
ered China with dual-use military technology, toasted their new
“strategic partnership,” and officially “delinked” human rights
and trade.
The Clinton teamʼs response to terrorism proved similarly
feckless. Despite a clear evidence trail leading back to Al Qaeda,
it failed to respond to the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole,
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and vetoed proposals to dispatch Special Forces in the hunt for
Osama bin Laden. In a similar vein, it never responded to the
1996 attack on the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks in Saudi
Arabia, despite (or because of) evidence of involvement by
Iran, which the Clinton team was then attempting to “engage.”
Then too, the administrationʼs response to the bombing of two
American embassies in East Africa in August 1998 was to fling
a few missiles at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the eve of
Clintonʼs impeachment. In fact, his administration never truly
responded to terrorist attacks with the long reach of American
military power. Doing so was a matter for the “long reach of our
nationʼs law enforcement,” as Madeleine Albright explained.
The Clinton administration even gave state sponsors of terrorism
a linguistic cleansing, changing their official title from “rogue
states” to “states of concern.”
Still, Bill Clinton was no George McGovern. He might
be dovish by temperament, but if the price of inaction proved
politically steeper than the alternative, the president could be
counted on to act. Hence, the uncontested occupation of Haiti
commenced only when the prospect of boatloads of Haitians
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washing up on Floridaʼs beaches, combined with protests from
the Congressional Black Caucus, had backed Clinton into a
corner. The presidentʼs Balkan point man, Richard Holbrooke,
likewise recounts that Clinton decided to launch a sustained
bombing campaign in Bosnia only after the Europeans began
pressing the United States to honor a pledge to evacuate their
hapless peacekeepers, a politically risky operation likely to
produce substantial U.S. casualties—which air strikes would,
and did, make unnecessary. Nor was the Clinton team any more
eager to act in Kosovo. And when it did, with an eye to the polls,
it kept attack aircraft above an altitude of 15,000 feet, ruled out
the use of ground troops, and then subordinated the mission of
U.S. peacekeepers to the imperative of “force protection.”
This peculiar mixture of liberalism and cynicism produced
its clearest failure in Iraq. According to the administrationʼs
scorecard, it was not the integrity of containment or even the
value of keeping Saddam disarmed that mattered. Far more
important was the political imperative of keeping Iraq “off
the Presidentʼs desk,” as one administration official put it. In
those instances when Clinton actually located Iraq on his desk,
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the administration did not perform much better. Advertising
their fears as if they were virtues, the Clinton team repeat-
edly appealed to the United Nations for help in extricating the
administration from binds of its own devising. The White House
abandoned members of Iraqʼs democratic opposition, in many
cases to a gruesome fate. It presided over the dismantling of
the containment apparatus that the previous administration had
used to keep Saddam “in his box.” And when it did resort to
the use of force, the administration employed tit-for-tat mili-
tary operations that had no demonstrable effect on a worsening
situation. The proclaimed effectiveness of these operations was
contrived and largely fanciful. The whole business reflected the
administrationʼs refusal to employ measures of genuine stra-
tegic effectiveness. The Clinton policy toward Iraq may have
comforted the sensibilities of its architects—but not nearly so
much as it comforted Saddam Hussein, who, by the time Clinton
left office, was out of the box whose confines had been mostly
imaginary to begin with.
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SIX
A Distinctly American Internationalism
(Bush II)
L iberals and realists approach the world from differ-
ent directions, but when it comes to Iraq, both have
ended up in the same place: watching Saddamʼs
arsenal grow ever more threatening. For each ideology tends
to impel America toward a minimalist approach to foreign
policy—one because the very concept of self-interest provokes
discomfort, and the other because it defines the national interest
far too narrowly. On the question of what to do about Saddam in
particular, both of these worldviews generated excuses for inac-
tion. But on the question of Iraq, and on the broader question
of how to use American power in the world, there was always
an alternative. After September 11, 2001, President George W.
Bush embraced it.
This alternative is what President Bush calls “a distinctly
American internationalism,” a philosophy that seeks to com-
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bine the most successful elements of realism and liberalism.
This worldview was not created out of whole cloth by the Bush
administration. Marrying American power to American ideals,
presidents from Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman to John F.
Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all put into practice the tenets of a
distinctly American internationalism, and did so to great effect.
On the 2000 campaign trail, Senator John McCainʼs call for a
policy of “rogue state rollback” harkened back to this tradition,
as did candidate Bushʼs call for a foreign policy that embraced
“idealism, without illusions” and “realism, in the service of
American ideals.” Though he was uncertain in charting such
a course during his first year in office, September 11 prompted
the president to return to his campaign slogan and build on it.
Bush subsequently embraced the inheritance of Truman and
Kennedy, promising to “fight, for a just peace—a peace that
favors liberty.” This, in turn, brought him logically and quickly
to the problem of Saddam Hussein.
What does “distinctly American internationalism”—or
simply American internationalism—mean? First, it clearly fol-
lows from “American exceptionalism”—a belief in the unique-
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ness and the virtue of the American political system that, when
translated into foreign policy terms, offers the United States
as a model for the world. It is a model because faith in the
universal ideal of freedom, not a blood-and-soil nationalism, is
what defines the American idea. The historian Robert Tucker
describes how this faith has shaped the contours of our foreign
policy:
From the outset of our existence as a nation we have
believed that our security and survival are synonymous
with the security and survival of freedom in the world.
This is why our reason of state has not only had a dimen-
sion above and beyond a conventional reason, but has been
regularly seen as somehow qualitatively different from it.
Contemporary liberals and realists tend to deny that
America is an exceptional nation in any sense. Todayʼs liber-
als are suspicious of this idea because the notion of Americaʼs
uniqueness contradicts the logic of cultural relativism and
encourages American nationalism. Realists believe that to con-
cede this exceptionalism would encourage Americaʼs “crusad-
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ing impulse.” In the postwar era, this distinction set American
internationalists like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy apart
from wishful liberals like Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt,
on the one hand, and from realists like George Kennan and
Henry Kissinger, on the other. Where liberals argue that peace
and political liberty can best be fostered within international
organizations and through international cooperation, American
internationalists look to American power and American-led alli-
ances. And while a deep-seated reluctance to judge others and
lingering skepticism about Americaʼs founding ideals weigh
down liberals, no such misgivings inhibit American interna-
tionalists. To be sure, some liberals concede that America should
play the role of global policemen—at least in conjunction with
the “world community.” But for American internationalists,
Americaʼs mission goes beyond so limited a view.
If this attachment to the American idea distinguishes
American internationalists from liberals, it equally sets them
apart from realists. When, for example, Harry Truman pledged
in 1947 to “assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in
their own way,” realists like Walter Lippmann warned that the
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president had launched a dangerous crusade. American interna-
tionalists do concur with certain tenets of realism—above all,
the view of the international environment as a fundamentally
dangerous place. Where the two worldviews part company is
precisely over the American internationalist claim that this con-
dition may be significantly ameliorated through the vigorous
application of American power and ideals.
The heyday of American internationalism—or liberal anti-
communism, as it was called at the time—began with Truman s̓
declaration that the United States had become “one of the most
powerful forces for good on earth,” and that the task now was
to “keep it so” and to “lead the world to peace and prosperity.”
NSC-68, the famous statement of national security policy that
Truman commissioned in 1950, insisted that “a defeat of free
institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” American inter-
nationalism, with its faith in liberal democracy and Americaʼs
duty to encourage it around the globe, was now enshrined in
official policy and would remain there through the administra-
tion of John F. Kennedy, who famously vowed that the United
States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hard-
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ship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival
and the success of liberty.”
By 1968, however, this form of American international-
ism was seemingly being discredited in the jungles of South-
east Asia. The war in Vietnam persuaded many liberals that
not only American policy, but also the fundamental character
of the United States had been tested and found wanting. The
United States, as former Kennedy official Richard Barnet argued
in 1971, ought to be viewed “not as the problem-solver of the
world but as an integral part of the problem.” Or as President
Carter put it a few years later, Vietnam taught that America
should not “become militarily involved in the internal affairs
of another nation unless there is a direct and obvious threat to
the security of the United States or its people.” The lessons of
Munich, which counseled resistance to aggression abroad, had
been replaced by the lessons of Vietnam.
In truth, Vietnam generated not one, but two misleading
lessons—one for the political left and one for the right. Some
realists had warned against Americaʼs intervention in Southeast
Asia from the outset, seeing it as the logical consequence of ide-
ology run amok. The outcome only confirmed their suspicions.
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The lesson, then, was that America should intervene only where
its “vital interests” were threatened, not on the “periphery” and
never for ideological reasons. Thus, even as his administration
continued to wage war in Vietnam, President Nixon proclaimed,
“the objective of any American administration would be to avoid
another war like Vietnam any place in the world.” America
would do this by looking “to the nation directly threatened to
assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower
for its defense.” It would also lean heavily on the European
brand of realpolitik espoused by national security advisor Henry
Kissinger, which led to strenuous efforts to improve relations
with the Soviet Union and with China, even as the two powers
continued to aid America s̓ foe in Southeast Asia. The “détente”
that grew out of this initiative would last the better part of a
decade.
During the 1970s, then, liberalism and realism tended to
act as mutually reinforcing barriers to the exercise of American
power. While future Clinton aide Anthony Lake applauded
a “welcome shift toward recognition of the limits of Ameri-
can power and responsibility,” Kissinger similarly counseled
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“restraint in the uses of power.” Yet as liberals and conserva-
tives alike abandoned the foreign policy tenets that had guided
America through the first phase of the Cold War, a small group
of Democrats and Republicans held to that philosophy. In the
aftermath of George McGovern s̓ 1972 defeat, a group of Ameri-
can internationalists—or neoconservatives, as they would soon
be called—close to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson formed the
Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), which directly
challenged the isolationism that had taken control of much of
the Democratic Party. Unlike his partyʼs dovish establishment,
Jackson and his colleagues at the CDM insisted that Americaʼs
self-interest and the interests of mankind were not inherently
incompatible. On the contrary, they claimed that the world was
a better place as a result of the vigorous application of American
power. Accordingly, Jackson counseled a foreign policy that was
at once robust, idealistic and interventionist. In the Democratic
Party of the 1970s, however, this was hardly an easy sell. Nor
was it much more welcome in the Republican Party of Gerald
Ford, whose devotion to realpolitik was considered by American
internationalists almost as dangerous as the Democratic Partyʼs
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self-flagellating foreign policy.
Rejecting the “lessons” of Vietnam, these American interna-
tionalists of the 1970s stood for continuity with the postwar
foreign policy tradition. They remained convinced of the need
for continued American vigilance abroad, particularly in deal-
ing with the Soviet Union. It is easy to forget how controversial
was the suggestion in the mid-to-late 1970s that the USSR was
really a danger, much less one that should be confronted by the
United States. This was hardly the dominant view of the Ameri-
can foreign policy establishment. Quite the contrary: Prevailing
wisdom from the Nixon through the Carter administrations held
that the United States should do its utmost to coexist peace-
ably with the USSR, and that the American people in any case
were not capable of sustaining a serious challenge to the Soviet
system. To engage in an arms race would either bankrupt the
United States or lead to Armageddon. To challenge communist
ideology at its core, to declare it evil and illegitimate, would be
at best quixotic and possibly perilous. When American interna-
tionalists challenged this consensus, when they criticized détente
and arms control and called for a military buildup and a broad
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ideological and strategic assault on Soviet communism, their
recommendations were generally dismissed as either naïve or
reckless. It would take a revolution in American foreign policy,
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet
empire to prove them right.
Having fallen out of favor for a decade and a half, the
tradition of distinctly American internationalism was revived
by President Reagan, who pledged that the decisive factor in
the Cold War would “not be bombs and rockets, but a test of
wills and ideas,” and that the United States would help other
nations “foster the infrastructure of democracy.” Reagan rebuilt
the United States military. He advanced the Reagan Doctrine,
which took seriously the admonition to roll back Soviet gains,
and did so by supporting anticommunist insurgencies around
the world. He helped found quasi-governmental organizations
like the National Endowment for Democracy, which encour-
aged political freedoms in autocratic countries. He described the
Soviet Union for what it was—an evil empire. Reagan believed
that only by changing the political systems of our adversaries,
rather than “balancing” or “engaging” them, could we ensure
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a safer America and a more secure world. Most important, he
spoke openly and frequently about Americaʼs mission in that
world. The Reagan inheritance languished for more than a
decade but then, after 9-11, George W. Bush revived it once
again.
I t is no small irony that the task of ousting Saddam Hussein
has fallen to the son of the president who, among other
things, made the fateful decision to leave Saddam in power. It is
also striking that President George W. Bush quotes approvingly
George Marshallʼs prediction that “our flag will be recognized
throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand,
and of overwhelming power on the other,” after candidate Bush
placed misgivings about military intervention at the center of
his foreign policy agenda. While American internationalists
saw the Clinton administration as weak and indecisive, Bush
foreign policy advisor Stephen Hadley complained that it had
“been too quick to reach out to the military instrument.” And
on the campaign trail George W. Bush flatly asserted that he
would not intervene to stop “genocide in nations outside our
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strategic interest” and that the United States needed to adopt a
more “humble” approach to the world.
Contrasting his own foreign policy, which would focus on
“vital national interests,” with Clintonʼs moralism, Bushʼs cri-
tiques often seemed to shade into contempt for democracy itself.
“The new Pakistani general, he s̓ just been elected—not elected,
this guy took over office,” Bush said of coup leader Pervez
Musharraf during the infamous name-the-president-of-Pakistan
ambush. “It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the
country, and I think thatʼs good news for the subcontinent.”
Indeed, for all his invocations of Reagan, it appeared that Bush s̓
approach would amount to nothing more than a variation of old-
world realpolitik and an echo of Gerald Ford. “[T]he emergent
ethos,” noted Jonathan Clarke, a realist at the Cato Institute,
shortly after Bush took office, “is of a return to professionalism
taking precedence over ideology.”
Bush s̓ choice of senior foreign policy aides only bolstered
that impression. Borrowing a line of reasoning that derived
partly from Hans Morgenthau and partly from Reader s̓ Digest,
his newly appointed secretary of state, Colin Powell, had argued
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in a 1992 New York Times op-ed that the United States should
not intervene in Bosnia because the conflict has “deep ethnic
and religious roots that go back a thousand years.” Nor should
America aid the Iraqi insurgents, lest it end up “trying to sort
out two thousand years of Mesopotamian history.” America,
Powell had said, should act only in those instances where “the
cold calculus of national interest” was at stake. In a similar
vein, Bush national security advisor Condoleezza Rice came to
the presidentʼs attention as a protégé of his fatherʼs close friend
Brent Scowcroft and espoused an unsentimental brand of real-
politik identical to her mentorʼs. Powell chose another Scow-
croft protégé, Richard Haass, as his Middle East point man and
director of policy planning. In his writings Haass had advised
that “order is more fundamental than justice” and, hence, “even
though the world would be far better off without Saddam, mak-
ing his ouster an explicit goal would also be wrong.”
Bush, though, also appointed several American interna-
tionalists to prominent posts in his administration. “We need to
strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes
hostile to our interests and values,” declared a statement of
The War over Iraq 138 The War over Iraq 139The War over Iraq 138
foreign policy principles produced by the Project for a New
American Century that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
and a group of future Bush aides signed two years before Bush
took office. Rumsfeldʼs deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was equally
committed to the role of principles in U.S. foreign policy. He
came to prominence in 1976 as a member of “Team B,” a group
of conservative foreign policy hands whose report turned on
its head the intelligence communityʼs benign reading of Soviet
strategic intentions. During the Reagan and Bush administra-
tions, Wolfowitz quickly rose through the State Department and
Pentagon ranks. In 1992 he provoked an uproar at both ends of
the political spectrum when, as undersecretary for policy at the
Pentagon, he urged exploiting Americaʼs military supremacy
for the purpose of “deterring potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Nor did he advo-
cate this merely for geopolitical reasons. During the 1990s,
Wolfowitz emerged as a tireless champion of ethnic minori-
ties from Bosniaʼs Muslims to Iraqʼs Kurds. Writing in the
National Interest just before taking office, Wolfowitz com-
plained, “Nothing could be less realistic than the versions of
The War over Iraq 138 The War over Iraq 139The War over Iraq 139
the ʻrealist ̓view of foreign policy that dismisses human rights,
an important tool of American foreign policy.”
Shortly after his inauguration, Bush said of his foreign policy
team, “Thereʼs going to be disagreements. I hope there is dis-
agreement.” There was—but not along familiar lines. When it
came to the issue of American power, our bureaucratic actors
in recent years had their lines down pat. The State Department
counseled an active role on the international scene; the Pentagon,
hobbled by the “lessons” of Vietnam, advised restraint. Even in
the administration of Ronald Reagan, which appeared united
behind a single vision, there were epic battles between Pentagon
chief Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz,
who complained that America was turning into “the Hamlet of
nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond”
to its foes. Recall, too, Madeleine Albrightʼs famous query to
Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Clinton
administration: “What s̓ the point of having this superb military
that youʼre always talking about if we canʼt use it?”
But on the question of Iraq, the Bush team has reversed the
The War over Iraq 140 The War over Iraq 141The War over Iraq 140
equation, pitting a State Department that warns about the perils
of the use of force against a Pentagon team that believes in its
efficacy. To the State Department, Colin Powell has brought
his peculiar brand of realism, while to the Pentagon, robust
internationalists like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have brought
their more expansive views of Americaʼs global role. When it
comes to Iraq, the disagreements between the two camps date
back to the first Bush administration, when Powell successfully
argued for halting the war after only four days and denying
aid to Iraqi insurgents, and Wolfowitz dissented from his own
administration s̓ decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power and
then spent much of the past decade lobbying for aid to the Iraqi
rebels. He now recommends that the United States strike Iraq as
soon as “we find the right way to do it.” Rumsfeld, for his part,
contends, “Iraq today is ripe for a broad-based insurrection.”
Yet, having pledged to deal forcefully with Baghdad, the
Bush team spent its first months in office not doing so. Like
the Clinton team before it, the Bush administration declined to
authorize the release of congressionally appropriated funds for
use by the opposition inside Iraq. Instead, the State Department
The War over Iraq 140 The War over Iraq 141The War over Iraq 141
audited them. In fact, far from transforming containment into
rollback, the White House proceeded to water down even the
demands that the Clinton team had imposed on Iraq. Only two
months after coming to office, Powell began promoting a plan
to ease the decade-old sanctions regime against Americaʼs Gulf
War foe. He intended the plan, which called for the elimina-
tion of most restrictions on Iraqi trade and a tightening of the
embargo on military imports, “to relieve the burden on the Iraqi
people” and thereby defuse criticism of the United States.
Powell headed off to the Middle East in March 2001 to sell
his plan. His friends in the region, Powell said, had told him it
was “the right thing to do.” But Powellʼs friends in Washing-
ton—namely, the president, the vice president and the defense
secretary—had told him nothing of the kind, as Powell acknowl-
edged during his trip. Nor were the Iraqis buying his sales pitch:
officials in Baghdad promptly termed his proposal “rubbish.”
Powell s̓ Arab “friends,” too, began disparaging the idea as soon
as he got back on his plane. Nonetheless, the secretary of state
soldiered on, pushing his plan both at home and at the United
Nations. Eventually he succeeded. But when the United Nations
The War over Iraq 142 The War over Iraq 143The War over Iraq 142
finally signed off on Powell s̓ new sanctions regime, it accepted
the carrot and rejected the stick. While it gladly authorized eas-
ing the embargo against Iraq, the final version of its plan left
out its only tough elements: commitments from Iraq s̓ neighbors
to stop illegal oil imports and to host international monitors
along Iraqʼs borders. “This significant step will improve the
Iraqi regimeʼs ability to meet the needs of its people,” Powell
declared. Saddam had gotten something for nothing.
T hen came September 11. That day may not have changed
the views of some of the presidentʼs diplomatic counsel-
ors. It may not even have changed the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein. But it did change the president, and therefore the direc-
tion of his foreign policy.
Exactly how much the president and his policies had
evolved after the attack may be gleaned from a series of
speeches Bush delivered between September 2001 and June
2002, as well as from the national security strategy document
in which their themes were formally enunciated. In the space of
less than an hour, during his address to a joint session of Con-
The War over Iraq 142 The War over Iraq 143The War over Iraq 143
gress on September 20, 2001, Bush transformed himself from
a realist following in his fatherʼs footsteps to an internationalist
touting Americaʼs ideals as sincerely and forcefully as Harry
Truman, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan before him. Bush
described Americaʼs purpose in this way:
The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of
our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on
us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of
violence from our people and our future. We will rally the
world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will
not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.
All of these things the president demonstrated in the follow-
ing months by concentrating Americaʼs military power to
devastating effect in Afghanistan. There the United States not
only destroyed bin Ladenʼs refuge, but toppled one of the most
repressive governments in the world, thereby encouraging
women to show their faces, children to fly their kites, and men
to get a shave and speak their minds for the first time in years.
President Bush, it was said, had translated “moral clarity” into
The War over Iraq 144 The War over Iraq 145The War over Iraq 144
official policy.
That moral clarity was reinforced in the presidentʼs Janu-
ary 29 State of the Union address, when he famously identified
Iraq, Iran and North Korea as members of the “axis of evil.” In
the days following that speech, gasps could still be heard from
Washington to New York to every European capital. Not since
Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as an evil empire
had an American president so boldly flouted the foreign policy
establishment s̓ conventional wisdom and euphemistic language.
The New York Times instantly expressed alarm and discomfort
that “the application of power and intimidation has returned
to the forefront of American foreign policy.” For their part, a
chorus of former Clinton administration officials complained
that the president had overstated the threats to America and
underestimated the perils of responding to them.
Nowhere were the complaints louder than in the case of
Iraq, where it was rapidly becoming clear that Bush would break
with the policies of his predecessors. Over the next few months,
in a series of speeches and interviews, the president explained
why Iraq was indeed a threat like no other, and how September
The War over Iraq 144 The War over Iraq 145The War over Iraq 145
11 had demonstrated the urgent need to confront it. In a Septem-
ber 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly, he detailed Sad-
dam Husseinʼs aggression, his attempts to acquire and develop
weapons of mass destruction, his depredations against the Iraqi
people, his defiance of the U.N. itself, and finally, his support for
terrorism. Elaborating on these themes in an October 7 speech
in Cincinnati, Bush warned,
While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from
Iraq stands alone—because it gathers the most serious
dangers of our age in one place. Iraqʼs weapons of mass
destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has
already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people.
This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has
invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck
other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting
hostility toward the United States. By its past and present
actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless
nature of its regime, Iraq is unique.
September 11 did not create the threat of Saddam Hussein,
The War over Iraq 146 The War over Iraq 147The War over Iraq 146
or even make the imperative of dealing with the threat more
urgent. Rather, it dramatized a threat that was there all along.
Before that day, the president reminded Americans, “we had
only hints of Al Qaedaʼs plans and designs.” But now, in Iraq,
“we see a threat whose outlines are far more clearly defined, and
whose consequences could be far more deadly. . . . Understand-
ing the threats of our time, knowing the designs and deceptions
of the Iraqi regime, we have every reason to assume the worst,
and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occur-
ring.” Nor, as the president has made clear, will Americaʼs duty
be discharged when Saddam is toppled, or even when Iraq
subsequently has a decent government. The Bush Doctrine has
regime change in Iraq as its focal point, but it provides guidance
and a mission for American foreign policy as a whole.
Thus, on June 1, 2002, in an address at West Point, Bush
elaborated on themes he had in the past applied primarily to
Iraq, spelling out what would henceforth be known as the Bush
Doctrine. First, he said that the United States would no longer
rely solely on “Cold-War doctrines of containment and deter-
rence.” Instead, it would reserve the right to preempt threats,
The War over Iraq 146 The War over Iraq 147The War over Iraq 147
to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront
the worst threats before they emerge.” Second, the United States
would actively promote its principles abroad, recognizing that
“the requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin
American and the entire Islamic world.” Finally, the United
States would do what was necessary to remain the worldʼs sole
superpower, or as the president put it, “America has, and intends
to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making
the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limit-
ing rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” Thus, just as
the particular events of the late 1940s yielded the broad com-
mitment that guided America through the Cold War, so have
September 11 and the threat from Iraq combined to produce a
national security doctrine that responds to the broader dangers
of the new century. The Bush Doctrine articulates an affirmative
vision of American leadership, one that is neither reactive to nor
dependent on the emergence of a specific threat.
In late September 2002, the White House published “The
National Security Strategy of the United States,” a document
that codified the three principles President Bush had spelled out
The War over Iraq 148 The War over Iraq 149The War over Iraq 148 at West Point: preemption, regime change and American leader-
ship. The publication of this document inaugurated a new era,
a shift in perception about Americaʼs global role comparable to
the advent of the containment doctrine a half-century earlier. It
transformed the war from a police action to round up the perpe-
trators of September 11 into a campaign to uproot tyranny and
export democracy. It also transformed the tenets of a distinctly
American internationalism into the official policy of the U.S.
government.
The Bush national security strategy bears little resemblance
to strategy documents produced by the Clinton administration or,
for that matter, by Bushʼs father. Harry Truman or Ronald Rea-
gan, on the other hand, would have found this robust approach
to the international scene familiar. The Bush document speaks
bluntly about the imperative of American leadership, stating
that we must “dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a
military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power
of the United States.” At the same time, it defends American
primacy on moral grounds:
In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not
The War over Iraq 148 The War over Iraq 149The War over Iraq 149
use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek
instead to create a balance of power that favors human
freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies
can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of
political and economic liberty. By making the world safer,
we allow the people of the world to make their own lives
better.
Yet if the Bush Doctrine is unequivocal in its commitment
to promoting democracy, it is also grounded in the reality of
self-interest. “To forestall or prevent . . . hostile acts from our
adversaries,” it adds, “the United States will, if necessary, act
preemptively.” There is no contradiction here. The emphasis
on preemption derives from the recognition that the world has
grown too small and too dangerous to allow, in some instances,
the luxury of mere containment. And preemption against dicta-
tors developing weapons of mass destruction clearly serves the
interest of democracies. The national security strategy seeks to
minimize the gap between ideals and interests, between moral-
ity and power. It gathers in one place all the major strands of a
The War over Iraq 150 The War over Iraq 151The War over Iraq 150
distinctly American internationalism.
The War over Iraq 150 The War over Iraq 151The War over Iraq 151
America’s Mission SEVEN
From Deterrence to Preemption
T he first element of the Bush Doctrine is a willingness
to acknowledge that under certain circumstances,
preemptive action will be required. Deterrence and
containment, according to the new National Security Strategy,
no longer suffice: “Given the goals of rogue states and terror-
ists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture
as we have in the past.” Instead, America must identify and
destroy the threat posed by those who would do us harm “before
it reaches our borders.” Why? Because of what President Bush
at West Point described as a world standing at “the crossroads
of radicalism and technology,” where “weak states and small
groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations.”
Those crossroads meet most clearly in Iraq.
Some critics of the Bush Doctrine argue that contain-
ment—resting ultimately on deterrence—is a more measured
alternative to preemption. Iraq is contained in a geopolitical
The War over Iraq 152 The War over Iraq 153The War over Iraq 152
“box,” these critics argue, so why run the risk of preemption and
war? Before examining this argument, we would do well to cast
a glance backward, for this is hardly the first time we have heard
the argument. Prior to Operation Desert Storm, the claim that
containment would defang Saddam was a commonplace among
many in the Democratic Party. In 1990, Senator Tom Harkin
expressed surprise that “there are some even today who say
that Saddam has already won. Quite to the contrary, he is losing
every day. . . . Do we want to wait a year and a half, perhaps, for
sanctions to really have their effect, or to perhaps lose 20,000
American lives in a war that would take place early this year?”
Echoing this assessment, former Carter national security advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “we should stay on course applying
the policy of punitive containment. This policy is working. Iraq
has been deterred, ostracized and punished.” Today, Madeleine
Albright insists that U.N. resolutions “keep Iraq in its box,”
while Senator Carl Levin claims, “Containment is so far work-
ing.” Not to be outdone, Jimmy Carter assures us that “there is
no current danger to the United States from Baghdad.”
The question is, having been so wrong before, are the lib-
The War over Iraq 152 The War over Iraq 153The War over Iraq 153
eral proponents of containment any more right now? Hardly.
The notion that “containment is working” is wishful. Whereas
in 1999, Iraq smuggled only about $350 million worth of oil
out of the country, today Saddam accrues about $3 billion a
year in illicit oil exports. To Syria alone, Baghdad is smuggling
something like 200,000 barrels of oil per day. It is also skim-
ming money from the U.N.ʼs oil-for-food program, requiring
surcharges for every barrel of oil sold, which has netted it hun-
dreds of millions of dollars. Commercial airliners routinely flout
the embargo against Iraq; country after country has resumed dip-
lomatic relations with Baghdad; Chinese, Russian and French
firms have raced to sign contracts with Saddam; and Arab
leaders, from former foes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to the
members of the Arab League, have warmly re-embraced him.
The Iraqi military, too, has improved its fortunes—acquir-
ing spare parts and other prohibited items from countries like
China and Serbia; improving its ability to target allied aircraft;
challenging American warplanes on a regular basis; and periodi-
cally making feints toward the Kuwaiti border. More important,
according to former weapons inspectors, Western intelligence
The War over Iraq 154 The War over Iraq 155The War over Iraq 154
agencies and defectors, Saddam has kept alive his program to
develop weapons of mass destruction. Noting that as many as
twenty Scud missiles remain unaccounted for, former chief
weapons inspector Richard Butler warns that Iraq “remains at
work” on its WMD program, and that “containment is not the
answer.” The former head of Iraqʼs nuclear programs, Khidir
Hamza, adds that the window of opportunity to halt Saddamʼs
WMD efforts “is closing down possibly within the next 2–3
years.” Vice President Cheney summarizes the case of those
who insist that containment is working: “The argument comes
down to this: Yes, Saddam is as dangerous as we say he is. We
just need to let him get stronger before we do anything about
it.”
There are two possible futures. One of them, says former
weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, “is an Iraq carried forward
under this regime with the potential of weapons of mass destruc-
tion, with leverage of four or five million barrels a day of oil
production, with its track record, with its pattern of aggression,
with its pattern of dominating not just its own people but its
neighbors.” The other alternative, Duelfer continues, “is a
The War over Iraq 154 The War over Iraq 155The War over Iraq 155
positive Iraq, an Iraq under a government that behaves more by
international norms” and which could be “the engine of develop-
ment in the Middle East.” That second alternative, needless to
say, is impossible so long as Saddam rules over Iraq.
Of course, not all of the opposition to invading Iraq comes
from the left. In the fall of 2002, several prominent officials who
had served George Herbert Walker Bush took to the op-ed pages
and airwaves in full cry against military action. For the most
part, their arguments were based on deterrence—the idea that
Americaʼs vast arsenal could keep Saddam from ever resorting
to his own. “Threatening to use [his] weapons for blackmail—
much less their actual use,” Brent Scowcroft wrote in the Wall
Street Journal, “would open him and his entire regime to a dev-
astating response by the U.S. While Saddam is thoroughly evil,
he is above all a power-hungry survivor.” Or as conservative
columnist Steve Chapman argued, “We donʼt have to wonder
if he can be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction.
He already has been.”
The realist argument for deterrence is weak. The logic of
deterrence—specifically, the threat of massive retaliation—func-
The War over Iraq 156 The War over Iraq 157The War over Iraq 156
tioned as intended during the Cold War. Then, the absolute cer-
tainty that the United States and the Soviet Union could destroy
one another at the push of a button finally prevented either from
doing so. The entire framework, however, always depended on
the assumption that Soviet leaders were fundamentally rational
actors, and conservative ones at that. And, indeed, however
brutal they may have been, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gor-
bachev did not wish to see their country laid waste in a nuclear
exchange. Can deterrence, depending as it does on an adversary
who maintains some semblance of sanity, work with Saddam?
The fact is that Saddam has revealed himself to be a patho-
logical risk-taker. Theories of deterrence notwithstanding, he
attacked Iran under the misguided belief that its regime would
quickly collapse; attacked Israel under the mistaken assump-
tion that doing so would collapse Arab support for the Ameri-
can-led coalition; and attacked Kuwait because he calculated
that the United States would not respond. Equally important,
he lives in a vacuum, depending on information from yes-men
who share his delusions. The U.S. Air Forceʼs official study of
Desert Storm, The Gulf War Air Power Survey, described his
The War over Iraq 156 The War over Iraq 157The War over Iraq 157
calculations this way: “Iraqi arrogance—which afflicted both
Saddam and his generals—and which manifested itself in a pre-
disposition to inflate Iraqi capabilities and underestimate those
of their enemies, had a significant impact on his assessment of
the balance of forces.”
Further clouding his ability to see clearly is his faith in
soothsayers, who informed his every move during the Gulf War,
his lack of credible information about U.S. intentions, his track
record of heedless risk-taking, and most of all, his supreme irra-
tionality. “If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people,
until we think we know what they know,” Walter Lippmann
once observed, “then in order to do justice we have to appraise
not only the information which has been at their disposal, but
the minds through which they have filtered it.” To deter Saddam
effectively, then, we must understand the mind through which
he filters his information. As an effective framework for deter-
rence, that is a shaky foundation indeed.
Brent Scowcroft may think that Saddam will never employ
his deadly arsenal. But before we send the former national secu-
rity advisor to hammer out an arms control agreement with Sad-
The War over Iraq 158 The War over Iraq 159The War over Iraq 158
dam, Scowcroft needs to explain much more convincingly how
weapons of mass destruction transform Third World dictators
into rational-choice theorists. Writing of “the ʻpsychological ̓
element in deterrence, on which all else depends,” Jonathan
Schell, dean of nuclear abolitionists, notes that a leaderʼs “state
of mind—his self-interest, his sanity, his prudence, his self-
control, his clear-sightedness—is the real foundation of his
countryʼs and everyone elseʼs survival. In short, he must decide
that the world he lives in is not one in which aggression pays
off.” Sanity, prudence and self-control, needless to say, are not
the first qualities that leap to mind when you think of Saddam
Hussein.
In any case, it makes perfect sense for Saddam to amass
a vast arsenal if his aim is to dominate his region and deter the
United States. Today we may attack Iraq with minimal risk
because Saddam has yet to acquire a nuclear bomb. Once he
does, the equation changes. Then it is we who will be deterred.
For evidence of this proposition, we need look no further than
North Korea. In the aftermath of that countryʼs announcement
that it did indeed possess nuclear material, the Washington
The War over Iraq 158 The War over Iraq 159The War over Iraq 159
Postʼs Mary McGrory wondered “why it is necessary for us
to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq while North Korea gets the
striped-pants treatment.” The answer is obvious: Iraq does not
yet have the bomb. If and when it does, it will, like North Korea,
acquire the ability to “blackmail” or deter the United States,
and also will get “striped-pants treatment.” Thus, Iraq s̓ drive to
build a bomb is entirely logical. Armed with nuclear weapons,
a rational Saddam could just as easily deter us from responding
to his provocations as an irrational Saddam. He could then com-
mit aggression or engage in regional blackmail and believe that
the United States—fearing loss of lives by its allies or even by
itself—would be deterred from acting against him. Hence, the
unpalatable choice offered by advocates of deterrence: Assume
Saddam is a madman and wait until he assembles the tools of
aggression, or assume he is rational and wait until he assembles
the tools of aggression.
What foreign policy analysts wedded to the old verities
about deterrence seem to forget is that the world has changed
since the Cold War, and along with it the nature of the threats
facing the United States. Aside from the death of Soviet commu-
The War over Iraq 160 The War over Iraq 161The War over Iraq 160
nism, the main thing that has changed is that more countries pos-
sess weapons of mass destruction and means to deliver them. In
the past few years alone, India and Pakistan have set off a com-
bined total of twelve atomic explosions; Pakistan, Iran, North
Korea and China have test-launched ballistic missiles; Iraq,
Syria and Libya have ongoing missile programs; and China,
Russia and North Korea have continued to export ballistic mis-
sile technology throughout the Middle East. U.S. policymakers
have been slow to recognize the danger. As late as 1998, Joint
Chiefs chairman Henry Shelton averred that “the intelligence
community can provide the necessary warning” if one of these
countries is developing “an ICBM threat to the United States.”
But just a week after Sheltonʼs pronouncement—and with no
warning whatsoever from the intelligence community—North
Korea demonstrated its intercontinental ballistic missile capabil-
ity by launching a three-stage rocket over Japan. Intelligence
analysts promptly dropped their nonchalance. “The probability
that a missile armed with weapons of mass destruction would
be used against U.S. forces or interests,” a CIA-sponsored study
asserted in 2000, “is higher today than during most of the Cold
The War over Iraq 160 The War over Iraq 161The War over Iraq 161
War and will continue to grow.”
Not all of these countries, of course, are ruled by unstable
tyrants like Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the problem with deter-
rence calculations in an era of proliferation derives less from
the nature of a given regime than from the nature of prolifera-
tion itself. If deterrence, as Henry Kissinger has written, was
“barely plausible when there was only one nuclear opponent,”
it is certainly less so today. That is because, in an era of prolif-
eration, the numbers have become much less favorable to the
United States. Instead of betting that one adversary will think
reasonably, we are now pinning our survival on the hope that six
or seven will. And that figure accounts only for adversaries with
return addresses. Many of Americaʼs most dangerous foes are,
like Al Qaeda, nonstate actors. Because these shadowy terror
networks have no home, it is virtually impossible to deter them.
And it is also virtually impossible to deter states that would
use terrorist groups as “cutouts” to deliver weapons. All of this
is to say nothing of the questionable morality of voluntarily
embracing a doctrine of mutual destruction, in which we place
our civilians, and those of hostile regimes, at risk of annihila-
The War over Iraq 162 The War over Iraq 163The War over Iraq 162
tion. In any case, as September 11 should have taught us, many
of our adversaries are bent on suicide and thus, by definition,
are undeterrable.
If containment and deterrence no longer suffice, then
America clearly needs a new roadmap. Where containment
and deterrence fail—as with sociopathic dictators like Saddam
and terror groups like Al Qaeda—an obvious way for the United
States to safeguard its citizens is through preemption. Unfor-
tunately, much of the debate swirling around the concept has
obscured more than it has clarified. To begin with, preemption
is not a novel aspect of U.S. strategy. On the contrary, the threat
and possibility of preemption have been a part of American
strategy for over a century. Further, its meaning is simple and
clear. Preemption means striking first. And, as President Bush
has explained repeatedly, avoiding another September 11 may,
on rare occasions, require the United States to do exactly that.
But only rarely. Lost in the media swirl over preemption is the
fact that it occupies a limited place in the Bush national secu-
rity strategy. The administration has emphasized repeatedly that
preemption applies only “in a small number of cases” where,
The War over Iraq 162 The War over Iraq 163The War over Iraq 163
as Colin Powell says, “there is a threat that doesnʼt respond the
way older threats did.”
The presidentʼs critics argue that by elevating preemption
from an unspoken possibility to an official policy, the president
violates both the precepts of international law and decades of
American military strategy. “Preemption . . . runs completely
against U.S. political and strategic culture,” defense expert
Frank Hoffman wrote last year in an essay published by the
left-leaning Center for Defense Information. For his part, former
House Republican majority leader Dick Armey says preemption
“would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation
or what we should be as a nation.” Not only that, but according
to Al Gore, “What this doctrine does it to destroy the goal of a
world in which states consider themselves subject to law.”
But these critics of the Bush Doctrine have things back-
ward. In international law, in international practice and in
American history, there is ample precedent for the doctrine of
preemption. Whether the term is “preventive attack,” “antici-
patory self-defense” or simply “preemption,” nations have
employed some form of this practice for centuries. The origins
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of this concept date back to the father of international law, Hugo
Grotius, who in the seventeenth century wrote, “It be lawful to
kill him who is preparing to kill.” In a similar vein, Thomas
More asserted, “If any foreign prince takes up arms and pre-
pares to invade their land, they immediately attack him in full
force outside their own borders.” In America, the legitimacy
of preemption was defended by Secretary of State Elihu Root,
a founder of the American Society of International Law, who
proclaimed in 1914 “the right of every sovereign state to protect
itself by preventing a condition of affairs in which it will be too
late to protect itself.”
Today, indeed, the legal basis for preemption has become
so broad that it permits acts of anticipatory self-defense well
before an attack becomes imminent. As the political scientist
Richard Regan puts it in his book Just War,
Nor need a would-be victim nation wait until a would-be
aggressor nation is immediately poised to attack before
the would-be victim nation has just cause to strike pre-
emptively against the would-be aggressor. . . . Nor need a
would-be victim nation wait until a would-be aggressor
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nation has stockpiled nuclear or chemical weapons before
the potential victim nation has just cause to strike plants
producing such weapons of destruction.
As applied to Iraq, the United States need not even invoke a
claim of preemption. After all, by attacking Iraq it would merely
be enforcing a stack of already existing U.N. resolutions that
Saddam has ignored or violated. In this sense, an invasion of
Iraq would do more to sustain international law than to erode
it.
Of course, an important measure of international law is the
record of actual state practice. And since the U.N. Charter was
adopted, numerous states have practiced preemption. Not the
least of these has been the United States. One case in particular
has in recent months drawn the attention of numerous commen-
tators and reportedly the president. During the Cuban missile
crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy seriously contem-
plated using air strikes to destroy missile sites erected in Cuba
by the Soviets. Recognizing that weapons of mass destruction
had blurred the distinction between immediate and looming
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threats, Kennedy said,
We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing
of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nationʼs
security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons
are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that
any substantially increased possibility of their use or any
sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded
as a definite threat to peace.
In this respect, Bush s̓ emphasis on the new danger posed by the
intersection of radicalism and technology echoes Kennedy forty
years before. The danger requires a greater willingness to con-
sider preemption against one s̓ enemies. As Henry Kissinger has
put it, in the twenty-first century, “Potential victims cannot wait
until the threat has been implemented. Preemption is inherent in
the technology and ideology of the 21st century system.”
Forty years ago, following extensive debate among his
advisors, the president rejected advice to strike Castro. But he
did engage in another form of preemption: a military blockade
of Cuba to prevent the actual delivery of the Soviet missiles.
While those missiles surely would have threatened the United
The War over Iraq 166 The War over Iraq 167The War over Iraq 167
States, they did not present a threat of imminent attack. None-
theless, the United States acted to preempt their activation. Two
decades later, in Grenada and Panama, Washington went further
under the authority of preemption. In the first case, President
Reagan cited the safety of American medical students in Gre-
nada to justify the subsequent U.S. invasion; but he also made
clear that his primary aim was to rid the island of growing
Soviet influence. In a similar vein, President Bush justified the
1989 U.S. invasion of Panama as a response to threats against
American lives and property; but administration officials openly
conceded that the true aim was to prevent an unstable dictator
from seizing control of the Panama Canal.
Oddly enough, given the animus toward the Bush Doctrine,
it was the Clinton administration that first drew the link between
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the need
to take preemptive action against them. In December 1993,
Defense Secretary Les Aspin launched a counterproliferation
program that included initiatives to prevent WMD attacks by,
among other things, developing preemptive weapons that could
penetrate underground bunkers to destroy chemical and biologi-
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cal arsenals. Less than a year later, Aspinʼs successor, William
Perry, threatened preemptive action to destroy North Koreaʼs
growing nuclear capability. In casting preemption as a form
of self-defense, both of these attempts to eliminate emerging
WMD arsenals anticipated the Bush Doctrine. But the Clinton
team took preemption a step further.
“Preemption as intervention, as perhaps we should have
[had] in the case of Rwanda or Kosovo, is when the threat to the
United States or our allies is not imminent,” strategist Robert
Killebrew claims. “The more serious cases involve preemption
as protection, when a Saddam Hussein gets his hand on an
arsenal of missiles that deliver WMD at regional or interconti-
nental range.” A distinction between acts to preempt imminent
threats and acts to preempt less imminent ones is important. In
places like Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, the Clinton administration
used force to preempt harm to those nations ̓citizens and their
neighbors when there was no direct threat to the United States.
The Democratic Party even enshrined a version of this kind of
preemptive intervention in its 2000 platform. “Forward engage-
ment,” it declared, “means addressing problems early in their
The War over Iraq 168 The War over Iraq 169The War over Iraq 169
development before they become crises, addressing them as
close to the source of the problem as possible, and having the
forces and the resources to deal with these threats as soon after
their emergence as possible.” By the end of the 1990s, U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan could look back and applaud “the
developing norm in favour of intervention to protect civilians
from wholesale slaughter.”
So in important ways, the Bush administration is following
in the footsteps of its predecessor. “What you are seeing in this
administration is the emergence of a new principle or body of
ideas . . . about what you might call the limits of sovereignty,”
Bush official Richard Haass said in an interview with the New
Yorker.
Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre
your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in
any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations,
then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sover-
eignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own
territory. Other governments, including the United States,
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gain the right to intervene.
Outside the United States, too, preemption is a well-known
tool. Perhaps the most famous—and successful—example of
its use occurred in 1981, when the Israeli air force struck Iraqʼs
Osirak nuclear plant. This operation, needless to say, was not
authorized by the United Nations. In fact, the U.N., along with
the United States and Great Britain, condemned it. “Israelʼs
sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was
an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression,” declared
the New York Times. That, of course, did not make the Israeli
strike any less wise or just. Had Israel not destroyed the reactor,
Saddam would have had a nuclear capability well before the
Gulf War—a fact recognized by, among others, Vice President
Dick Cheney, who thanked Israel in the aftermath of that war,
and today hails the strike as a template for American action. The
Israeli announcement of the raid described its purpose simply:
“We under no circumstances will allow an enemy to develop
against our people weapons of mass destruction.” The rationale,
in other words, was identical to the one currently employed by
the United States. “Historyʼs judgment should inform our own
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judgment today,” says former Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. “Did Israel launch that preemptive strike because
Saddam had committed a specific act of terror against us? Did
we coordinate our actions with the international community?
Did we condition that operation on the approval of the United
Nations? No, Israel acted alone because we understood that a
nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein would place our very survival
at risk.” Osirak, indeed, stands as the very model for preemptive
action, undertaken in the face of a clear, though hardly immi-
nent, threat and despite howls of international protest.
O ne of the virtues of preemptive action, then, is that it is
often less costly than the alternative. “History is littered
with cases of inaction that led to very grave consequences for
the world,” Condoleezza Rice has said. “We just have to look
back and ask how many dictators who ended up being a tremen-
dous global threat and killing thousands and, indeed, millions of
people, should we have stopped in their tracks.” But for many,
preemption remains taboo. It is primarily a unilateral tactic, and
for some liberals, that itself disqualifies it as a foreign policy
The War over Iraq 172 The War over Iraq 173The War over Iraq 172
tool. “I believe any action in Iraq at this time, without allied
support, without United Nations support . . . ,” Senator Dianne
Feinstein says, “would be both morally wrong and politically
mistaken.” Senate majority leader Tom Daschle cautions that
unilateral action, which he says he would never support, could
have “very, very dire consequences.” In buttressing their case
against such action, liberals can point to the sentiments of the
international community. From the Arab world, Jordanʼs King
Abdullah says, “In all the years I have seen in the international
community, everybody is saying this is a bad idea.” Staking out
his own countryʼs opposition, Germanyʼs Gerhard Schroeder
pledges flatly that “Germany will not participate” in U.S.-led
military action against Iraq because “we need more peace, not
more war.” In Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chretien also sees
no particular need to follow Americaʼs lead. Instead, “we have
to follow the United Nations.”
In a narrow sense, the advocates of multilateral action have
a point. The United States should prefer to act in concert with
other states. Doing so would not only confer broader legitimacy
upon America s̓ war aims, but also make those aims much easier
The War over Iraq 172 The War over Iraq 173The War over Iraq 173
to achieve—if not militarily, at least financially and politically.
But must multilateral approval be the precondition for American
action? Should the United States never act unilaterally?
In this instance the demand may prove unnecessary. Presi-
dent Bush sought and received United Nations approval—in
the form of a unanimous Security Council vote—for a renewed
campaign to disarm Saddam. Moreover, the Iraqi dictator is
already in defiance of an entire catalogue of U.N. resolutions,
which provide the United States with more than enough legal
basis for punitive action. But even had the U.N. declined to lend
its initial imprimatur to Bushʼs policy, and even if it fails to do
so if and when the United States returns to the Security Coun-
cil, Bush would hardly be acting without precedent if he acted
unilaterally against Saddam. After all, President Clinton resorted
to force without U.N. approval on several occasions, each time
receiving the support of Daschle and his fellow Democrats.
In 1998, for instance, France and Russia refused to allow the
U.N. Security Council to authorize military action against Iraq
in response to its obstruction of weapons inspections, so the
United States acted without new U.N. authorization. Nor was
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the United States deterred when, the following year, the Security
Council refused to support a resolution calling for action to halt
Serb depredations in Kosovo. In the Balkans, America “faced
a simple choice,” recalls Clintonʼs Kosovo point man, Richard
Holbrooke: “Act without the Security Council, or donʼt act at
all.” Again, the United States chose action over inaction.
The reason it did so was simple. The U.N. secretary general
at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had things exactly wrong
when he predicted a decade ago that the United Nations “may
emerge as greater than the sum of its parts.” Alas, whether
standing by impassively during the mass slaughters in Bosnia
and Rwanda or quietly tolerating Saddamʼs flouting of its own
resolutions, the U.N. has emerged as considerably less than the
sum of its parts. Or as one of Britainʼs former ambassadors to
the U.N. put it, “There is nothing wrong with the Charter, only
with the members.”
It is exceedingly strange to view the United Nations as a
higher moral authority than the United States. The U.N., after
all, is simply a collection of sovereign states. The organization
makes no distinctions based on political systems; a tyranny is
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as welcome as a democracy. And rather than being transformed
by the U.N., these tyrannies have nearly transformed it—into
an arena to pursue their agendas and propagandize their griev-
ances. Moreover, in matters of war and peace, the only members
of the United Nations that count are those who sit on the Secu-
rity Council. Among its permanent members—China, Russia,
Britain, the United States and France—only three qualify as
mature democracies. And even they use the U.N. for their own
geopolitical ends. In the case of France, for example, those ends
often involve little more than obstructing the United States, an
exercise often involving hypocrisy as well as malice. “In fact,
even as [Prime Minister] Chirac was proclaiming the sanctity of
the United Nations ̓authority over war-making,” the Washington
Post noted during the recent debate over weapons inspections,
“some 1,000 French troops were intervening unilaterally to
protect French interests in Ivory Coast.”
That is doubly the case with respect to Iraq, where differ-
ent countries have their own reasons for being less than resolute
in the face of evil. “France and Russia have turned the United
Nations into a stage from which to pursue naked self-interest,”
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notes Newsweekʼs Fareed Zakaria. “They have used multilat-
eralism as a way to further unilateral policies.” Russia, which
according to the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Alexander
Saltanov, has signed billions of dollars of contracts with Iraq
in recent years, has a longstanding pecuniary interest in Sad-
damʼs well-being. China, which has complained repeatedly of
Americaʼs violations of Iraqi sovereignty, has clung for years
(as it did in Kosovo) to the self-serving argument that a nation
should be able to do as it pleases within its own borders. The
Arab states, whose Arab League warned that U.S. action against
Iraq would “open the gates of hell in the Middle East,” fear the
popular anger a military strike could unleash—and fear even
more that it might be turned against the other governments of
the region, not one of which qualifies as a democracy. As for the
Europeans, who furnished a good portion of Saddamʼs deadly
inventory (France supplying nuclear technology, Germany sup-
plying chemical agents), they seem more eager to deflate what
the French like to call America s̓ “hyperpower” than to confront
Iraqʼs evil.
When Europeans insist that the United States defer to the
The War over Iraq 176 The War over Iraq 177The War over Iraq 177
consensus of the “world community,” they are practicing a form
of power politics dressed up as international morality. It is only
at the United Nations that they can wield the influence they
once wielded as individual nations. An American attack on Iraq,
needless to say, diminishes that power. But instead of merely
carping about American “hegemony,” the Europeans could boost
their defense budgets and take an active hand in insuring world
stability. Instead, they spend on social programs and allow the
United States to guarantee their security, and then condemn their
American cousin for being too aggressive.
The obsession with building an international consensus for
action against Iraq also confuses means and ends. A coalition
so broad that its effect is to hamper the United States from car-
rying out this mission is not a coalition worth having. Because
different countries bring different sensitivities and demands to
multilateral undertakings, the broader the coalition becomes,
the narrower Americaʼs freedom to maneuver. And for what
would we be sacrificing that freedom? So France can continue
to do business with Saddam? So the debt that Saddam has rung
up with the Russians will be paid? Because the Saudis fear the
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emergence of a democracy on their border? So that Syria and
other dictatorships can veto American action?
A decade ago, the first Bush administration assembled a
multilateral coalition to go to war against Iraq. But it did so
armed with a unilateral determination to act, with or without a
“coalition of the willing” at Americaʼs side. Contrast this with
President Clintonʼs feeble 1993 attempt to assemble a coali-
tion for action in Bosnia. Rather than lead, Clinton permitted
himself to be led—dispatching Warren Christopher to “consult”
with Americaʼs European allies. When those allies refused their
support, Clinton opted to avert his gaze as the slaughter in the
Balkans continued.
To the most committed advocates of multilateralism, how-
ever, such drawbacks are precisely the point. Their preference
for multilateralism responds to multiple needs, but most of them
have nothing to do with national security. Invoking the author-
ity of organizations like the U.N. comforts the sensibilities of
those who have distaste for things military but find themselves
wanting to “do something.” It testifies to their virtue and good
intentions. It offers assurance that U.S. military power, of which
The War over Iraq 178 The War over Iraq 179The War over Iraq 179
they remain suspicious, serves not only a national interest but
the interests of all humanity. Best of all, from this point of view,
multilateralism can inhibit the use of that power, which, in the
case of Iraq, many liberals seem determined to do.
Many on the left have made the calculation that between
Saddam Husseinʼs Iraq and George Bushʼs America, the latter
presents the greater threat to world order. Not a few liberals
have made the mistake of, in Salman Rushdieʼs words, “being
so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Sad-
dam Hussein.” The impulse is nothing new. During the war in
Kosovo, the liberal writer David Rieff denounced “the utopian
nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia
and the mass deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen,
however marginally, the hegemony of the United States.” Where
all this heads has been described well by essayist Christopher
Hitchens: “Instead of internationalism, we find among the left
now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism.”
If the goal is to subordinate American power to the inhibi-
tions of global consensus, U.N.-sanctioned multilateralism in
theory produces isolationism in practice. Unlike the homegrown
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isolationists of the 1930s, who argued that America was too
good for the world, the multilateralists of today argue in effect
that the world is too good for America, and that only through
the entanglements of a web of international constraints can
America s̓ destructive impulses be contained. Harvard professor
Stanley Hoffman, for example, recommends that in Iraqʼs case
a coalition would be “a constructive source of restraint.” Sum-
marizing the logic of Hoffmanʼs argument, columnist Charles
Krauthammer notes that “multilateralism is the isolationism of
the internationalist.” The impulse owes entirely to the lingering
suspicion that American self-interest and the interests of human-
ity are inherently incompatible.
For such critics, action in concert with, and on behalf of,
the international community—or strictly in self-defense, as in
Afghanistan—passes the virtue test. But action against Iraq fits
none of these criteria. “The crucial difference between the Dem-
ocratic establishmentʼs support for interventions in Kosovo and
Bosnia,” elaborates the internationalist Democrat Will Marshall,
“was that they were cloaked in disinterestedness, whereas in
Iraq, Americaʼs interests are directly threatened.” And that, for
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many, makes intervention impossible. Anthony Lewis, Michael
Walzer and other writers who oppose the use of force against
Iraq vocally supported U.S. efforts in Kosovo because, as Wal-
zer approvingly observed, “obviously, U.S. national security is
not at stake.” And where many on the right declined to support
the air campaign in the Balkans because they (wrongly) failed to
discern a national interest, the endorsement of liberal Democrats
was based precisely on what they claimed to be the absence of
such an interest.
There is, of course, a powerful moral and humanitarian
argument for regime change in Iraq. But you can read all of the
arguments against an invasion put forward by liberals who once
could be relied on to offer moral arguments, and only seldom
will you find any mention of this. The irony is that what passes
for heightened moral awareness among opponents of action on
the left (and right) actually amounts to moral evasion. After all,
there is nothing reactionary about wanting to rid the world of
a dictator who gasses his own people, invades his neighbors,
develops weapons of mass destruction, and flouts an entire
catalogue of U.N. resolutions. As the New Republic has edito-
The War over Iraq 182 The War over Iraq 183The War over Iraq 182
rialized, “the important question is not whether other countries
agree with the United States but whether those countries are
right.” In the case of Iraq, they are not.
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EIGHT
From Containment to Regime Change
T he second tenet of the Bush Doctrine is regime
change—that is, the recognition that the United
States cannot really coexist peacefully with gov-
ernments that seek to develop weapons of mass destruction,
threaten their neighbors and brutalize their own citizens. The
Bush Doctrine reserves the right to bring about—whether
through diplomatic or military means—the demise of these
regimes.
As in the case of preemption, critics of regime change
denounce the tactic as evidence of “unilateralism,” “imperial-
ism” and “hubris.” But is it really so wrong to topple nuclear-
armed despots? The answer depends substantially on what
comes next. Here the Bush Doctrine is specific: the ultimate
goal of regime change is liberal democracy. Thus, the national
security strategy commits the United States to “champion the
cause of human dignity and oppose those who resist it” by creat-
ing “a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions
The War over Iraq 184 The War over Iraq 185The War over Iraq 184
in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves
the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.”
Achieving liberal democracy in Iraq is a principal objective of
the Bush administrationʼs campaign against Saddam. “Liberty
for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic
goal,” the president said in his Cincinnati address. Why a stra-
tegic goal? “Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and
conquest,” Bush explained, “and open societies do not threaten
the world with mass murder.” The assertion is more than a turn
of phrase. It is a fact.
Of course, very few opinion makers explicitly defend Sad-
dam Hussein, or even question the desirability of regime change
in Iraq. But skeptics do challenge the feasibility of removing
Saddam. Borrowing a page from the pre–Desert Storm script,
some of Bushʼs critics—in this case, mostly narrow realists—
have revived the notion that war will “destabilize” Iraq and
possibly the entire region. Thus, Colin Powellʼs warning of a
decade ago—“It would not contribute to the stability we want
in the Middle East to have Iraq fragmented into separate Sunni,
Shia, and Kurd political entities”—has once more returned to
The War over Iraq 184 The War over Iraq 185The War over Iraq 185
favor. Better to keep Iraq together than to confront instability,
the argument goes, even if the only glue available happens to
be Saddam Hussein. Brent Scowcroft warns that in the event
of an invasion, “Dire consequences would be the effect in the
region.” Among these would be “an explosion of outrage against
us” and a threat to “stability and security in a vital region of the
world.” Scowcroftʼs colleague in the first Bush administration,
Lawrence Eagleburger, warns similarly that the United States
will become entangled in a “morass” and wonders “how we are
going to deal with all of the consequences that come thereafter.”
Iraq s̓ uncertain future, as opposed to its totalitarian present, has
become the principle concern of many realists. “What comes
after a military invasion?” Senator Chuck Hagel would like to
know. “Who rules Iraq? Does the United States really want to
be in Baghdad, trying to police Baghdad for twenty or thirty
years?”
Behind this hand-wringing lurks a narrow realpolitik,
brought to us by the same Metternichs who, in the name of
“stability,” insisted that we not upset the Iraqi order a decade
ago. For realists like Scowcroft, the preference for order over
The War over Iraq 186 The War over Iraq 187The War over Iraq 186
liberty—whether in the Soviet Union, China or Yugoslavia—is
nothing new. But the tendency to confuse international stability
with the longevity of anti-American dictatorships finds its pur-
est expression in Iraq. Yet is it really necessary to point out that
Saddam s̓ Iraq is not the Concert of Europe? Saddam s̓ regime is
a vicious dictatorship that, through aggression abroad and perse-
cution at home, has brought to the region exactly the instability
Scowcroft and others profess to fear. We have long ago passed
the threshold where the prospect of, say, a fragmented Iraq is
a greater evil than the persistence of Saddam Hussein. That
things might be worse without him is of course a possibility.
But given the status quo in Iraq, it is difficult to imagine how.
To uphold the stability of a government whose demise Iraqis
might be expected to cheer defies logic. Especially when, far
from destabilizing the region, the replacement of Saddam Hus-
sein would, over time, allow for greater stability.
Nevertheless, Powell and others have argued that if the
United States alienates central Iraq s̓ Sunnis, say, by overthrow-
ing Saddam, Iraq could be plunged into chaos. (During the war
in Afghanistan, Powell made the same point—wrongly, as it
The War over Iraq 186 The War over Iraq 187The War over Iraq 187
turned out—about overthrowing the ethnic Pashtuns who led the
Taliban.) But predictions of ethnic turmoil in Iraq are even more
questionable than they were in the case of Afghanistan. Unlike
the Taliban, Saddam has little support among any ethnic group,
Sunnis included, and the Iraqi opposition is itself a multiethnic
force. What has brought the Kurds and Shiites to the point of
open revolt is not so much disenchantment with the idea of an
Iraqi nation as the simple fact that the present Iraqi govern-
ment has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them. Iraq was a
multiethnic, multisectarian state before Saddam came to power,
and as Iraq scholar Phebe Marr points out, “the overwhelming
majority of the population, except possibly for a few Kurds, has
consistently shown a strong desire to keep the state together and
profit from its ample resources.” Echoing that assessment, the
executive director of the Iraq Foundation, Rend Rahim Francke,
says, “we will not have a civil war in Iraq. This is contrary to
Iraqi history, and Iraq has not had a history of communal conflict
as there has been in the Balkans or in Afghanistan. . . . Iraq will
not fall apart and will not be dismembered. The Kurds have
spared no words or effort in explaining and stressing they want
to remain part of Iraq. The Shiʼia, far from wishing to secede,
The War over Iraq 188 The War over Iraq 189The War over Iraq 188
see themselves as quintessential Iraqi patriots.”
If anything, one could argue that the aim of Iraqi unity may
run counter to the aim of Iraqi stability. “One way to reconcile
territorial integrity with political stability,” recommends Johns
Hopkins Universityʼs Michael Mandelbaum, “is with [a] com-
mitment to the postwar decentralization of governmental author-
ity.” Or, more precisely, make Iraq a federation. The concept is
hardly without precedent in Iraqi history. Prior to Baghdadʼs
independence from Britain, leading Iraqis endorsed the idea.
A central government in Baghdad would still control most of
the levers of Iraqi power, but each ethnic community would be
granted limited powers of self-government—and certainly the
freedom to speak their languages, celebrate their customs and
practice their religious beliefs.
More important than how exactly a post-Saddam Iraq
would be configured is the commitment of the United States
to play a major role in the country. The task will be made con-
siderably easier by Iraqʼs vast oil reserves. The moment that oil
begins flowing again, the burden of rebuilding Iraqʼs economy
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will lighten considerably. Moreover, the Gulf countries as well
as the principal consumers of Iraqi oil in Asia and Europe could
surely raise funds for this purpose. The prospect of sharing in
this revenue, which Saddam Hussein presently controls, also
offers a powerful reason for Iraqʼs different ethnic groups to
retain their allegiance to the state.
The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time.
Though U.N., European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan,
contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall
to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one esti-
mate, initially as many as 75,000 U.S. troops may be required
to police the warʼs aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As
other countries ̓forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy
and political system, that force could probably be drawn down
to several thousand soldiers after a year or two.
A fter Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occu-
pied, installing a decent and democratic government in
Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States.
But not according to some realists. Time columnist Michael
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Elliott scoffs, “The President looked forward to a day when
ʻthe people of Iraq ̓can join a ʻdemocratic Afghanistan and a
democratic Palestine, ̓inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim
world. . . . Yet there is a problem with Bushʼs vision: it will have
to be imposed from the outside.” In a similar vein, the Brooking
Institution s̓ Middle East analyst, Shibley Telhami, writes in the
New York Times that “Democracy cannot be imposed through
military forces, even if force is used successfully to oust anti-
democratic dictators.”
Really? What about Japan, Germany, Austria, Italy, Gre-
nada, the Dominican Republic and Panama? These are only
a few of the nations whose democratic systems were at first
“imposed” by American arms. Furthermore, Iraq, more perhaps
than any other nation in the region, is ripe for democracy. For
evidence, one need look no further than northern Iraq, where,
under an umbrella of American air patrols, the Iraqi opposition
already presides over a thriving democracy. Iraq possesses some
of the highest literacy rates in the region, an urbanized middle
class, and other demographic measures that typically conduce to
democracy. Indeed, the exile umbrella group, the Iraqi National
The War over Iraq 190 The War over Iraq 191The War over Iraq 191
Congress, is already working on the shape of Baghdad s̓ postwar
government. According to INC founding member Laith Kubba,
its principal aims will be to “create a constitution assembly with
a coherent agenda, hold a free and fair referendum on ratifica-
tion, and, ultimately seek power through the ballot box.” The
Bush administration, too, has been drawing up plans for a demo-
cratic Iraq—a nation represented, in the words of Vice President
Cheney, by “a government that is democratic and pluralistic . . .
where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are
recognized and protected.”
The establishment of such a state should have powerful
reverberations in the Arab world, where not one country qualifies
as a democracy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
for example, supports invading Iraq because “what the Arab
world desperately needs is a model that works—a progressive
Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure
and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization
around the region.” The vista that “the first Arab democracy,”
as Paul Wolfowitz puts it, could open up would be stunning. It
could “prove to be as large as anything that has happened in the
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Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” says Iraq
scholar Kanan Makiya.
Iraqʼs experience of liberal democratic rule in turn could
increase the pressure already being felt by Teheranʼs mullahs to
open that society. Iraq s̓ model will be eyed warily by Saudi Ara-
biaʼs theocrats to the south, where male unemployment stands
at 30 percent, population growth is rapid, and the populace is
restive for change. Meanwhile, Iraq could even replace Saudi
Arabia as the key American ally and source of oil in the region.
A democratic Iraq would also encourage the regionʼs already
liberalizing regimes—such as those in Qatar, Morocco and Jor-
dan—to continue on their paths toward democracy. Then, too, a
Baghdad under American supervision would surely improve its
relations with the region s̓ other democracies, Turkey and Israel.
Arguing exactly this point, Vice President Cheney predicts that
when Saddam falls, “the freedom-loving peoples of the region
will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting
peace.”
When speaking of democracy in the broader Muslim
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world, however, one encounters yet another, more serious
objection from critics of the Bush Doctrine—namely, that Islam
and democracy are inherently incompatible. Adam Garfinkle,
editor of the National Interest, writes that anything America
does is “unlikely to change the contemporary Arab view of
liberal democracy as an alien Western idea at a time when Arab
societies are struggling to cope with Western-wrought moder-
nity.” And, just as Colin Powell dismissed the idea of a “desert
democracy where people read The Federalist Papers along
with the Koran,” Middle East expert Graham Fuller scoffs at
the notion that modern liberal governance could take root in
the Islamic world “from imported Western modules of ʻinstant
democracy.ʼ”
As it happens, this line of reasoning mirrors exactly the
logic that U.S. scholars and policymakers applied to every
other formerly undemocratic region of the world. “I doubt that
democracy U.S.-style can be exported,” the Latin Americanist
Howard Wiarda argued in the 1980s. “I doubt that Latin America
wants it, or wants it all that much.” Thirty years earlier, Joseph
Grew, the State Departmentʼs chief Japan expert, had cautioned
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President Truman that “the best we can hope for is a constitu-
tional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in
Japan would never work.” At various points since World War
II, American policymakers have made the same point about
Germany, Russia, East Asia and South America. And now that
the tide of democracy has swept over each of these regions,
they are again making the same point about the one region that
it has yet to touch.
But is the Islamic world immune from the appeal of
democratization? There is an important distinction to be made
between the Arab world, which is overwhelmingly Muslim,
and the Muslim world, not all of which is Arab. In the latter,
from Turkey to Indonesia, democracy has indeed made dra-
matic advances over the past decades. Members of the Bush
team—including Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of State
Paula Dobriansky—have made the point forcefully. According
to Dobriansky, those who argue that democracy “is not realistic
in the Muslim world have been listening to Muslim politicians,
civil society leaders, academics, and religious authorities who
are increasingly arguing that it is not only possible, indeed it is
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essential.” Or as President Bush himself put it, “The peoples of
the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and
opportunities as people in every nation, and their governments
should listen to their hopes.” The problem, in fact, is less the
Islamic world than the Arab world.
There is today not a single Arab state that qualifies as a
democracy. The “Arab Human Development Report 2002,”
compiled under the auspices of the United Nations and spon-
sored by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development,
examines why this is the case. “The wave of democracy that
transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia
in the 1980s, and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, has barely reached the Arab
States. This freedom deficit undermines human development
and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political
development.” Among the explanations the report offers for this
pitiful state of affairs is a traditional Arab culture at odds with
modernization, overwhelming illiteracy rates, poverty, stag-
nant economic growth, weak civil society and, most important,
the persistence in every Arab state of “a powerful executive
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branch that exerts significant control over all other branches
of the state, being in some cases free from institutional checks
and balances.”
Despite this Arab self-indictment, Senator Chuck Hagel
complains, “I detect a dangerous arrogance and a sort of ʻPax
Americana ̓ vision which holds that we are more powerful,
richer, and smarter than the rest of the world, and we are going
to go forth and impose democracy.” But promoting democracy
in the Middle East is not a matter of national egoism. It has
become a matter of national well-being, even survival. On
September 11, the Arab worldʼs predicament became our own.
Not only has Arab repression fueled Islamist terror movements
and anti-American extremism; the very regimes we have been
propping up have directly encouraged these forces as a way
to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The eminent
historian John Lewis Gaddis writes:
The intersection of radicalism with technology the world
witnessed on that terrible morning means that the persis-
tence of authoritarianism anywhere can breed resentments
that can provoke terrorism that can do us grievous harm.
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There is a compellingly realistic reason now to complete
the idealistic task Woodrow Wilson began more than eight
decades ago: the world must be made safe for democracy,
because otherwise democracy will not be safe in the
world.
Having created a domestic audience for Islamic extremism
through their repressive policies, the regimes most directly
threatened by Islamist movements have co-opted and sanctioned
their worst elements. This is particularly true of Saudi Arabia,
parts of whose royal family have funded Osama bin Laden and
other anti-American terror groups, on the one hand, while ben-
efiting from the protection of the United States, on the other.
When it came to the Middle East, Washington upheld a
special bargain: Arab dictators provided the United States with
oil, basing rights and counterweight to Soviet and other hostile
influences; in return, the United States overlooked the depreda-
tions they inflicted on their citizens and their involvement with
Islamist groups. For all his efforts elsewhere, President Reagan
never promoted democracy in the Middle East. Neither did
The War over Iraq 198 The War over Iraq 199The War over Iraq 198
the first Bush administration—even in Kuwait, a country that
American soldiers died to liberate. For its part, Bill Clintonʼs
team proceeded on the assumption that, as his Middle East
point man Martin Indyk recalled, “moderate Arab states would
provide the U.S. military with access to bases and facilities . . .
; in return, Washington would not exert significant pressure
for domestic change.” The present administration, until quite
recently, honored the agreement as well—for example, by refus-
ing to press the Saudis to cooperate in the September 11 inves-
tigation or even to allow us to launch raids against bin Laden
from Saudi territory. Invoking a version of Jeane Kirkpatrickʼs
“Dictatorships and Double Standards” argument, members of
the Bush team argued that, yes, “friendly” Arab dictatorships
were unpalatable, but their potential successors would be even
worse. Nor have those “friendly” dictators been shy about
reminding the Bush team of their likely replacements. Thus, in
a letter to President Bush last year, Saudi Arabia s̓ Crown Prince
Abdullah pointed out that if the United States failed to be more
sensitive to his regimeʼs plight, the royal family could “suffer
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the fate of the Shah of Iran.”
As applied to the likes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, how-
ever, Franklin Roosevelt s̓ description of Nicaragua s̓ Anastasio
Somoza—“He may be a son of a bitch. But heʼs our son of a
bitch”—fails to persuade. To begin with, countries like Saudi
Arabia are not, in fact, ours at all. Far from being our clients,
as Somoza once was, they not only have helped to create the
problem of Islamist radicalism, but actively abet it. During the
Cold War, when the risks were at least as great as they are now,
the Reagan administration devised a way to further democracy
from El Salvador to the Philippines without bringing its foes to
power. Then, as now, skeptics cautioned that the devil we knew
was safer than the alternative. They were wrong then. They are
wrong now.
In terms of concrete policy initiatives, the efforts to build
democracy in the Middle East have so far been modest—a boost
in funds for the U.S. Agency for International Development to
promote democracy; grants for the National Endowment for
Democracy to do the same; a State Department–run program
to fund democratization efforts in Morocco, Bahrain and Qatar;
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and the creation of a radio network to bring accurate and fair
news coverage to a region not known for either. But in terms of
rhetoric, which usually precedes policy, the administration has
gone much further. Further, indeed, than any of its predecessors.
“We reject the condescending view that freedom will not grow
in the soil of the Middle East—or that Muslims somehow do
not share in the desire to be free,” Condoleezza Rice said last
October. Backing up these words with deeds, the Bush team
has offered support for pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran,
insisted on political reforms in the Palestinian Authority, and
censured President Hosni Mubarak for his treatment of democ-
racy activists in Egypt.
Pledging that the United States “will use this moment of
opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe,”
Bush is equally strong in his support for democracy beyond the
Middle East:
The United States possesses unprecedented—and
unequaled—strength and influence in the world. Sustained
by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free
society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibili-
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ties, obligations and opportunities. The great strength of
this nation must be used to promote a balance of power
that favors freedom.
This proposition seems inarguable. But according to critics on
both the right and the left, our “preoccupation” with democratiz-
ing other states is flawed by the parochial assumption that our
principles are universal ones; such narrow chauvinism inevita-
bly leads to dangerous “crusades” to make the world over, and
derives from a uniquely lethal American mixture of naïveté and
hubris. In one sense, such a critique contains a kernel of truth.
Exporting democracy does further America s̓ vital interests. But
it does this by fulfilling our most cherished ideals—chief among
them a belief that people should not be governed without their
consent. As the Bush national security strategy puts it, “No
people on earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, or
eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.”
The universality of American principles has its strategic
uses as well. By defining our aims in democratic, rather than in
specifically American, terms, U.S. policies may attract wider
support. Characterizing the U.S. effort to oust Saddam as “a war
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for oil,” critics of the Bush Doctrine at home and abroad try to
portray the United States as a bully state intoxicated by the arro-
gance of power. To the degree that we phrase—and wage—this
war as a war for democracy, the effect among Middle Easterners
will be far different. A “balance of power that favors freedom”
also lends coherence to what often seems like an incoherent
American approach to the world. Undertakings from the wars in
Kosovo and Iraq to U.S. assistance to Israel and Taiwan—which
at first glance bear little relation to one another—take on the
qualities of a coherent worldview under this umbrella. “Cast
in these terms,” writes Stanford University scholar Michael
McFaul, “Muslims and Christians, Americans and Iranians,
Arabs and Italians can all be on the same side. Framed in these
terms, the enemy is also much larger than Islamic totalitarians
and includes all those who oppose liberty, be they dictators in
North Korea or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.”
The strategic value of democracy is reflected in a truth
of international politics: Democracies rarely, if ever, wage
war against one another. Why? One reason was identified by
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Immanuel Kant:
[When] the consent of the citizens is required to decide
whether or not war should be declared, it is very natural
that they will have a great hesitation in embarking on so
dangerous an enterprise. . . . But under a constitution . . .
which is . . . not republican, it is the simplest thing in the
world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow
citizen, but the owner of the state, and war will not force
him to make the slightest sacrifice.
The ethics and institutions of democracy encourage compromise
and other norms that democratic states then apply to their rela-
tions with one another. Nondemocratic states, needless to say, do
not. Or, as Woodrow Wilson put it in 1917, “A steadfast concert
of peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of
democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted
to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.”
A century of fighting fascist dictators in Germany, Italy
and Japan, communist dictators in Korea and Vietnam, neo-
fascist dictators in the Balkans and Iraq, and for that matter
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a narco-trafficking dictator in Central America has alerted all
but the most obdurate policymakers to the fact that the char-
acter of regimes—not diplomatic agreements or multilateral
institutions—are the key to peace and stability. The strategy of
focusing on regime change to foster democracy, writes politi-
cal scientist G. John Ikenberry, “is a strategy based on the very
realistic view that the political character of other states has an
enormous impact on the ability of the United States to ensure its
security and economic interests.” For the United States, then, a
straightforward argument from self-interest follows naturally:
The more democratic the world becomes, the more likely it is
to be congenial to America.
Tactics for pursuing democratization may vary accord-
ing to circumstance. In some cases, the policy might focus on
rebel groups, along the lines of the Reagan Doctrine as it was
applied in Nicaragua and elsewhere in the 1980s. In other cases,
it might mean support for dissidents by either overt or covert
means, which yielded such positive results in countries such as
Poland and South Korea. The tactics may or may not succeed
immediately, but their purpose ought to be clear. When it comes
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to dealing with tyrannical regimes, especially those with the
power to do us or our allies harm, the United States should seek
transformation, not coexistence.
The idea that the United States can “do business” with any
regime, no matter how odious and hostile to American prin-
ciples, is both morally and strategically dubious. Relationships
with tyrannical regimes are inherently difficult to sustain. The
force of American ideals and American power tends inevitably
to corrode the pillars on which authoritarian and totalitarian
regimes rest. To buttress their legitimacy, such regimes there-
fore resort frequently to provocation, either with arms buildups
designed to intimidate both the United States and its allies, as
in the case of China and North Korea, or by plots for regional
conquest, as in the case of Iraq and Serbia. Unable to acquire
legitimacy through the consent of their own oppressed citizens,
such states seek the more superficial authority that comes from
demonizing an external enemy. The Chinese government, for
instance, knows there can be no real “strategic partnership” with
the United States. The Iranian government knows there can be
no true “normalization” with the democratic world. Saddam
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Hussein knows he cannot simply give up the weapons of mass
destruction he has compiled. The price of such accommodations
would be the collapse of their regimes.
Promoting democracy is a pragmatic goal in that it makes
the world more congenial to America. But while it is a sound
strategy, it is also Americaʼs particular inheritance. Its tenets
are enshrined in the countryʼs Declaration of Independence. Its
substance is defined by the Constitution. And its influence has
shaped two centuries of U.S. foreign policy. Not only is the
United States a beacon of liberal democracy; every one of this
country s̓ leaders—whether arguing that America s̓ international
behavior should exemplify these democratic ideals or that the
United States could best inspire others through the practice
of these ideals at home—has recognized the special role that
Americaʼs principles play in its conduct abroad.
This uniquely American interest in democracy is pre-
cisely what troubles so many of Bushʼs critics on the left.
Doubtful that the United States is capable of installing a
“democratic government in a place that has never known
one,” former Gore national security advisor Leon Fuerth
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warns that the attempt to do so may lead to “a dangerous
intoxication with American power.” The democracy promot-
ers in the Bush administration belong to “that most danger-
ous breed of men, utopians,” says New York Times columnist
Anthony Lewis. In a similar vein, Harvard professor Stanley
Hoffman, who only a few years ago was writing in defense
of “morality in foreign policy,” cannot understand why the
United States would want to change “countries that have no
past experience of democracy and where repressive regimes
face no experienced or cohesive opposition.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wil-
son launched a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.”
His successors from FDR to JFK never questioned that goal. But
in the long aftermath of Vietnam, this vision became tarnished.
Liberals in particular questioned whether the United States had
any right to judge its own system superior to others or, for that
matter, to assert American influence. They did not deny the ben-
efits of democracy, but they did question the principal means
used to accomplish it—namely, American power. Thus, when
the Carter team spoke out on behalf of democracy, it did so most
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vocally in the case of allies, such as Iran and Nicaragua, who
were confronting insurgencies at home, rather than criticize the
Soviet Union and its satellites. A deep-seated reluctance to judge
others and a lingering skepticism about America s̓ founding ide-
als also led liberals to emphasize the promotion of universal
“social” and “economic” rights over democracy—the latter
being too closely identified with the United States. “The Cold
War led us astray,” explained Clintonʼs public diplomacy czar,
Joseph Duffey. “We got into a crusading mentality,” whereby
it “somehow made us feel better to throw messages at other
countries.”
Echoing George McGovern, who claimed during his 1972
campaign that “forces beyond our control will have the most
to do with shaping the political arrangements of the future,”
and Jimmy Carter, whose national security advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, looked forward to “an age in which technology and
electronics . . . are increasingly becoming the principal deter-
minants of . . . the global outlook of society,” the Clinton team
decided that vast, impersonal forces could achieve many of the
traditional aims of American policy. Specifically, democracy
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would be furthered not by Americaʼs political activism, but
rather by the forces of “interdependence,” by which the Clinton
administration meant international trade. According to the Clin-
ton team, focusing on international commerce not only made
good economic sense, but could help accomplish the traditional
aims of U.S. foreign policy, chief among them democratization.
Or as national security advisor Sandy Berger put it in 1997, “the
fellow travelers of the new global economy—computers and
modems, faxes and photocopiers, increased contacts and binding
contracts—carry with them the seeds of change.” After officially
“delinking” human rights and trade considerations in China in
1994, Clinton offered assurances that commerce and technology
would suffice as “a force for change in China, exposing China
to our ideas and our ideals.”
The hope of leaving the task of democratization to the mar-
ket, however, ensnarled the Clinton team in moral complications
to which it could provide no adequate response. The Clinton
White House characterized its approach to foreign affairs as
“pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism,” but Woodrow Wilson entered
office with the explicit intention of putting an end to the “dol-
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lar diplomacy” of the Taft administration. Moreover, the logic
of the Clinton teamʼs approach to democratization was quickly
revealed to have things exactly backward. Comforted that it
could promote democracy by means of sheer acquisitiveness, the
administration disregarded human rights violations in countries
where American corporations happened to do business. And far
from tempering those violations, the expansion of trade ties with
countries like China and Pakistan coincided with a worsening
of their human rights records. This subordination of political
principle to the expansion of economic ties also led to the justi-
fied charge of American hypocrisy. As the French newspaper
Le Monde noted in an editorial, “The Chinese case destroys the
American pretension to universality on human rights.” Far from
spreading democracy, under the terms of “interdependence,”
the international conduct of the United States was becoming
indistinguishable from that of the Europeans.
The Bush Doctrine rejects the complacent assumption that
“engagement” will suffice to promote democratization. It also
acknowledges that democracy is a political choice, an act of
will. Someone, not something, must create it. Often that some-
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one is a single leader—a Lech Walensa, a King Juan Carlos, a
Václav Havel. Other times, the pressure for democracy comes
for a political opposition movement—the African National
Congress in South Africa, Solidarity in Poland, or the marchers
in Tiananmen Square. But history suggests that it comes most
effectively from the United States.
During the 1980s, America applied diplomatic and eco-
nomic pressure to repressive regimes from Poland to South
Africa; intervened to prevent military coups in the Philip-
pines, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras and Bolivia; and bluntly
enshrined human rights and democracy in official policy. The
United States played a pivotal and direct role in democratizing
countries like South Korea and Taiwan. Appropriately enough,
the decade closed with democracy activists erecting a facsimile
of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square. Christopher Pat-
ten, the last British governor of nearby Hong Kong, observed:
“American power and leadership have been more responsible
than most other factors in rescuing freedom in the second half
of this century.”
To argue that the United States, having come so far, should
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now leave that task to technology or commerce or even inter-
national organizations is absurd. To argue that America should
do so because it has no “right” to impose its will on others is
wrong. “The Communist leaders say, ʻDonʼt interfere in our
internal affairs. Let us strangle our citizens in peace and quiet,ʼ”
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote. “But I tell you: Interfere
more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to
come and interfere.”
S olzhenitsynʼs admonition is of course as unwelcome to
conservative realists as it is to leftist skeptics of Ameri-
can power. While many of these realists played a key role dur-
ing the Cold War and supported the main thrust of U.S. policy
during this era—warning Americans away from the delusions
of both liberal accommodation and isolationism, supporting a
robust level of defense expenditure, and alerting policymakers
to the threat that Soviet expansionism posed—they were never
sympathetic to the idealism that infused that policy. Early on
in the Cold War, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr complained that
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“we are still inclined to pretend that our power is exercised by a
peculiarly virtuous nation,” while his fellow realist George Ken-
nan went so far as to compare American democracy to “one of
those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as a room and a
brain the size of a pin.” What the realists feared was not so much
the mechanics of American democracy at home—although they
often had reservations about that, too—but rather what they
perceived to be a messianic impulse that could lead America
to upset the balance of power between it and the Soviet Union.
Awash in this relativism, Hans Morgenthau characterized
American democracy and Soviet communism as merely two
variations of the same “nationalistic universalism,” which
sought “for one nation and one state the right to impose its own
valuations and standards of action upon all other nations.” What
Americans ought to recognize, Kennan recommended, was that
“no people can be the judge of anotherʼs domestic institutions
and requirements.”
Blinded by this line of reasoning, the realists never antici-
pated that “the domestic institutions and requirements” of both
the Soviet Union and the United States would be precisely what
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brought an end to the Cold War. Just as the internal contradic-
tions of communism contributed to the demise of the Soviet
Union and its satellites, so did the allure and success of Ameri-
can democracy offer a better alternative to the inhabitants of
communist nations. The principles of liberal democracy had
also supported the sacrifices that Americans were willing to
make during four decades of cold war. Idealism, argued Robert
Osgood in a rebuttal of Morgenthau, was an “indispensable spur
to reason.” It turned out that communism could not compete
with liberal democracy materially, politically or ethically. Com-
munism as an idea could not even outlast the coercive power
that made it into a global ideology. Liberal democracy, by con-
trast, has been profoundly vindicated and its appeal continues
to grow.
This dramatic vindication notwithstanding, many realists
still regard the idea of America using its power to promote
change of regime in nations ruled by dictators as dangerous
utopianism. Rather than prompt second thoughts, todayʼs real-
ists have somehow managed to locate in one of historyʼs most
lopsided victories the seeds of an even greater defeat. Hence,
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where a few years earlier Harvard Universityʼs Samuel Hun-
tington conceded that Americans “have a special interest in the
development of a global environment congenial to democracy,”
by the mid-1990s he was condemning U.S. efforts to promote
such an environment as “false,” “immoral” and “dangerous.” In
an identical vein, the Nixon Centerʼs Dmitri Simes and former
NATO ambassador Robert Ellsworth claim, “The assumption
that our values are universal is false because it is demonstrably
untrue; immoral because of what would be necessary to make
non-Western people adopt Western institutions and culture; and
dangerous because it could lead to war.”
At first glance, the complaints of today s̓ realists bear even less
scrutiny than those of their predecessors. After all, during the
Cold War democracyʼs global appeal had yet to be empirically
proven, and if idealism acted as a spur to reasonable action, so,
for the realists, did the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today, with
the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the rapid advance
of democracy, their admonitions seem more puzzling. There
is something perverse in continuing to doubt the efficacy of
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promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of
the past three decades. After we have already seen dictatorships
toppled by democratic forces in such seemingly unlikely places
as the Philippines, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Tai-
wan and South Korea, how utopian is it to imagine a change of
regime in a place like Iraq? For that matter, how utopian is it
to work for the fall of the Communist Party in China after a far
more powerful and stable oligarchy fell in the Soviet Union?
With democratic change sweeping the world at an unprece-
dented rate over the past decades, is it truly “realistic” to insist
that we quit now?
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NINE
From Ambivalence to Leadership
T he final and most controversial pillar of the Bush
Doctrine is its commitment to American preemi-
nence. The insistence that the United States must
prevent potential adversaries from “surpassing, or equaling, the
power of the United States” has elicited an outcry along the
Eastern seaboard. “The vision laid out in the Bush document is
a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the
Soviet ambition, world domination,” Hendrik Hertzberg claims
in the New Yorker, managing in one sentence to indict the U.S.
and exonerate the USSR. What the national security strategy is
fundamentally about, echoes Al Gore, is “glorifying the notion
of dominance.” Well, what is wrong with dominance, in the
service of sound principles and high ideals?
“The Bush administration has clearly broken with the
internationalist premises that have been accepted by every
other administration since World War II, with the exception of
Reaganʼs first,” complains Frances Fitzgerald in the New York
The War over Iraq 218 The War over Iraq 219The War over Iraq 218
Review of Books. But this is simply wrong. Far from breaking
with the premises of postwar national security policy, the Bush
Doctrine harkens back to the tenets that guided American policy
through the most successful phases of that period. The era com-
menced in 1947 with a congressional address by Harry Truman
in which he allowed the “frank recognition that totalitarian
regimes imposed on free people, by direct or indirect aggres-
sion, undermine the foundations of international peace and
hence the security of the United States.” In defining this new
era, Bush, like Truman before him, has resorted to the language
of American exceptionalism, insisting that the “requirements of
freedom apply fully” to all and that the United States will pro-
mote these requirements tirelessly. Just as on March 12, 1947,
Truman unveiled the doctrine that carries his name, pledging to
confront Soviet expansionism wherever it emerged and to pro-
mote freedom, so on June 1, 2002, Bush previewed the doctrine
that carries his name, pledging to preempt threats wherever they
arose and to promote freedom. One president relied on contain-
ment and the other on preemption, but the Truman and Bush
Doctrines share a common purpose: Both offer roadmaps for
The War over Iraq 218 The War over Iraq 219The War over Iraq 219
American leadership, backed up by American power and culmi-
nating in the spread of American ideals. In fact, both doctrines
trace their lineage back to principles that animated American
foreign policy even before the Cold War.
“[T]his is a period not just of grave danger, but of enor-
mous opportunity,” says Condoleezza Rice, “ . . . a period akin to
1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number
of free and democratic states—Japan and Germany among the
great powers—to create a new balance of power that favored
freedom.” Just as sensible Americans after World War II did
not imagine that the United States should retreat from global
involvement and await the rise of the next Nazi Germany, so
the Bush team has recognized that in the aftermath of Septem-
ber 11 its charge is to shape the international environment to
prevent the next threat from arising in the first place. We often
forget that the plans for a postwar order devised by American
foreign policy makers in the early 1940s were not simply aimed
at containing the Soviet Union, which many of them still viewed
as a potential partner. Rather, those policymakers were looking
backward to the circumstances that had led to the catastrophe
The War over Iraq 220 The War over Iraq 221The War over Iraq 220
of global conflict. Their purpose was to construct a more stable
international order than the one that had imploded in 1939; an
economic system that furthered the aim of international stability
by promoting growth and free trade; and a framework for inter-
national security that, although it placed too much faith in the
willingness of the Soviet Union to work with the United States,
rested ultimately on the fact that American power had become
the keystone in the arch of world order.
Men like James Forrestal and Dean Acheson believed
the United States had supplanted Great Britain as the worldʼs
leader and that, as Forrestal put it in 1941, “America must be the
dominant power of the twentieth century.” Henry Luce spoke
for most influential Americans inside and outside the Roosevelt
administration when he insisted that it had fallen to the United
States not only to win the war against Germany and Japan,
but to create an “international moral order” that would spread
American principles—and in the process avoid the catastrophe
of a third world war. Such thinking was reflected in Rooseveltʼs
Atlantic Charter and, more concretely, in the creation of the
United Nations in 1945.
The War over Iraq 220 The War over Iraq 221The War over Iraq 221
Thus, well before the Soviet Union had emerged as the great
challenge to American security and American principles, Ameri-
can leaders had arrived at the conclusion that it would be neces-
sary for the United States to deter aggression globally, whoever
the aggressor might be, in order to build a safer world. In fact,
during the war years they were at least as worried about the pos-
sible reemergence of Germany and Japan as about the Soviets.
John Lewis Gaddis has summarized American thinking in the
years between 1941 and 1946 in this way:
The American president and his key advisers were deter-
mined to secure the United States against whatever dangers
might confront it after victory, but they lacked a clear sense
of what those might be or where they might arise. Their
thinking about post-war security was, as a consequence,
more general than specific.
Few influential government officials, moreover, were under
the illusion that “collective security” and the United Nations
could be counted on to keep the peace. In 1945 Harry Truman
declared that the United States had become “one of the most
The War over Iraq 222 The War over Iraq 223The War over Iraq 222
powerful forces for good on earth,” and the task now was to
“keep it so” and to “lead the world to peace and prosperity.”
The United States had “achieved a world leadership which does
not depend solely upon our military and naval might,” Truman
declared. But it was his intention, despite demobilization, to
ensure that the United States would remain “the greatest naval
power on earth” and would maintain “one of the most powerful
air forces in the world.” Americans, Truman said, would use
“our military strength solely to preserve the peace of the world.
For we now know that this is the only sure way to make our
own freedom secure.”
The unwillingness to sustain the level of military spending
and preparedness required to fulfill this expansive vision was a
failure of American foreign policy in the immediate aftermath
of the war. But Stalinʼs drawing of the Iron Curtain and the
outbreak of the war in Korea reawakened Americans to the
need for an assertive and forward-leaning foreign policy. But
while the United States promptly rose to meet these challenges,
a certain intellectual clarity was lost in the transition from the
immediate postwar years to the beginning of the Cold War. The
The War over Iraq 222 The War over Iraq 223The War over Iraq 223
original goal of promoting and defending a decent world order
became conflated with the goal of meeting the challenge of
Soviet power. The United States adopted policies it would have
pursued even in the absence of a Soviet challenge—playing a
large role in Europe, Asia and the Middle East; upholding basic
norms of international behavior; promoting democratic reform
where possible and advancing American principles abroad. All
of these ideals became associated with the strategy of contain-
ing the Soviet Union, and therefore with the strategy that led
America into Southeast Asia.
If anything, the Bush Doctrine signals a return to this ear-
lier era, when Munich, not Vietnam, was the cautionary lesson
and admonitions about the “arrogance of power” and the perils
of “judging others” had little traction among U.S. policymak-
ers. In a 1951 address explaining Americaʼs participation in the
Korean War, President Truman insisted that if the allies “had
followed the right policies in the 1930s—if the free countries
had acted together to crush the aggression of the dictators, and
if they had acted at the beginning when the aggression was
small—there probably would have been no World War II. If
The War over Iraq 224 The War over Iraq 225The War over Iraq 224
history has taught us anything, it is that aggression anywhere in
the world is a threat to peace everywhere in the world.” Today,
too, American policymakers are drawing the same lesson: resist
aggression with force if necessary, and sooner rather than later.
“Hitler had indicated what he intended to do,” Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld told an interviewer in 2001, adding that he
should have “been stopped early, as he might have been . . . at
minimal cost.”
If the Bush Doctrine really does “break” from the prem-
ises of recent national security policy, then, it is only because it
departs decisively from the legacy of Vietnam. A recent News-
week profile of Donald Rumsfeld revealed something striking
about him, and to a degree about the Bush Doctrine: “Rumsfeld
is a product of a time and generation that was long in eclipse
but whose outlook and attitudes are now making a comeback
at the highest levels of the U.S. government.” The article con-
tinues, “The decision on whether to invade Iraq, seen through
the prism of Rumsfeldʼs background and experience, can be
seen as a clash between the values of the Greatest Generation
and the early cold warriors and the baby boomers who came to
The War over Iraq 224 The War over Iraq 225The War over Iraq 225
power after Watergate and Vietnam.” The profile concludes with
a quote from Henry Kissinger, who observed that “[Rumsfeld]
is trying to bring back the duty of service and American respon-
sibility, to beat back the attitudes of the Vietnam generation that
was focused on American imperfection and limitations.”
Those attitudes survived the demise of the Soviet Union.
On the left, where writer Noemie Emery has observed “it is
always 1968, the dark night of the American soul,” the Vietnam
syndrome returned during Operation Desert Storm. It persisted
through the Clinton administration, as veterans of the McGovern
campaign wrung their hands about repeating Vietnam s̓ mistakes
in Bosnia and Kosovo—so much so that Balkans troubleshooter
Richard Holbrooke felt compelled to point out that “Bosnia was
not Vietnam, the Serbs were not the Vietcong, and Belgrade was
not Hanoi.” The ghost of Vietnam walks again today. “I kept
thinking of one thing: Vietnam,” writes Anthony Lewis in the
New York Review of Books, echoing his objections to the Gulf
War a decade earlier. “Iraq is a large, modern, heavily urbanized
country. If we bomb it apart, are we going to be wise enough to
put it back together?”
The War over Iraq 226 The War over Iraq 227The War over Iraq 226
On the right, the Nixonian strategy of avoiding another Viet-
nam by focusing on narrowly conceived vital interests also
continued well into the 1990s. Though he invoked the Munich
analogy and even likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, President
George H. W. Bush pledged that he had “learned from Viet-
nam” and conducted the Gulf War accordingly—halting it
once the “vital interest” of Kuwaiti oil had been secured, and
leaving thousands of Iraqis to be slaughtered by the “Hitler”
whom the United States had decided to leave in power. After
having boasted that “weʼve kicked the Vietnam syndrome
once and for all,” not a year later Bush opposed intervening in
Bosniaʼs “guerrilla warfare” because “Weʼve lived through that
once already.” Even George W. Bush, at the 2000 Republican
National Convention, admonished his audience to “remember
the lessons of Vietnam.”
Politicians are not the only ones who still suffer from
the Vietnam syndrome. The American military establishment
over which Rumsfeld presides has yet to recover from the
war. “Vietnam,” explains strategist Eliot Cohen, “has become
the defense establishmentʼs morality play, a cautionary tale of
The War over Iraq 226 The War over Iraq 227The War over Iraq 227
civilian meddling, military timidity, and ensuing—but unneces-
sary—disaster.” The bureaucratic lessons of this morality play
were first articulated by Caspar Weinberger, Reaganʼs defense
secretary, who spelled out a restrictive set of criteria for the use
of force. Colin Powell later enshrined those criteria in the doc-
trine that now carries his name. The Powell Doctrine addresses
more than just how to fight wars; it also addresses when to fight
them—namely, for “vital interests,” not for “half-baked reasons”
like “nation-building” and “humanitarianism,” which call up the
specter of Vietnam. Powell summarizes his doctrine this way:
“Is the national interest at stake? If the answer is yes, go in, and
go in to win. Otherwise, stay out.”
This may sound reasonable enough. Invoking the Powell
Doctrine and the war that inspired it, however, America s̓ senior
generals have opposed nearly every intervention that the United
States has undertaken in the post–Cold War era—Iraq, Bosnia,
Kosovo and now Iraq again. “In none of these recent foreign
crises,” Powell wrote of the Clinton-era conflicts in his autobi-
ography, “have we had a vital interest such as we had after Iraq s̓
invasion of Kuwait and the resulting threat to Saudi Arabia and
The War over Iraq 228 The War over Iraq 229The War over Iraq 228
the free flow of oil.” Never mind that Powell opposed the Gulf
War, too. In rhetoric, the Powell Doctrine sounds powerful. In
practice, it is a template for inaction.
When it is governed by the Vietnam analogy, the United
States almost always suffers setbacks. There is a simple reason
for this: Our policymakers may be consumed by the lessons of
Vietnam, but the rest of the world plays by Munich rules. Hence,
while Nixon and Kissinger consigned the Third World to the
back burner in the aftermath of Vietnam, Moscow redoubled
its efforts to expand Soviet influence in Africa, the Middle
East and East Asia. And while President Carter derived from
Vietnam the lesson that the United States should not “interfere
in the internal affairs of another nation,” the Soviet Union was
busy invading Afghanistan and establishing a proxy in Central
America. Assuming, too, that the United States had lost its
nerve, both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic invoked
the legacy of Vietnam to explain why America would not halt
their aggressions.
In fact, as a guide for how and when to use force in the
post–Cold War era, the Vietnam analogy has proved next to
The War over Iraq 228 The War over Iraq 229The War over Iraq 229
useless. In many instances, much as the left resists acknowledg-
ing it, all that stands between civility and genocide, order and
mayhem, is American power. Strict adherence to the lessons
of Vietnam means no peacekeeping missions, no punitive air
strikes, no humanitarian interventions—in short, no operation
that proceeds from any principle other than the narrowest self-
interest. As for the conservative lessons of Vietnam, the brand
of foreign policy restraint that they encourage is even more
out of place in todayʼs world. The definition of vital interests
as consisting merely of oil wells, sea lanes and canals would,
if enshrined in official policy, translate into the abdication of
American leadership. When America refused to act in Bosnia,
for instance, the humanitarian crisis quickly began to threaten
the stability of the Atlantic alliance, one of the most vital of
American interests. Realists may not like it, but the United
States remains the hinge of the international system. And when
it sits idly by in the face of threats to that system, international
order erodes. Quickly. In recent history, it has been excessive
American reticence, not bellicosity, which has led to more prob-
The War over Iraq 230 The War over Iraq 231The War over Iraq 230
lems and greater dangers.
Like the cold warriors of the pre-Vietnam era, members of
the Bush team recognize that the present era offers both crisis
and opportunity. In their view, the United States must pursue two
goals at once: first, the promotion of a world order conducive to
American interests and principles; and second, a defense against
the most immediate and menacing obstacle to achieving that
order. In other words, fighting an unconventional war on terror-
ism does not absolve U.S. foreign policy of its traditional aims.
But the discovery last year that America must still contend with
cruel and resourceful foes has generated a certain fatalism about
broad foreign policy goals, particularly among elites. “We no
longer have the luxury of thinking about U.S. national security
primarily in terms of protecting American allies and interests
abroad,” says Michele Flournoy, a senior advisor at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies. “We need to give far
more serious attention to protecting the U.S. homeland.” That
we do. But this hardly relieves the United States of its obligation
to defend Taiwan from China, to stand by Israel and our Euro-
pean and Asian allies, and to defend American principles abroad.
The War over Iraq 230 The War over Iraq 231The War over Iraq 231
A failure to mind the broader ends of U.S. foreign policy could
leave us even more vulnerable than before to the conventional
threats that consumed our attention until September 11.
The events following 9-11 have not altered the fundamental
purposes of American foreign policy. On the contrary, the
administrationʼs war against terror falls squarely within the tra-
dition of Americaʼs grand strategy. Nor, in its essentials, does
that strategy respond to anything more than a simple recognition
of fact. The conceit of the Bush administrationʼs critics is that
Americaʼs position in the world amounts to something other
than global preeminence. The United States has assumed an
unprecedented position of power and influence in the world.
By the traditional measures of national power, the United States
holds a position unmatched since Rome dominated the Mediter-
ranean world. American military power dwarfs that of any other
nation, both in its war-fighting capabilities and in its ability to
intervene in conflicts anywhere in the world on short notice.
Meanwhile, the American economic precepts of liberal capital-
ism and free trade have become almost universally accepted
The War over Iraq 232 The War over Iraq 233The War over Iraq 232
as the best model for creating wealth, and the United States
itself stands at the center of the international economic order.
The American political precepts of liberal democracy have
spread across continents and cultures as other peoples cast off
or modify autocratic methods of governance and opt for, or at
least pay lip service to, the American principles of individual
rights and freedoms.
Moreover, unlike past imperial powers, if the United
States has created a Pax Americana, it is not built on colo-
nial conquest or economic aggrandizement. “America has no
empire to extend or utopia to establish,” President Bush said
in his West Point speech. Rather, what upholds todayʼs world
order is Americaʼs benevolent influence—nurtured, to be sure,
by American power, but also by emulation and the recognition
around the world that American ideals are genuinely universal.
As a consequence, when the worldʼs sole superpower commits
itself to norms of international conduct—for democracy, for
human rights, against aggression, against weapons prolifera-
tion—it means that successful challenges to American power
will invariably weaken those American-created norms. Were
The War over Iraq 232 The War over Iraq 233The War over Iraq 233
we—through humility, self-abnegation or a narrow conception
of the national interest—to retreat from the position that history
has bequeathed us, the turmoil that would soon follow would
surely reach our shores.
Even if the threat posed by Iraq were to disappear tomor-
row, that would not relieve us of the need to play a strong and
active role in the world. Nor would it absolve us of the responsi-
bilities that fate has placed on our shoulders. Given the dangers
that currently exist, and given the certainty that unknown perils
await us over the horizon, there can be no respite from this bur-
den. The maintenance of a decent and hospitable international
order requires continued American leadership in resisting, and
where possible undermining, aggressive dictators and hostile
ideologies; in supporting American interests and liberal demo-
cratic principles; and in providing assistance to those strug-
gling against the more extreme manifestations of human evil.
If America refrains from shaping this order, we can be sure that
others will shape it in ways that reflect neither our interests nor
our values.
Absent the United States, who else could uphold decency
The War over Iraq 234 The War over Iraq 235The War over Iraq 234
in the world? Europe? Having engaged in fratricidal conflict
twice in the twentieth century, and then taken shelter under an
American umbrella during the Cold War, much of Europe has
responded to the challenges of the post–Cold War era with a
mixture of pettiness, impotence and moral lassitude. Having
proclaimed the 1990s the “hour of Europe,” its leaders spent
the decade failing to deal with ethnic cleansing on their own
continent, while cutting lucrative trade deals with a gallery of
rogue states and refusing to boost their defense budgets or take
the other necessary steps to establish an independent foreign
policy. Could China assume the role? It is ruled by a dictator-
ship, hobbled by a dysfunctional ideology, and it inspires only
fear and loathing amongst its neighbors. The United Nations?
Far from existing as an autonomous entity, the organization is
nothing more than a collection of states, many of them auto-
cratic and few of them as public-spirited as America—which, in
any case, provides the U.N. with most of its financial, political
and military muscle.
A humane future, then, will require an American foreign
policy that is unapologetic, idealistic, assertive and well funded.
The War over Iraq 234 The War over Iraq 235The War over Iraq 235
America must not only be the worldʼs policeman or its sheriff,
it must be its beacon and guide. “A policeman gets his assign-
ments from higher authority,” writes foreign policy analyst
Joshua Muravchik, “but in the community of nations there is
no authority higher than America.” This sentiment is not merely
an assertion of national pride. It is simple fact. The alternative
to American leadership is a chaotic, Hobbesian world where
there is no authority to thwart aggression, ensure peace and
security or enforce international norms. This is what it means to
be a global superpower with global responsibilities. It is short-
sighted to imagine that a policy of “humility” is either safer
or less expensive than a policy that aims to preclude and deter
the emergence of new threats, that has the United States arriv-
ing quickly at the scene of potential trouble before it has fully
erupted, that addresses threats to the national interest before they
develop into full-blown crises. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
expressed a common but mistaken view when she wrote a few
years ago that “a superpower is more credible and effective
when it maintains a measured distance from all regional con-
flicts.” In fact, this is precisely the way for a superpower to cease
The War over Iraq 236 The War over Iraq 237The War over Iraq 236
being a superpower.
Still, it is fair to ask how the rest of the world will respond
to a prolonged period of American dominance. Charles A. Kup-
chan, author of The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign
Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century, cautions
that the Bush doctrineʼs “neo-imperialist overtones” could fos-
ter “the very countervailing coalition that the administration
says it is trying to avoid.” To be sure, those regimes that find
an American-led world order menacing to their existence will
seek to cut away at American power, form tactical alliances
with other rogue states for the common purpose of unsettling
the international order, and look for ways to divide the United
States from its allies. None of this, however, adds up to a con-
vincing argument against American preeminence. The issue
today is not American “arrogance.” It is the inescapable reality
of American power in all its many forms. Those who suggest
that these international resentments could somehow be elimi-
nated by a more restrained American foreign policy are deluding
themselves. Even a United States that never again intervened
in a place like Iraq would still find itself the target of jealousy,
The War over Iraq 236 The War over Iraq 237The War over Iraq 237
resentment and in some cases even fear. A more polite but still
preeminently powerful United States would continue to stand
in the way of Chinese ambitions, offend Islamists and grate
on French insecurities. Unless the United States is prepared to
divest itself of its real power and influence, thereby allowing
other nations to achieve a position of relative parity on the world
stage, would-be challengers as well as the envious will still have
much to resent.
But it is doubtful that any effective grouping of nations
is likely to emerge to challenge American power. Much of the
current international attack against American “hegemonism”
is posturing. Allies such as the French may cavil about the
American “hyperpower,” but they recognize the benefits that
their dependence on the United States as the guarantor of inter-
national order brings them. As for Russia and China and the
Islamic world, the prospect of effective joint action between
these forces is slight. Their long history of mutual mistrust is
compounded by the fact that they do not share common strategic
goals—even with regard to the United States. The unwillingness
of these and other powers to gang up on the United States also
The War over Iraq 238 The War over Iraq 239The War over Iraq 238
has much to do with the fact that it does not pursue a narrow,
selfish definition of its national interest, but generally finds its
interest in a benevolent international order.
Is the task of maintaining American primacy and mak-
ing a consistent effort to shape the international environment
beyond the capacity of Americans? Not if American leaders
have the understanding and the political will to do what is nec-
essary. What is required is not particularly forbidding. Indeed,
much of the task ahead consists of building on already-existing
strengths.
Despite its degradation during the 1990s, the United States
still wields the strongest military forces in the world. It has dem-
onstrated its prowess on several occasions since the end of the
Cold War—in Panama, in Iraq, in Kosovo and in Afghanistan.
Still, those victories owed their success to a legacy the United
States has lived off for over a decade. It is true that despite
increases in the latest Bush defense budget, the United States
still spends too little on its military capabilities, in terms of both
present readiness and investment in future weapons technolo-
gies. The gap between Americaʼs strategic ends and the means
The War over Iraq 238 The War over Iraq 239The War over Iraq 239
available to accomplish those ends is significant, a fact that
becomes more evident each time the United States deploys
forces abroad.
Still, the task of repairing these deficiencies and creating
a force that can shape the international environment today,
tomorrow and twenty years from now is manageable. It would
probably require spending about $100 billion per year above
current defense budgets. This price tag may seem daunting, but
in historical terms it represents only a modest commitment of
Americaʼs wealth. The sum is still low by the standards of the
past fifty years, and far lower than most great powers have spent
on their militaries throughout history. Is the aim of maintaining
American primacy really not worth that much?
The United States also inherited from the Cold War a leg-
acy of strong alliances in Europe and Asia, and with Israel in the
Middle East. Those alliances are a bulwark of American power,
and more important still, they comprise the heart of the liberal
democratic order that the United States seeks to preserve and
extend. Critics of a distinctly American internationalism often
claim that it is unilateralist in its heart. In fact, a strategy aimed
The War over Iraq 240 The War over Iraq 241The War over Iraq 240
at preserving American preeminence would require an even
greater U.S. commitment to its allies. The United States would
not be merely an “offshore balancer” in actions of last resort, as
many recommend. It would not be a “reluctant sheriff,” rousing
itself to action only when the threatened townsfolk turn to it in
desperation. American preeminence cannot be maintained from
a distance. The United States should instead conceive of itself
as at once a European power, an Asian power and, of course, a
Middle Eastern power. It would act as if threats to the interests
of our allies are threats to us, which indeed they are. It would
act as if the flouting of civilized rules of conduct are threats
that affect us with almost the same immediacy as if they were
occurring on our doorstep. To act otherwise would make the
United States appear an unreliable partner in world affairs, and
this would erode both American primacy and the international
order itself.
A strong America capable of projecting force quickly and
with devastating effect to important regions of the world would
make it less likely that challengers to regional stability would
attempt to alter the status quo in their favor. It might even deter
The War over Iraq 240 The War over Iraq 241The War over Iraq 241
such challengers from undertaking expensive efforts to arm
themselves in the first place. An America whose willingness to
project force is in doubt, on the other hand, can only encourage
such challenges. The message we should be sending to potential
foes is: “Donʼt even think about it.” That kind of deterrence
offers the best recipe for a lasting peace; it is much cheaper
than fighting the wars that would follow should we fail to build
such a capacity.
The ability to project force overseas, however, could
increasingly be jeopardized over the coming years as smaller
powers acquire weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to
launch them at American forces, at our allies and at the Ameri-
can homeland. Oddly enough, foreign critics, who carp that mis-
sile defense will cement U.S. hegemony and make Americans
“masters of the world,” grasp its rationale better than critics here
at home. The real rationale for missile defense is that without
it, an adversary armed with long-range missiles can, as Robert
Joseph, President Bushʼs counterproliferation specialist at the
National Security Council, argues, “hold American and allied
cities hostage and thereby deter us from intervention.” In other
The War over Iraq 242 The War over Iraq 243
words, missile defense is about preserving Americaʼs ability to
wield power abroad.
No one could have predicted that Iraq would be the first
test-case of the post–Cold War era, just as no one could have
predicted that Berlin would be the first battlefield of the Cold
War. Indeed, the test could just as easily have come elsewhere—
in North Korea, the Taiwan Strait or the Golan Heights. But
history has conspired to locate the first serious challenge of the
twenty-first century in Iraq. The failure to defeat Saddam was
a defining moment for the presidencies of George H. W. Bush
and Bill Clinton. The question of what to do about Saddam is
now a defining moment for George W. Bush. Having fallen short
before, will the United States get the answer right this time? If
the president responds to the challenge of Iraq with the policies
and worldviews of his predecessors, he too will surely fail. If,
however, President Bush succeeds in bringing about regime
change in Iraq, he will set a historical precedent—for Iraq,
which could become the first Arab democracy; for the United
States, which will demonstrate to all the compatibility of its
interests and its ideals; and for the world, which America will
The War over Iraq 242 The War over Iraq 243
have made a safer and more just place.
The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there.
Were the United States to retreat after victory into complacency
and self-absorption, as it did the last time it went to war in Iraq,
new dangers would soon arise. Preventing this outcome will be a
burden, of which war in Iraq represents but the first installment.
But America cannot escape its responsibility for maintaining a
decent world order. The answer to this challenge is the American
idea itself, and behind it the unparalleled military and economic
strength of its custodian. Duly armed, the United States can
act to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty—in
Baghdad and beyond.
The War over Iraq 244 The War over Iraq 245The War over Iraq 244
Notes Part One: Saddam’s Tyranny
Chapter 1: Tyranny at Home
“Three Whom God Should Not Have Created”: Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 38.
“We hanged spies”: Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 34.
“made him far more ruthless”: Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 35.
“To visit Iraq is to enter the land of big brother”: Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 24.
“The Baath have saddled Iraq”: Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 42.
“not more than one million Iraqis”: An Iraqi quoted in Youssef Ibrahim, “Baghdadʼs Burden,” New York Times, 25 October 1994.
“zero defects program”: Kelly quoted in Louise Lief, “Even Three Sets of Spies Arenʼt Enough,” U.S. News and World Report, 4 February 1991.
“family s̓ home was bulldozed”: Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 50.
Manʼs tongue sliced off: see description in “Iraq: System- atic Torture of Political Prisoners,” Amnesty International, August 2001, p. 10.
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Iraq had more unresolved “disappearances”: “Iraq and Kurdistan,” Human Rights Watch World Report, 1998, p. 1.
“profiteering” and “Greedy Merchants”: Makiya, Republic of Fear, p. xvi.
Sexual torture of women by Iraqi government: Omar Ismael quoted in Marie Colvin, “Torturer Lays Bare Saddamʼs Death Machine,” Sunday Times (London), 14 January 2000; see also “Torture, Ill-Treatment, and Death in Iraq,” Amnesty International, April 1989, pp. 250-53; “Human Rights in Iraq,” Middle East Watch, November 1990, p. 248.
Mass killing at Abu Ghraib prison: defector quoted in Peter Beaumont, “Saddamʼs Executioner Tells of Slaughter in Jail ʻCleansing,ʼ” London Observer, 3 December 2000.
“eyes gouged out, fingernails missing”: “Human Rights in Iraq,” Middle East Watch, November 1990, p. 248.
Torture of al-Sadr: Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 108.
Shiite uprising and “killing fields”: Sandra Mackey, The Reckoning (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 289-91.
“wipe out” the local populations: “Saddamʼs Work in the Marshlands,” Wall Street Journal, 19 August 1992.
“withdraw all foodstuffs”: Mackey, Reckoning, p. 315.
“indiscriminate bombardments on civilian settlements” and Saddamʼs attack on the marsh Arabs: see UN Human Rights Commission Special Report, August 1992; “Sad- damʼs Work in the Marshlands,” Wall Street Journal, 19
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August 1992; David Rose, “Iraq s̓ Arsenal of Terror,” Van- ity Fair, May 2002, pp. 120-31.
“a method to facilitate government control”: UN Human Rights Commission Special Report, August 1992.
Killing of fish, turtles and other marsh life: damage to marshes as described in Shyam Bhattia, “Murder of the Marshes,” London Observer, 28 February 1993.
“racist war of extermination” and the burning of women and children in Mosul: Makiya, Republic of Fear, pp. 22- 23.
Left half of Iraqʼs Kurdish population homeless: London Times, quoted in Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 52.
Account of Kurds fleeing during 1974 offense: Mackey, Reckoning, p. 224.
“I will kill them all with chemical weapons” and “mass executions” of Kurds: Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Ter- ror,” New Yorker, 3 March 2002.
Chapter 2: Aggression Abroad
“let him rant and rave”: Dick Armey quoted in Eric Schmitt, “Iraq Is Defiant as GOP Leader Opposes Attack,” New York Times, 8 August 2002.
“Pyramids of skulls”: “King Says Saddamʼs Policies Have Left Pyramids of Skulls,” Associated Press, 15 December 1997.
“must be ranked as one of this centuryʼs worst strategic miscalculations”: Michael Sterner, “The Persian Gulf: The
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Iran-Iraq War,” Foreign Affairs, Fall 1984. Saddam believed the war would be over within a month:
Sandra Mackey, The Reckoning (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 252.
“Saddam s̓ convoy was besieged by Iranian troops”: Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 114.
“inept strategy and tactics of the Iraqis”: account of Sad- damʼs military incompetence in Makiya, Republic of Fear, pp. 276-77.
Iraq launched at least 189 Scud missiles at Teheran: Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Gener- als ̓War (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995), p. 229.
“We are frying them like eggplants”: Mark Fineman, “Madness in the Marshes,” Los Angeles Times, 14 August 1990.
“batons, truncheons, or wire cables”: Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1991.
Testimony of Andrew Whitley: Quoted in Dana Priest, “Iraq Routinely Mistreated Iranian POWs,” Washington Post, 25 January 1991.
Documented instances of Iraq using chemical weapons on Iranians: Jill Smolowe, “Chemical Warfare,” Time, 22 August 1988.
Aziz openly admitted that Iraq had enshrined their use: Pat- rick Tyler, “UN Cites Iraqi Use of Toxic Gas,” Washington Post, 2 August 1988.
“more intense and frequent use” of chemical weapons:
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Peter Spielman, “Security Council Condemns Chemical Attacks against Iranians,” Associated Press, 27 August 1988.
Iraq bombarded Iran with chemical weapons for five con- secutive years: account of Iraqi gas attacks in Patrick Tyler, “UN Cites Iraqi Use of Toxic Gas,” Washington Post, 2 August 1988.
“pesticide to throw at these swarms of insects”: William Drozdiak, “US Accuses Iraq of Employing Chemical Weapons against Iran,” Washington Post, 6 March 1984.
Saddam s̓ forces executed or tortured to death and “Electric shock was applied to sensitive parts of the body”: John Lancaster, “Administration Releases Report on Iraqi War Crimes in Kuwait,” Washington Post, 20 March 1993.
“Are you getting your milk and cornflakes too?”: Michael Kranish, “Saddam Hussein on TV with Captives,” Boston Globe, 24 August 1990.
Crippled 749 oil wells and the discharge of nearly eight million barrels of oil: “Gulf War Update,” Science News, 16 November 1991.
“overcast skies drips a greasy black rain”: Dowell and Riley, “A Man-Made Hell on Earth,” Time, 3 March 1991.
“foul Jewish usurpers”: Hussein speech as reported by the Iraqi News Agency, BBC Worldwide, 17 July 2001.
“confront Israelʼs existing bombs”: Hussein speech on Baghdad Radio as reported in the New York Times, 24 July 1982.
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Iraqi officials have stated explicitly that Iraq maintains biological weapons: Richard Butler, The Greatest Threat (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), p. 118.
“the extinction of the Zionist entity”: Miller and Mylroie, Crisis in the Gulf, p. 14.
Relatives of suicide bombers earn $25,000: Mohammed Daraghmeh, “Iraq Increases Payments to Families of Pal- estinian Suicide Bombers to $25,000,” Associated Press, 3 April 2002.
“nearby town of Afula with a gun and opened fire”: Lon- don s̓ Daily Telegraph as quoted in Vancouver Sun, 30 May 2002.
“solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda mem- bers”: CIA director George Tenet letter to Sen. Bob Gra- ham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 9 October 2002.
Group was trained by Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan: Daniel Eisenberg, “ʻWeʼre Taking Him Out,ʼ” Time, 13 May 2002.
“In a vicious, repressive dictatorship”: Donald Rumsfeld press briefing, Pentagon, 20 August 2002.
“We were convinced that money from Iraq”: Stanley Bed- lington quoted in Peter Eisler, “Targeting Saddam: Was There an Iraqi 9/11 Link?” USA Today, 3 December 2001. See same article for Iraq using bin Laden to funnel money to Algerian terrorists.
“Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members”: CIA director George Tenet letter to Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 9 October 2002.
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“only Iraq would give safe haven to Abu Nidal”: White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, press briefing, Crawford, Texas, 20 August 2002.
“Iraq provided bases to several terrorist groups”: U.S. Department of State Report, “Patterns of Global Terror- ism,” 21 May 2002.
Hamas, too, has benefited from Saddamʼs generosity: David Rose, “Iraqʼs Arsenal of Terror,” Vanity Fair, 2 May 2002.
“We were training these people to attack installations”: Iraqi defector quoted in Chris Hedges, “Defectors Cite Iraqi Training for Terrorism,” New York Times, 8 Novem- ber 2001.
“They are even trained how to use utensils”: Iraqi defector on Salman Pak quoted in Michael Dornheim, “Satellite Photos Believed to Show Airliner for Training Highjack- ers,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, 7 January 2002.
Chapter 3: Weapons of Mass Destruction
“Predators of the twenty-first century”: President Clinton, Pentagon, 17 February 1998.
Iraq began its efforts to develop biological weapons in 1973 or 1974 and conducted “research on microorganisms for military purposes”: United Nations Report Annex C, “Sta- tus of Verification of Iraqʼs Biological Warfare Program” (hereafter Annex C), 25 January 1999, p. 37.
Saddam resolved to diversify the weapons of mass destruc- tion: Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein
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and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York: Times Books, 1990), pp. 156-57.
Imported 819 long-range combat missiles: United Nations Report Annex A, “Status of the Material Balances in the Missile Area” (hereafter Annex A), 25 January 1999, p. 3.
“field tests of BW agents started in late 1987/early 1998”: details of Iraqʼs BW program quoted in Annex C, p. 32.
“design, component testing, and the construction of manu- facturing facilities”: David Kay, “Denial and Deception: The Lessons of Iraq,” U.S. Intelligence at the Crossroads: Agendas for Reform, ed. Roy Godson, Gary James Schmitt and Ernest May (Washington, D.C.: Brasseyʼs, 1995), p. 2.
“possessed nearly 10,000 nerve gas warheads”: United Nations Report Annex B, “Status of the Verification of Iraqʼs Chemical Weapons Programme” (hereafter Annex B), 25 January 1999, p. 7.
Ten times the number of chemical weapons: David Kay, “With More at Stake, Less Will Be Verified,” Washington Post, 17 November 2002.
“no mention was made of Aflatoxin”: Annex C, pp. 9-10.
“significant documentary material and equipment”: “Inspectors Charge Iraq Has Ongoing Nuclear Weapons Programme,” United Nations Chronicle, December 1991.
“the equivalent of war in arms control”: Rolf Ekeus quoted in Richard Butler, The Greatest Threat (New York: Publi- cAffairs, 2001), p. 53.
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“ʻdog ate my homeworkʼ”: Iraqi WMD concealment excuses found in Butler, Greatest Threat, p. 51.
“highest level of concealment-related decisions”: United Nations Report Annex D, “Actions by Iraq to Obstruct Disarmament,” 25 January 1999, p. 6.
“a truckers ̓ picnic was taking place”: Butler, Greatest Threat, p. 157.
France and Russia seized every opportunity: Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Bluffing: Why Is Bush Demanding Weapons Inspectors?” New Republic, 25 February 2002, p. 19.
“a man I can do business with”: Kofi Annan quoted in Robin Wright, “UN Chief Confidant about Pact with Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, 25 February 1998.
“more aligned with the rest of the U.N. system”: Kaplan, “Bluffing: Why Is Bush Demanding Weapons Inspec- tors?”
“same old game of hide and seek” and “salami-slicing”: Kaplan, “Bluffing: Why Is Bush Demanding Weapons Inspectors?”
Weapons inspectors could never locate: list of unac- counted-for weapons quoted in Judith Miller and William J. Broad, “Germs, Atoms and Poison Gas: The Iraqi Shell Game,” New York Times, 20 December 1998.
“theyʼve lied across the board”: Scott Ritter, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 3 Septem- ber 1998.
“Iraq is well into CW production”: Richard Butler, testi- mony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 31
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July 2002.
“reinitiate both its CW and BW programs”: Central Intel- ligence Agency, “Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Related to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions,” Feb- ruary 2000.
Cohen released a Pentagon report: Myers and Schmitt, “Iraq Rebuilt Weapon Factories, US Officials Say,” New York Times, 22 January 2001.
“Mr. Saeed said that several of the production”: Judith Miller, “Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, 20 December 2001.
Bush administration and British government presented further evidence: White House Background Document, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance,” 12 September 2002; The Assessment of the British Government, “Iraqʼs Weapons of Mass Destruction,” 24 September 2002.
Part Two: The American Response
Chapter 4: Narrow Realism (Bush I)
“It is too bad they both canʼt lose”: Norman Kempster, “US Favors Iraq in War, Shultz Indicates,” Los Angeles Times, 17 December 1986, p. 22.
“Eximbank could play a crucial role”: Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982- 1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 43.
“encourage other countries to arm and finance Iraqʼs war effort”: Jentleson, With Friends Like These, p. 45.
“set aside the emotions of the moment”: Jentleson, With
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Friends Like These, p. 84.
“a more responsible, status-quo state”: Jentleson, With Friends Like These, p. 98.
“demand of Iraq what we do of its neighbors”: Jentleson, With Friends Like These, p. 104.
“It is in no way [U.S.] policy”: Jentleson, With Friends Like These, p. 146.
“I believe your problem is with the Western media”: Jentle- son, With Friends Like These, p. 146.
“saw the presidential message”: Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals ̓War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995), p. 23.
“Let me assure you”: Gordon and Trainor, The Generals ̓ War, p. 23.
“I know personally”: R. W. Apple Jr., “Noncandidate Pow- ell Stirs Waves on Republican Right,” New York Times, 3 October 1995.
“The American people do not want their young dying”: Gordon and Trainor, The Generals ̓War, p. 33.
“The vaunted Republican Guard formations”: Rick Atkin- son, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 470.
“We have done the job”: Gordon and Trainor, The Gener- als ̓War, p. 416.
“We would be committing ourselves”: George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, paperback edi-
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tion (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 433.
“It would not contribute”: Colin Powell, My American Journey, paperback edition (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 512.
“our practical intention”: Powell, My American Journey, p. 516.
“I envisioned a postwar government”: Brent Scowcroft, interview with ABC News, 7 February 1998.
“the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands”: President George H. W. Bush, remarks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 15 February 1991.
“if Saddam had fallen”: Powell, My American Journey, p. 513.
“goes not abroad, in search of monsters”: John Quincy Adams, Fourth of July Address, 1821.
“phenomenon of the moral crusade”: Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), p. 35.
“restraint in the uses of power”: Quoted in Robert Kagan, “The Revisionist,” New Republic, 21 June 1999, p. 36.
“I was skeptical about the wisdom”: Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, p. 188.
“painful to watch Yeltsin”: Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, p. 556.
“not support those who seek independence”: President
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George H. W. Bush, remarks to the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of the Ukraine, 1 August 1991.
“nothing that I really want China to do”: Bush and Scow- croft, A World Transformed, p. 111.
“Following the Gulf War”: David Gompert, “How to Defeat Serbia,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1994, p. 30.
“We donʼt have a dog in that fight”: James Baker, quoted in Time, 17 August 1992.
Chapter 5: Wishful Liberalism (Clinton)
“left the Kurds and the Shiites”: President Bill Clinton, interview with New York Times, 28 June 1992.
“will not turn our backs”: Al Gore, quoted in Scott MacLeod, “Gore to Rebels: Weʼre with You, Maybe,” Time, 11 August 1997.
“Our purpose is deliberate”: Martin Indyk, remarks to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 18 May 1993.
“the United States will not support this”: ABC News, 7 February 1998.
“These guys are a feckless bunch”: Robin Wright, “Jordan King Aims to Organize Foes of Saddam Hussein,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1995.
“They are really more gnats”: John Lancaster and David B. Ottaway, “With CIAʼs Help, Group in Jordan Targets Saddam,” Washington Post, 23 June 1996.
“Our interest in the Kurds”: William Perry on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 17 September 1996.
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“Our missiles sent the following”: President Bill Clinton, address from the Oval Office, 3 September 1996.
“a message directed at Iraq”: Madeleine Albright on New- sHour with Jim Lehrer, 28 June 1993.
“It was not designed”: Al Gore, interview with CBS News, 28 June 1993.
“a devastating blow”: Al Gore, quoted in Susan Bennett and Frank Greve, “A Question of Deterrence,” Houston Chronicle, 29 June 1993.
“we are not talking about a war”: Madeleine Albright, remarks at Tennessee State University, 19 February 1998.
Finally, in December 1998: Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Roll- back,” New Republic, 30 September 2000.
“predicted fierce and effective Iraqi resistance”: Jim Hoa- gland, “Virtual Policy,” Washington Post, 7 March 1999.
“stopped trying to convince anyone”: Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 102.
“we know that they represent fighters”: Kaplan, “Roll- back.”
“The guidance equipment is still there”: Selean Hacaoglu, “U.S. Air Force Using Cement Bombs against Iraq,” Asso- ciated Press, 7 October 1999.
“During a conversation”: Pollack, Threatening Storm, p. 99.
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“this might create a climate”: Colum Lynch, “UN Arms Inspectors Back Down,” Washington Post, 31 August 2000.
This reflexive suspicion of American power: Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Trading Places,” New Republic, 23 October 2000.
“we simply donʼt have the leverage”: Peter Tarnoff quoted in Newsday, 30 May 1993.
“Weʼve simply got to focus on rebuilding”: President Bill Clinton quoted in the Washington Post, 17 October 1993.
“we are really powerless”: William Perry, interview on Meet the Press, 27 November 1994.
“The forces of global integration”: President Bill Clinton, remarks to the United Nations, 22 September 1997.
“from the floor of the stock exchange”: Strobe Talbott, “Globalization and Diplomacy,” Foreign Policy, Septem- ber 1997, p. 68.
“If the American people donʼt know anything”: President Bill Clinton, remarks to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Conference, 23 March 1999.
“a humanitarian crisis a long way from home”: Warren Christopher quoted in James Chace, “Exit, NATO,” New York Times, 4 June 1993.
“This agreement will help”: President Bill Clinton, state- ment regarding U.S.-North Korea Framework Agreement, 18 October 1994.
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“long reach of our nationʼs”: Madeleine Albright, news conference on the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 27 August 1998.
Chapter 6: A Distinctly American Internationalism (Bush II)
“From the outset of our existence”: Robert W. Tucker, “Exemplar or Crusader?” National Interest, Fall 1986, p. 69.
“not as the problem-solver of the world”: Richard Barnet quoted in John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 27.
“the objective of any American administration”: Richard Nixon quoted in Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), p. 76.
“too quick to reach out”: Stephen Hadley, interview with National Public Radio, 13 September 2000.
“a return to professionalism”: Jonathan Clarke, “May Powell Win the G.O.P. Slug Fest over Foreign Policy,” Los Angeles Times, 6 February 2001, p. 9.
“deep ethnic and religious roots”: Colin Powell, “Why Generals Get Nervous,” New York Times, 8 October 1992, p. 35.
“order is more fundamental”: Richard Haass, “What to Do with American Primacy,” Foreign Affairs, September/
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October 1999, p. 37.
“even though the world would be far better off”: Richard Haass quoted in Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Drill Sergeant,” New Republic, 26 March 2001, p. 17.
“Whatʼs the point”: Colin Powell, My American Journey, paperback edition (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 561.
“This significant step”: Colin Powell quoted in Washington Post, 15 May 2002.
“The advance of human freedom”: President George W. Bush, address to Congress, 20 September 2002.
“the application of power”: “The Limits of Power,” New York Times, 31 January 2002.
“While there are many dangers”: President George W. Bush, remarks at the Cincinnati Museum Center, 7 Octo- ber 2002.
“take the battle to the enemy”: President George W. Bush, commencement address, United States Military Academy, 1 June 2002.
“dissuade potential adversaries”: National Security Strat- egy of the United States, 2002, 17 September 2002.
Part Three: America’s Mission
Chapter 7: From Deterrence to Preemption
“Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists”: National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002, 17 September 2002.
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“there are some even today who say”: Senator Tom Harkin, remarks to the Senate, 4 January 1991.
“keep Iraq in its box”: Madeleine Albright on Moneyline, CNN, 13 September 2002.
“Containment is so far working”: Senator Carl Levin on Meet the Press, ABC, 12 August 2002.
“there is no current danger to the United States”: Jimmy Carter, “The Troubling New Face of America,” Washington Post, 5 September 2002.
“containment is not the answer”: Richard Butler, remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 31 July 2002.
“is closing down possibly within the next 2-3 years”: Khi- dir Hamza, remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 31 July 2002.
“The argument comes down to this”: Vice President Cheney, remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nash- ville, Tennessee, 26 August 2002.
“an Iraq carried forward under this regime”: Charles Duelfer on Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, 8 August 2002.
“Threatening to use [his] weapons for blackmail”: Brent Scowcroft, “Donʼt Attack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2002.
“We donʼt have to wonder if he can be deterred”: Steve Chapman, “Case for Invading Iraq Is Full of Holes,” Bal- timore Sun, 3 September 2002.
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“Iraqi arrogance—which afflicted both Saddam and his generals”: U.S. Air Force, The Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. 1, Planning and Command and Control (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), p. 81.
“If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people”: Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: MacMillan, 1927), p. 85.
“state of mind—his self-interest, his sanity”: Jonathan Schell quoted in Lawrence Kaplan, “Offensive Line,” New Republic, 12 March 2001.
“why it is necessary for us to bomb”: Mary McGrory, “Unequal Opportunity for Tyrants,” Washington Post, 20 October 2002.
“the intelligence community can provide the necessary warning”: Henry Shelton, letter to Senator James Inhofe, 24 August 1998.
“The probability that a missile armed with weapons of mass destruction”: National Intelligence Council Report, Foreign Missile Developments and Ballistic Missile Threat to the Uniied States through 2015, 2000.
“barely plausible when there was only one nuclear oppo- nent”: Henry Kissinger, “Ready for Revitalizing,” Wash- ington Post, 9 March 1995, p. A21.
“in a small number of cases”: Colin Powell, remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 26 September 2002.
“Preemption . . . runs completely against U.S. political and strategic culture”: Frank Hoffman quoted in Thomas E.
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Ricks and Vernon Loeb, “Bush Developing Military Policy of Striking First,” 10 June 2002.
“would not be consistent”: Dick Armey quoted by Eric Schmitt, “Iraq Is Defiant as G.O.P. Leader Opposes Attack,” New York Times, 9 August 2002, p. A6.
“What this doctrine does is to destroy”: Al Gore, remarks at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, 23 September 2002.
“the right of every sovereign state to protect”: Secretary of State Elihu Root quoted by Ruth Wedgwood in “Six Degrees of Preemption,” Washington Post, 29 September 2002, p. B2.
“Nor need a would-be victim nation wait”: Richard Regan, Just War (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), p. 51.
“Potential victims cannot wait”: Kissinger, Washington Post, 10 December 2002, p. A29.
“Preemption as intervention”: Robert Killebrew quoted in “Six Degrees of Preemption,” Washington Post, 29 Sep- tember 2002, p. B2.
“Forward engagement means addressing problems”: 2000 Democratic Party Platform, 15 August 2000.
“the developing norm in favour of intervention”: Kofi Annan, “Two Concepts of Sovereignty,” The Economist, 18 September 1999.
“What you are seeing in this administration”: Richard Haass quoted in Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order,” New Yorker, 1 April 2002, p. 42.
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“Israelʼs sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor”: “Israelʼs Illusion,” New York Times, 9 June 1981, p. A14.
“We under no circumstances will allow an enemy”: Israeli government statement about the attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor, 8 June 1981.
“Historyʼs judgment should inform our own judgment today”: Benjamin Netanyahu, remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 14 September 2002.
“History is littered with cases of inaction”: Condoleezza Rice, BBC Radio 4, 15 August 2002.
“I believe any action in Iraq at this time”: Dianne Feinstein, remarks to the 107th Congress, 5 September 2002.
“very, very dire consequences”: Tom Daschle, remarks to reporters, 3 September 2002.
“In all the years I have seen”: King Abdullah of Jordan quoted in Glenn Kessler and Peter Slavin, “Abdullah: Foreign Leaders Oppose Attack; Jordanian King to Urge Bush to Focus on Peace in Mideast, Not Invasion of Iraq,” Washington Post, 1 August 2002, p. A24.
“Germany will not participate”: Gerhard Schroeder, ARD Television, 10 August 2002.
“we have to follow the United Nations”: Jean Chretien, remarks to President Bush in Detroit, 10 September 2002.
“faced a simple choice”: Richard Holbrooke, “Give Diplo- macy More Time,” Washington Post, 7 September 2002, p. A17.
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“may emerge as greater than the sum”: Boutros Boutros- Ghali quoted in Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1991), p. 82.
“There is nothing wrong with the Charter”: Quoted in Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership, p. 78.
“In fact, even as [Prime Minister] Chirac was proclaiming the sanctity”: “Let the U.N. Vote,” Washington Post, 23 October 2002.
“France and Russia have turned the United Nations”: Fareed Zakaria, “The Lonesome Doves of Europe,” News- week, 30 September 2002.
“open the gates of hell in the Middle East”: Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, 5 September 2002.
“being so eager to oppose Bush”: Salman Rushdie, “A Liberal Argument for Regime Change,” Washington Post, 1 November 2002.
“the utopian nihilism of a left”: David Rieff, World Policy Journal, 22 June 1999.
“Instead of internationalism, we find among the left”: Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post, 20 October 2002.
“a constructive source of restraint”: Stanley Hoffman, “America Alone in the World,” American Prospect, 23 September 2002, p. 20.
“multilateralism is the isolationism of the internationalist”: Charles Krauthammer, “Alone at the Top,” Commercial
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Appeal, 21 July 1991, p. B4.
“The crucial difference between the Democratic estab- lishmentʼs support”: Will Marshall quoted in Lawrence Kaplan, “On Iraq, McGovernism Returns,” New Republic, 28 January 2002.
“obviously, U.S. national security is not at stake”: Michael Walzer quoted in Lawrence Kaplan, “Meanwhile on the Left . . . ,” National Interest, Spring 2000.
“the important question is not whether other countries”: Editorial, New Republic, 23 September 2002.
Chapter 8: From Containment to Regime Change
“champion the cause of human dignity”: National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002, 17 September 2002.
“Liberty for the Iraqi people”: President George W. Bush in a speech in Cincinnati, 7 October 2002.
“It would not contribute to the stability”: Colin Powell, My American Journey, paperback edition (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 512.
“Dire consequences would be the effect”: Brent Scowcroft, “Donʼt Attack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2002, p. 12.
“morass”: Lawrence Eagleburger on Meet the Press, NBC, 1 September 2002.
“how we are going to deal”: Lawrence Eagleburger on Crossfire, CNN, 19 August 2002.
“What comes after a military invasion?”: Senator Chuck Hagel on This Week, ABC, 1 September 2002.
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“the overwhelming majority of the population”: Phebe Marr, remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Commit- tee, 1 August 2002.
“we will not have a civil war in Iraq”: Rend Rahim Francke, remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee, 1 August 2002.
“One way to reconcile territorial integrity”: Michael Man- delbaum, “U.S. Must Plan Post-Hussein Iraq,” Newsday, 1 August 2002, p. A37.
“The President looked forward to a day”: Michael Elliot, “The Lessons of Empire: As Bush Considers Colonizing Iraq, He Ought to Look at the Last Attempt,” Time, 7 Octo- ber 2002, p. 38.
“Democracy cannot be imposed”: Shibley Telhami, “A Hidden Cost of War on Iraq,” New York Times, 7 October 2002, p. A19.
“create a constitution assembly”: Laith Kubba, “How to Achieve Democracy in Iraq,” Financial Times, 7 October 2002, p. 13.
“a government that is democratic and pluralistic”: Vice President Dick Cheney, remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee, 26 August 2002.
“what the Arab world desperately needs”: Thomas Friedman, “Iraq Debate Is Upside Down: America Has More to Fear from Angry Radicals with Nothing to Lose,” New York Times, 19 September 2002, p. A18.
“prove to be as large as anything”: Kanan Makiya, “The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,” remarks at a conference at the American Enterprise Institute, 3 October
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2002.
“unlikely to change the contemporary Arab view”: Adam Garfinkle, “The Impossible Imperative? Conjuring Arab Democracy,” National Interest, Fall 2002.
“desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers”: Powell, My American Journey, p. 513.
“from imported western modules of ʻinstant democracy ̓“: Graham Fuller, “The Future of Political Islam,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002, p. 48.
“I doubt that democracy U.S.-style can be exported”: Howard Wiarda, “Can Democracy Be Exported? The Quest for Democracy in the United States Latin Policy,” paper prepared for the Inter-American Dialogue on United States-Latin American Relations in the 1980s, sponsored by the Latin America Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., March 1983.
“the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy”: Joseph Grew quoted in Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1991), p. 71.
“is not realistic in the Muslim world”: Paula Dobriansky, speech to the Heritage Foundation, “The Diplomatic Front of the War on Terrorism: Can the Promotion of Democracy and Human Rights Tip the Scales?” 21 December 2001.
“the peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve”: President George W. Bush, speech at West Point Military Academy, 1 June 2002.
“I detect a dangerous arrogance”: Senator Chuck Hagel quoted in James Kitfield, “The New New World Order,”
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National Journal, 2 November 2002.
“The intersection of radicalism with technology”: John Lewis Gaddis, “A Grand Strategy of Transformation,” Foreign Policy, 1 November 2002.
“moderate Arab states would provide”: Martin Indyk, “Long War in the Making,” Foreign Affairs, January/ February 2002, p. 75.
“suffer the fate of the Shah of Iran”: Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, letter to President Bush, 28 October 2001.
“We reject the condescending view”: Condoleezza Rice, Wriston Lecture, 1 October 2002.
“will use this moment of opportunity”: National Security Strategy, 2002.
“The United States possesses unprecedented”: President Bush, speech at U.S. Military Academy at West Point, 1 June 2002.
“No people on earth yearn to be oppressed”: National Security Strategy, 2002.
“balance of power that favors freedom”: National Security Strategy, 2002.
“Cast in these terms, Muslims and Christians”: Michael McFaul, “The Liberty Doctrine: Reclaiming the Purpose of American Power,” Policy Review, 1 April 2002, p. 3.
“[When] the consent of the citizens”: Immanuel Kant quoted in Michael U. Doyle, “Liberalism and War Poli- tics,” American Political Science Review, vol. 80, no. 4,
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pp. 1151-69.
“is a strategy based on the very realistic view”: G. John Ikenberry, “Why Export Democracy?” Wilson Quarterly, 22 March 1999, p. 56.
“democratic government in a place that has never known one”: Leon Fuerth, “Intoxicated with Power,” Washington Post, 16 October 2002, p. A25.
“that most dangerous breed of men, utopians”: Anthony Lewis, “Bush and Iraq,” New York Review of Books, 7 November 2002.
“countries that have no past experience of democracy”: Stanley Hoffman, “America Alone in the World,” Ameri- can Prospect, 23 September 2002, p. 20.
“The Cold War led us astray”: Joseph Duffey quoted in an interview with Dick Kirschten, “Restive Relic,” National Journal, 22 April 1995, p. 976.
“forces beyond our control will have the most”: George McGovern, quoted in John Ehrman, The Rise of Neocon- servatism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 59.
“an age in which technology and electronics”: Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconserva- tism, p. 30.
“the fellow travelers of the new global economy”: Sandy Berger, speech to the Council on Foreign Relations: “Building a New Consensus on China,” 6 June 1997.
“a force for change in China”: President Bill Clinton, speech on nuclear testing, 3 June 1998.
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“The Chinese case destroys the American pretension”: edi- torial, Le Monde, quoted in Craig R. Whitney, “Dissents on Iran and Iraq,” New York Times, 9 November 1997, p. D1.
“American power and leadership have been more respon- sible”: Christopher Patten, quoted in G. John Ikenberry, “The West: Precious, Not Unique,” Wilson Quarterly, 22 March 1997, p. 162.
“The Communist leaders say, ʻDonʼt interfereʼ”: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Warming to the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 48.
“we are still inclined to pretend”: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribnerʼs Sons, 1960; reprint, 1994), p. ix.
“one of those prehistoric monsters”: George Kennan, quoted in Robert Kagan, “American Power—A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreign Policy and U.S. Intervention in Foreign Conflicts,” Commentary, April 1996.
“have a special interest in the development”: Samuel Huntington quoted in Lawrence Kaplan, “Fall Guys,” New Republic, 26 June 2000.
“The assumption that our values are universal”: Robert F. Ellsworth and Dimitri K. Simes, “Imposing Our ʻValues ̓ by Force,” Washington Post, 29 December 1999.
Chapter 9: From Ambivalence to Leadership
“surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States”: President George W. Bush, “The Bush Doctrine,” speech to a joint session of Congress, 20 September 2001.
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“The vision laid out in the Bush document”: Hendrik Hertzberg, “Manifesto,” New Yorker, 14 October 2002.
“The Bush administration has clearly broken”: Frances Fitzgerald, “George Bush and the World,” New York Review of Books, 26 September 2002.
“requirements of freedom apply fully”: President George W. Bush, speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, 1 June 2002.
“[T]his is a period not just of grave danger”: Condoleezza Rice, speech to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Inter- national Studies, 29 April 2002.
“America must be the dominant power”: James Forrestal quoted in David Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
“international moral order”: Henry Luce, quoted in Wil- liam Kristol and Robert Kagan, Present Dangers (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 10.
“The American president and his key advisers”: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War His- tory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 12.
“one of the most powerful forces for good”: President Harry Truman, “Address before a Joint Session of the Con- gress, April 16, 1945,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry Truman, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 6.
“Hitler had indicated what he intended to do”: Donald Rumsfeld, interview on Fox Special Report with Brit Hume, 19 August 2002.
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“Rumsfeld is a product of a time and generation”: Evan Thomas, “Rumsfeldʼs War,” Newsweek, 16 September 2002, p. 20.
“it is always 1968, the dark night”: Noemie Emery, “Quag- mire Nostalgia,” Weekly Standard, 11 November 2002.
“Bosnia was not Vietnam”: Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 118.
“I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam”: Anthony Lewis, “Bush and Iraq,” New York Review of Books, 7 November 2002.
“learned from Vietnam”: President George H. W. Bush, quoted in Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), p. 104.
“weʼve kicked the Vietnam syndrome”: President George H. W. Bush, 1 March 1991.
“Weʼve lived through that once already”: President George H. W. Bush, ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the start of the battle of Guadalcanal, 7 August 1992.
“remember the lessons of Vietnam”: President George W. Bush, acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, 4 August 2000.
“Vietnam has become the defense establishmentʼs moral- ity play”: Eliot Cohen, “Enough Blame to Go Round,” National Interest, Spring 1998.
“In none of these recent foreign crises”: Colin Powell, My American Journey, paperback edition (New York: Random
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House, 1996), p. 589.
“interfere in the internal affairs”: President Jimmy Carter, address to the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo, 28 May 1975, quoted in Robert Kagan, A Twilight Strug- gle: American Power in Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 51.
“We no longer have the luxury”: Michele Flournoy, quoted
in “Terrorist Strikes Bring ʻHomeland Defense ̓to Fore- front,” Associated Press, 16 September 2001.
“America has no empire to extend”: President George W. Bush, speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, 1 June 2002.
“A policeman gets his assignments”: Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1991), p. 1.
“a superpower is more credible”: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, “The Case for Strategic Sense,” Washington Post, 13 September 1999, p. A27.
“the very countervailing coalition”: Charles A. Kupchan quoted in Judith Miller, “Keeping U.S. No. 1,” New York Times, 26 October 2002, p. B5.
“hold American and allied cities hostage”: Robert Joseph, statement to the House Armed Services Committee, 28 June 2000.
- Contents
- Introduction
- Tyranny at Home
- Aggression Abroad
- Weapons of Mass Destruction
- Narrow Realism (Bush I)
- Wishful Liberalism (Clinton)
- A Distinctly American Internationalism (Bush II)
- From Deterrence to Preemption
- From Containment to Regime Change
- From Ambivalence to Leadership
- Notes
