Ian Boyne, ContributorNO ONE can properly assess the heated, often belligerent and bellicose arguments for and against the proposed United States (US) attack on Iraq without an understanding of the dangerous Bush Doctrine which was enunciated last year.
The Bush Doctrine basically says that the US had the moral right to launch a pre-emptive attack on any state it deems a threat to the United States.
This was a complete and radical repudiation of all the principles of diplomacy and mainstream US foreign policy thinking since the 1940s. The touch-tone of U.S. foreign policy was containment and deterrence.
Since the Cold War containment, a doctrine first broached in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal by George Kennan in that famous pseudonymous piece under 'Mr. X'. Basically, the doctrine surrounded nuclear deterrence and a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which essentially said that US military might would contain Soviet expansionism and would actually work for global peace and security.
It worked, for despite the avowedly expansionist aims of the Soviet Union, which believed that history was inevitably on its side, the U.S. was able to maintain its sphere of influence.
It is felt now, however, that we are in a new era, and that September 11 has changed all of that. Containment and deterrence cannot work with terrorists who are not bounded by states and who are not afraid of undertaking suicide missions.
You contain and deter rational, calculating individuals who can logically assess the odds stacked against them. Religious fanatics hell-bent (or Heaven-bent) on destroying 'infidels' and establishing Allah's will on the earth don't fear for their lives and, therefore, deterrence loses its force.
But "a madman and egomaniac like Saddam Hussein" whom one writer describes as "unintentionally suicidal" and who has already demonstrated that he can miscalculate badly (Witness his invasion of Kuwait and his unpreparedness for the US response) cannot be deterred or contained. The only way to deal with him, war advocates say, is to take him out. He is ruthless, reckless, irrational and masochistic. Indeed, among the hawks he is called the New Hitler.
Many of those who are opposed to the attack on Iraq argue their case from a moral point of view and, indeed, the arguments for the immoral and unprincipled stand of the United States is overwhelming.
However, because the moral argument in a post-modern, relativistic and pragmatic age has lost its force - and is only selectively appealed to by the hawks - the more convincing case to be brought to the public is the pragmatic case against going to war. There is a strong pragmatic case that the US and the world will lose far more by going to war with Saddam Hussein than by trying to use the United Nations and diplomacy to contain and deter him. Let's look at some arguments.
The two leading international relations journals in the United States have incisive, convincingly-argued essays giving the pragmatic case against the war in their current issues.
In the January-February issue of Foreign Policy, which ideologically launched the Cold War and which is regarded as the number one international relations journal, John Mearsheimer, author of the much-hailed 2001 tome The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and Stephen Walt write on An Unnecessary War. In the same issue, the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, Richard Betts, shows the dangers America exposes itself to on its own soil if Saddam Strikes back ('Suicide from Fear of Death').
The first point to note is that the facts don't bear out the propaganda of the warmongers and hegemonists that Saddam is a totally crazy, unalterably irrational and absolutely reckless demon who cannot be reasoned with. This has been a carefully crafted, cleverly packaged imaging of Saddam to justify the war.
Let's look at the facts - for the emotions are on both sides and both sides are distorting the facts.
CAN SADDAM BE DETERRED?
Saddam has been in power for 30 long years during which he has launched only two wars - with Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1939, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France in 1940 and Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1941. And he declared war on the US in 1941.
Let's go back to Saddam's war with Iran in 1980. Remember that Iran was seen as the gravest threat to the region at that time. Iran was fomenting strife in Iraq by supporting the rebelling Kurds and Shiites, the latter of whom constitute the majority in Iran. The religious fanatic Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to export his Islamist revolution all over the region and wanted to start with the secularist state of Iraq. The Kurds and Shi'ite populations were being supported to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It was in face of that threat to his country that Saddam calculatedly launched an attack in September 1980. His goal was to capture territory on the Iraq-Iran border, not to oust the Khomeini regime. Remember, too, that Iraq then received considerable support from neighbouring countries as well as the great moral policeman of the world, the United States.
Khomeini was then the greatest threat to the region, in the eyes of the US which backed Saddam. But some would ask what excuse did Saddam have for invading Kuwait.
What must be borne in mind - for we are trying to determine if Saddam can be deterred or contained - is that the US tacitly gave permission for Iraq to decide what to do with Kuwait. Before Saddam declared war in July 1990, he approached the United States to find out how it would react. In an interview which has now become famous, US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam: "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait". The U.S. State Department itself reinforced this by declaring that the U.S. had "no special defence or security commitments to Kuwait". In diplomatic language, while that is not an unequivocal green light, it was an indication that the U.S. did not feel strongly about a possible invasion.
The point is that if Saddam Hussein had been told clearly and forcefully, and if he had been threatened about his intention to go to war with Kuwait he might not have taken the decision. He is deterrable.
Even the former CIA analyst and the Director of Research at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, a major advocate of war on Iraq, admits in the March/April 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs ("Next Stop Baghdad?") in which he pushes heavily for war that "this is not to argue that Saddam is irrational. There is considerable evidence that he weighs costs and benefits and follows a crude logic in determining how best to achieve his goals and understands deterrence and has been deterred in the past.
"Few knowledgeable observers doubt that Saddam refrained from using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) when he attacked Israel during the Gulf War because he feared Israeli nuclear retaliation and he seems to have been deterred from using WMD against Saudi Arabia and coalition forces because he feared U.S. retaliation". This is a profound admission by a hawk.
Though Saddam has chemical weapons he did not use chemical warfare in the Gulf War. In 1994 Iraq mobilised force on the Kuwaiti border in an attempt to force modification of the weapons inspection regime. But when the United Nations issued its warning and the U.S. strengthened its forces in Kuwait, Saddam Hussein backed down. This man can be deterred. He is not the wild-eyed lunatic totally out of touch with reality that the propagandists make him out to be.
He is certainly no saint and has used nerve gas against his people and has oppressed them brutally. Saddam is a tyrant whom all progressive people agree should go - but not through tyrannical means such as those being proposed by the U.S. unilateralists.
Remember, too, that when Saddam was cruelly gassing his own people and the Iranians the U.S. had him as an ally. In fact, it was the Reagan Administration which facilitated Iraq's efforts to develop biological weapons, noted Mearsheimer and Walt in the Foreign Policy essay, "by allowing Baghdad to import disease-producing biological weapons such as anthrax, West Nile virus and botulinum toxin."
Ironically, a central figure in the drive to court Saddam was the same hawkish Donald Rumsfeld, now Defence Secretary, who was cosying up with Saddam beginning in 1983.
Ask Mearsheimer and Walt: "If Saddam's use of chemical weapons is such a clear indicator that 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 him having chemical and biological weapons? It was hardly a secret that Saddam was a brutal dictator and guilty of widespread human rights abuses and Iraq's invasion of Iran was a recent memory."
It is this type of double standard and hypocrisy which has characterised American foreign policy and which has led rational thinking people to say with justification that America has no moral authority to be the arbiter of global values. As former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick said famously in the 1970s, the Latin American right-wing dictators might be authoritarian but "they are our dictators".
SADDAM AND TERRORISTS
But what about the fear that Saddam could pass on nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda and other terrorists who would then threaten the United States and the free world? Some facts which the average person might not realise in all this propaganda swirling.
Saddam is no friend of the Islamists. Saddam is a secularists. He is regarded by al Qaeda as an "infidel" who has no spiritual legitimacy, an impostor over Allah's people. The secularists and the Islamists are united in their hatred and aversion to the United States and their resentment over its backing of Israel. They will make strategic alliances and bin Laden, if he is really alive, will support Iraq in any conflict with the United States. The old adage in international relations is "My enemy's enemy is my friend".
But think rationally. Would Saddam be such a madman as to empower al Qaeda with nuclear weapons knowing that its goal is the Islamisation of the world and particularly the region? Doesn't Saddam know that al Qaeda wants to capture all the secularist states back to the purity of the Shari?
Is Saddam so obsessed with hatred for the U.S. that he is intentionally suicidal? Remember he is no fanatical, suicide-bomber Muslim. And there is absolutely no evidence that Saddam Hussein has any link with the terrorist attacks of September 11.
"Hawks inside and outside the Bush Administration have gone to extraordinary lengths (since September 11) and they have come up empty-handed" to prove that, say Mearsheimer and Walt.
"America's political leaders have lost sight of the fact that when it comes to a showdown between two countries that both possess weapons of mass destruction, deterrence can work both ways. The United States is about to poke a snake out of a fear that the snake might strike some time in the future, while virtually ignoring the danger that it might strike back when America pokes it," says Richard Betts poignantly in his January-February essay in the highly-respected Foreign Affairs.
The CIA Director himself, George Tenet, told the Congress in October that Saddam would be more likely to use weapons of mass destruction as "his last chance to exact vengeance". Why is America risking this when Iraq is not outrightly rejecting the international community's overtures and demands?
Of course he lies, just like American politicians and can't be totally trusted, just like the American politicians (and the British).
Why is the U.S. risking massive civilian casualties, retaliation against Americans at home and abroad, a global economic slowdown if Saddam destroys his oil fields, and estrangement from important allies such as France and Germany?
Now, who is acting irrationally and recklessly?
