COMMENT:
Stephen Walt is the author of the classical balancing versus bandwagoning
theory of international relations, referred to, to take one example, in Samuel
Huntington's bestseller "A Clash of Civilizations." If you go to school for
international relations, you read Stephen Walt. Here he and Mearsheimer make
the point, as has another giant of foreign policy, Robert Jervis,
that there is nothing about Saddam Hussein which could not be dealt with
by ordinary means of statesmanship. Jervis says: "American
policy is foolish and... Iraq does not pose a threat that is beyond the reach
of normal statecraft." Such statecraft would include invoking a
doctrine which kept the world from nuclear disaster during the 50 years
of the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. Walt points
out that in a 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs:
National Security
Advisor Rice described how the United States should
react if Iraq acquired
WMD. "The first line of defense," she wrote, "should be a clear and classical
statement of deterrence—if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable
because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."
Walt writes:
If
she believed Iraq’s
weapons would be unusable in 2000, why does she now think Saddam must be toppled
before he gets them? For that matter, why does she now think a nuclear arsenal
would enable Saddam to blackmail the entire international community, when she
did not even mention this possibility in 2000?
Walt addresses the notion that Saddam
is an irrational actor. He says he is bad, like many dictators in the world
(many of whom we support), but not
irrational, and is "eminently deterrable."
-Polis
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An Unnecessary
War
(Foreign Policy: The Magazine of Global Politics, Economics, and
Ideas, Jan/Feb2003)
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In the full-court press for war with Iraq, the Bush
administration deems Saddam Hussein reckless, ruthless, and not fully
rational. Such a man, when mixed with nuclear weapons, is too unpredictable
to be prevented from threatening the United States, the hawks say. But
scrutiny of his past dealings with the world shows that Saddam, though cruel
and calculating, is eminently deterrable.
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By John
J. Mearsheimer and Stephen
M. Walt
Should the United States
invade Iraq and
depose Saddam Hussein? If the United States
is already at war with Iraq
when this article is published, the immediate cause is likely to be Saddam’s
failure to comply with the new U.N. inspections regime to the Bush
administration’s satisfaction. But this failure is not the real reason Saddam
and the United States have been on a collision course
over the past year.
The deeper root of the conflict is the U.S.
position that Saddam must be toppled because he cannot be deterred from using
weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Advocates of preventive war use numerous
arguments to make their case, but their trump card is the charge that Saddam’s
past behavior proves he is too reckless, relentless, and aggressive to be
allowed to possess WMD, especially nuclear weapons. They sometimes admit that
war against Iraq
might be costly, might lead to a lengthy U.S.
occupation, and might complicate U.S.
relations with other countries. But these concerns are eclipsed by the belief
that the combination of Saddam plus nuclear weapons is too dangerous to accept.
For that reason alone, he has to go.
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Even many opponents of preventive war seem to agree deterrence will not work
in Iraq.
Instead of invading Iraq
and overthrowing the regime, however, these moderates favor using the threat of
war to compel Saddam to permit new weapons inspections. Their hope is that
inspections will eliminate any hidden WMD stockpiles and production facilities
and ensure Saddam cannot acquire any of these deadly weapons. Thus, both the
hard-line preventive-war advocates and the more moderate supporters of
inspections accept the same basic premise: Saddam Hussein is not deterrable, and he cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear
arsenal.
One problem with this argument: It is almost certainly wrong. The belief that
Saddam’s past behavior shows he cannot be contained rests on distorted history
and faulty logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United
States can contain Iraq
effectively—even if Saddam has nuclear weapons—just as it contained the Soviet
Union during the Cold War. Regardless of whether Iraq
complies with U.N. inspections or what the inspectors find, the campaign to
wage war against Iraq
rests on a flimsy foundation.
Is Saddam a Serial Aggressor?
Those who call for preventive war begin by portraying Saddam as a serial
aggressor bent on dominating the Persian Gulf. The war
party also contends that Saddam is either irrational or prone to serious
miscalculation, which means he may not be deterred by even credible threats of
retaliation. Kenneth Pollack, former director for gulf affairs at the National
Security Council and a proponent of war with Iraq,
goes so far as to argue that Saddam is “unintentionally suicidal.”
The facts, however, tell a different story. Saddam has dominated Iraqi politics
for more than 30 years. During that period, he started two wars against his
neighbors—Iran
in 1980 and Kuwait
in 1990. Saddam’s record in this regard is no worse than that of neighboring
states such as Egypt
or Israel, each
of which played a role in starting several wars since 1948. Furthermore, a
careful look at Saddam’s two wars shows his behavior was far from reckless.
Both times, he attacked because Iraq
was vulnerable and because he believed his targets were weak and isolated. In
each case, his goal was to rectify Iraq’s
strategic dilemma with a limited military victory. Such reasoning does not
excuse Saddam’s aggression, but his willingness to use force on these occasions
hardly demonstrates that he cannot be deterred.
The Iran-Iraq War, 1980–88
Iran was the
most powerful state in the Persian Gulf during the
1970s. Its strength was partly due to its large population (roughly three times
that of Iraq)
and its oil reserves, but it also stemmed from the strong support the shah of Iran
received from the United States.
Relations between Iraq
and Iran were
quite hostile throughout this period, but Iraq
was in no position to defy Iran’s
regional dominance. Iran
put constant pressure on Saddam’s regime during the early 1970s, mostly by
fomenting unrest among Iraq’s
sizable Kurdish minority. Iraq
finally persuaded the shah to stop meddling with the Kurds in 1975, but only by
agreeing to cede half of the Shatt al-Arab waterway
to Iran, a
concession that underscored Iraq’s
weakness.
It is thus not surprising that Saddam welcomed the shah’s ouster in 1979. Iraq
went to considerable lengths to foster good relations with Iran’s
revolutionary leadership. Saddam did not exploit the turmoil in Iran
to gain strategic advantage over his neighbor and made no attempt to reverse
his earlier concessions, even though Iran
did not fully comply with the terms of the 1975 agreement. Ruhollah
Khomeini, on the other hand, was determined to extend his revolution across the
Islamic world, starting with Iraq.
By late 1979, Tehran was pushing
the Kurdish and Shiite populations in Iraq
to revolt and topple Saddam, and Iranian operatives were trying to assassinate
senior Iraqi officials. Border clashes became increasingly frequent by April
1980, largely at Iran’s
instigation.
Facing a grave threat to his regime, but aware that Iran’s
military readiness had been temporarily disrupted by the revolution, Saddam
launched a limited war against his bitter foe on September 22, 1980. His principal aim was to capture a
large slice of territory along the Iraq-Iran border, not to conquer Iran
or topple Khomeini. “The war began,” as military analyst Efraim
Karsh writes, “because the weaker state, Iraq,
attempted to resist the hegemonic aspirations of its stronger neighbor, Iran,
to reshape the regional status quo according to its own image.”
Iran and Iraq
fought for eight years, and the war cost the two antagonists more than 1
million casualties and at least $150 billion. Iraq received considerable
outside support from other countries—including the United States, Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, and France—largely because these states were determined to prevent the
spread of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Although the war cost Iraq
far more than Saddam expected, it also thwarted
Khomeini’s attempt to topple him and dominate the region. War with Iran
was not a reckless adventure; it was an opportunistic response to a significant
threat.
The Gulf War, 1990–91
But what about Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait
in August 1990? Perhaps the earlier war with Iran
was essentially defensive, but surely this was not true in the case of Kuwait.
Doesn’t Saddam’s decision to invade his tiny neighbor prove he is too rash and
aggressive to be trusted with the most destructive weaponry? And doesn’t his
refusal to withdraw, even when confronted by a superior coalition, demonstrate
he is “unintentionally suicidal”?
The answer is no. Once again, a careful look shows Saddam was neither
mindlessly aggressive nor particularly reckless. If anything, the evidence
supports the opposite conclusion.
Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait
was primarily an attempt to deal with Iraq’s
continued vulnerability. Iraq’s
economy, badly damaged by its war with Iran,
continued to decline after that war ended. An important cause of Iraq’s
difficulties was Kuwait’s
refusal both to loan Iraq
$10 billion and to write off debts Iraq
had incurred during the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam believed Iraq
was entitled to additional aid because the country helped protect Kuwait
and other Gulf states from
Iranian expansionism. To make matters worse, Kuwait
was overproducing the quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, which drove down world oil prices and reduced Iraqi oil profits.
Saddam tried using diplomacy to solve the problem, but Kuwait
hardly budged. As Karsh and fellow Hussein biographer
Inari Rautsi note, the
Kuwaitis “suspected that some concessions might be necessary, but were
determined to reduce them to the barest minimum.”
Saddam reportedly decided on war sometime in July 1990, but before sending his
army into Kuwait,
he approached the United States
to find out how it would react. In a now famous interview with the Iraqi
leader, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam,
“[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like
your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
The U.S. State Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington
had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.”
The United States
may not have intended to give Iraq
a green light, but that is effectively what it did.
Saddam invaded Kuwait
in early August 1990. This act was an obvious violation of international law,
and the United States
was justified in opposing the invasion and organizing a coalition against it.
But Saddam’s decision to invade was hardly irrational or reckless. Deterrence
did not fail in this case; it was never tried.
But what about Saddam’s failure to leave Kuwait
once the United States
demanded a return to the status quo ante? Wouldn’t a prudent leader have
abandoned Kuwait
before getting clobbered? With hindsight, the answer seems obvious, but Saddam
had good reasons to believe hanging tough might work. It was not initially
apparent that the United States
would actually fight, and most Western military experts predicted the Iraqi
army would mount a formidable defense. These forecasts seem foolish today, but
many people believed them before the war began.
Once the U.S.
air campaign had seriously damaged Iraq’s
armed forces, however, Saddam began searching for a diplomatic solution that
would allow him to retreat from Kuwait
before a ground war began. Indeed, Saddam made clear he was willing to pull out
completely. Instead of allowing Iraq
to withdraw and fight another day, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush and his
administration wisely insisted the Iraqi army leave its equipment behind as it
withdrew. As the administration had hoped, Saddam could not accept this kind of
deal.
Saddam undoubtedly miscalculated when he attacked Kuwait,
but the history of warfare is full of cases where leaders have misjudged the
prospects for war. No evidence suggests Hussein did not weigh his options
carefully, however. He chose to use force because he was facing a serious
challenge and because he had good reasons to think his invasion would not
provoke serious opposition.
Nor should anyone forget that the Iraqi tyrant survived the Kuwait
debacle, just as he has survived other threats against his regime. He is now
beginning his fourth decade in power. If he is really “unintentionally suicidal,”
then his survival instincts appear to be even more finely honed.
History provides at least two more pieces of evidence that demonstrate Saddam
is deterrable. First, although he launched
conventionally armed Scud missiles at Saudi
Arabia and Israel
during the Gulf War, he did not launch chemical or biological weapons at the
coalition forces that were decimating the Iraqi military. Moreover, senior
Iraqi officials—including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq
Aziz and the former head of military intelligence,
General Wafiq al-Samarrai—have
said that Iraq refrained from using chemical weapons because the Bush Sr.
administration made ambiguous but unmistakable threats to retaliate if Iraq
used WMD. Second, in 1994 Iraq
mobilized the remnants of its army on the Kuwaiti border in an apparent attempt
to force a modification of the U.N. Special Commission’s (UNSCOM) weapons
inspection regime. But when the United Nations issued a new warning and the United
States reinforced its troops in Kuwait,
Iraq backed
down quickly. In both cases, the allegedly irrational Iraqi leader was
deterred.
Saddam’s Use of Chemical weapons
Preventive-war advocates also use a second line of argument. They point out
that Saddam has used WMD against his own people (the Kurds) and against Iran
and that therefore he is likely to use them against the United
States. Thus, U.S. President George W. Bush
recently warned in Cincinnati that
the Iraqi WMD threat against the United States
“is already significant, and it only grows worse with time.” The United
States, in other words, is in imminent
danger.
Saddam’s record of chemical weapons use is deplorable, but none of his victims
had a similar arsenal and thus could not threaten to respond in kind. Iraq’s
calculations would be entirely different when facing the United
States because Washington
could retaliate with WMD if Iraq
ever decided to use these weapons first. Saddam thus has no incentive to use
chemical or nuclear weapons against the United
States and its allies—unless his survival is
threatened. This simple logic explains why he did not use WMD against U.S.
forces during the Gulf War and has not fired chemical or biological warheads at
Israel.
Furthermore, if Saddam cannot be deterred, what is stopping him from using WMD
against U.S.
forces in the Persian Gulf, which have bombed Iraq
repeatedly over the past decade? The bottom line: Deterrence has worked well
against Saddam in the past, and there is no reason to think it cannot work
equally well in the future.
President Bush’s repeated claim that the threat from Iraq
is growing makes little sense in light of Saddam’s past record, and these
statements should be viewed as transparent attempts to scare Americans into
supporting a war. cia
Director George Tenet flatly contradicted the president in an October 2002
letter to Congress, explaining that Saddam was unlikely to initiate a WMD
attack against any U.S.
target unless Washington provoked
him. Even if Iraq
did acquire a larger WMD arsenal, the United
States would still retain a massive nuclear
retaliatory capability. And if Saddam would only use WMD if the United
States threatened his regime, then one
wonders why advocates of war are trying to do just that.
Hawks do have a fallback position on this issue. Yes, the United
States can try to deter Saddam by
threatening to retaliate with massive force. But this strategy may not work
because Iraq’s
past use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran
shows that Saddam is a warped human being who might use WMD without regard for
the consequences.
Unfortunately for those who now favor war, this argument is difficult to
reconcile with the United States’
past support for Iraq,
support that coincided with some of the behavior now being invoked to portray
him as an irrational madman. The United States backed Iraq during the
1980s—when Saddam was gassing Kurds and Iranians—and helped Iraq use chemical
weapons more effectively by providing it with satellite imagery of Iranian
troop positions. The Reagan administration also facilitated Iraq’s
efforts to develop biological weapons by allowing Baghdad
to import disease-producing biological materials such as anthrax, West
Nile virus, and botulinal toxin. A
central figure in the effort to court Iraq
was none other than current U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
who was then President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle
East. He visited Baghdad
and met with Saddam in 1983, with the explicit aim of fostering better
relations between the United States
and Iraq. In
October 1989, about a year after Saddam gassed the Kurds, President George H.W.
Bush signed a formal national security directive declaring, “Normal
relations between the United States
and Iraq would
serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle
East.”
If Saddam’s use of chemical weapons so clearly indicates he is a madman and
cannot be contained, why did the United States
fail to see that in the 1980s? Why were Rumsfeld and
former President Bush then so unconcerned about his chemical and biological weapons?
The most likely answer is that U.S.
policymakers correctly understood Saddam was unlikely to use those weapons
against the United States
and its allies unless Washington
threatened him directly. The real puzzle is why they think it would be
impossible to deter him today.
Saddam With Nukes
The third strike against a policy of containment, according to those who have
called for war, is that such a policy is unlikely to stop Saddam from getting
nuclear weapons. Once he gets them, so the argument runs, a host of really bad
things will happen. For example, President Bush has warned that Saddam intends
to “blackmail the world”; likewise, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
believes he would use nuclear weapons to “blackmail the entire international community.”
Others fear a nuclear arsenal would enable Iraq
to invade its neighbors and then deter the United
States from ousting the Iraqi army as it did
in 1991. Even worse, Saddam might surreptitiously slip a nuclear weapon to al Qaeda or some like-minded terrorist organization, thereby
making it possible for these groups to attack the United
States directly.
The administration and its supporters may be right in one sense: Containment
may not be enough to prevent Iraq
from acquiring nuclear weapons someday. Only the conquest and permanent
occupation of Iraq
could guarantee that. Yet the United States
can contain a nuclear Iraq,
just as it contained the Soviet Union. None of the
nightmare scenarios invoked by preventive-war advocates are likely to happen.
Consider the claim that Saddam would employ nuclear blackmail against his
adversaries. To force another state to make concessions, a blackmailer must
make clear that he would use nuclear weapons against the target state if he
does not get his way. But this strategy is feasible only if the blackmailer has
nuclear weapons but neither the target state nor its allies do.
If the blackmailer and the target state both have nuclear weapons, however, the
blackmailer’s threat is an empty one because the blackmailer cannot carry out
the threat without triggering his own destruction. This logic explains why the Soviet
Union, which had a vast nuclear arsenal for much of the Cold War,
was never able to blackmail the United States
or its allies and did not even try.
But what if Saddam invaded Kuwait
again and then said he would use nuclear weapons if the United
States attempted another Desert Storm?
Again, this threat is not credible. If Saddam initiated nuclear war against the
United States
over Kuwait, he
would bring U.S.
nuclear warheads down on his own head. Given the choice between withdrawing or dying, he would almost certainly choose the former. Thus,
the United States
could wage Desert Storm II against a nuclear-armed Saddam without precipitating
nuclear war.
Ironically, some of the officials now advocating war used to recognize that
Saddam could not employ nuclear weapons for offensive purposes. In the
January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, for example, National Security
Advisor Rice described how the United States
should react if Iraq
acquired WMD. “The first line of defense,” she wrote, “should be a clear and
classical statement of deterrence—if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be
unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” If
she believed Iraq’s
weapons would be unusable in 2000, why does she now think Saddam must be
toppled before he gets them? For that matter, why does she now think a nuclear
arsenal would enable Saddam to blackmail the entire international community,
when she did not even mention this possibility in 2000?
What About A
Nuclear Hand-Off?
Of course, now the real nightmare scenario is that Saddam would give nuclear
weapons secretly to al Qaeda or some other terrorist
group. Groups like al Qaeda would almost certainly
try to use those weapons against Israel
or the United States,
and so these countries have a powerful incentive to take all reasonable
measures to keep these weapons out of their hands.
However, the likelihood of clandestine transfer by Iraq
is extremely small. First of all, there is no credible evidence that Iraq
had anything to do with the terrorist attacks against the World
Trade Center
and the Pentagon or more generally that Iraq
is collaborating with al Qaeda against the United
States. Hawks inside and outside the Bush
administration have gone to extraordinary lengths over the past months to find
a link, but they have come up empty-handed.
The lack of evidence of any genuine connection between Saddam and al Qaeda is not surprising because relations between Saddam
and al Qaeda have been quite poor in the past. Osama bin Laden is a radical fundamentalist (like
Khomeini), and he detests secular leaders like Saddam. Similarly, Saddam has
consistently repressed fundamentalist movements within Iraq.
Given this history of enmity, the Iraqi dictator is unlikely to give al Qaeda nuclear weapons, which it might use in ways he could
not control.
Intense U.S.
pressure, of course, might eventually force these unlikely allies together,
just as the United States
and Communist Russia became allies during World War II. Saddam would still be
unlikely to share his most valuable weaponry with al Qaeda, however, because he
could not be confident it would not be used in ways that place his own survival
in jeopardy. During the Cold War, the United
States did not share all its WMD expertise
with its own allies, and the Soviet Union balked at
giving nuclear weapons to China
despite their ideological sympathies and repeated Chinese requests. No evidence
suggests Saddam would act differently.
Second, Saddam could hardly be confident that the transfer would go undetected.
Since September 11, U.S.
intelligence agencies and those of its allies have been riveted on al Qaeda and Iraq,
paying special attention to finding links between them. If Iraq
possessed nuclear weapons, U.S.
monitoring of those two adversaries would be further intensified. To give
nuclear materials to al Qaeda, Saddam would have to
bet he could elude the eyes and ears of numerous intelligence services
determined to catch him if he tries a nuclear handoff. This bet would not be a
safe one.
But even if Saddam thought he could covertly smuggle nuclear weapons to bin
Laden, he would still be unlikely to do so. Saddam has been trying to acquire
these weapons for over 20 years, at great cost and risk. Is it likely he would
then turn around and give them away? Furthermore, giving nuclear weapons to al Qaeda would be extremely risky for Saddam—even if he could
do so without being detected—because he would lose all control over when and
where they would be used. And Saddam could never be sure the United
States would not incinerate him anyway if it
merely suspected he had made it possible for anyone to strike the United
States with nuclear weapons. The U.S.
government and a clear majority of Americans are already deeply suspicious of Iraq,
and a nuclear attack against the United States
or its allies would raise that hostility to fever pitch. Saddam does not have
to be certain the United States
would retaliate to be wary of giving his nuclear weapons to al Qaeda; he merely has to suspect it might.
In sum, Saddam cannot afford to guess wrong on whether he would be detected
providing al Qaeda with nuclear weapons, nor can he
afford to guess wrong that Iraq would be spared if al Qaeda
launched a nuclear strike against the United States or its allies. And the
threat of U.S.
retaliation is not as far-fetched as one might think. The United
States has enhanced its flexible nuclear
options in recent years, and no one knows just how vengeful Americans might
feel if WMD were ever used against the U.S.
homeland. Indeed, nuclear terrorism is as dangerous for Saddam as it is for
Americans, and he has no more incentive to give al Qaeda
nuclear weapons than the United States does—unless, of course, the country
makes clear it is trying to overthrow him. Instead of attacking Iraq
and giving Saddam nothing to lose, the Bush administration should be signaling
it would hold him responsible if some terrorist group used WMD against the United
States, even if it cannot prove he is to
blame.
Vigilant Containment
It is not surprising that those who favor war with Iraq
portray Saddam as an inveterate and only partly rational aggressor. They are in
the business of selling a preventive war, so they must try to make remaining at
peace seem unacceptably dangerous. And the best way to do that is to inflate
the threat, either by exaggerating Iraq’s
capabilities or by suggesting horrible things will happen if the United
States does not act soon. It is equally
unsurprising that advocates of war are willing to distort the historical record
to make their case. As former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously
remarked, in politics, advocacy “must be clearer than truth.”
In this case, however, the truth points the other way. Both logic and
historical evidence suggest a policy of vigilant containment would work, both now and in the event Iraq
acquires a nuclear arsenal. Why? Because the United States and its regional allies are far stronger than Iraq.
And because it does not take a genius to figure out what would happen if Iraq
tried to use WMD to blackmail its neighbors, expand its territory, or attack
another state directly. It only takes a leader who wants to stay alive and who
wants to remain in power. Throughout his lengthy and brutal career, Saddam
Hussein has repeatedly shown that these two goals are absolutely paramount.
That is why deterrence and containment would work.
If the United States
is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq,
Americans should understand that a compelling strategic rationale is absent.
This war would be one the Bush administration chose to fight but did not have
to fight. Even if such a war goes well and has positive long-range
consequences, it will still have been unnecessary. And if it goes badly—whether
in the form of high U.S.
casualties, significant civilian deaths, a heightened risk of terrorism, or
increased hatred of the United States
in the Arab and Islamic world—then its architects will have even more to answer
for.
John J. Mearsheimer
is the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science
at the University of Chicago, where he codirects the
Program in International Security Policy. He is the author of The
Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Stephen M. Walt is the
academic dean and the Robert and Renee Belfer
professor of international affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is faculty chair of the
International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and is writing
a book on global responses to American primacy..