Dark victory

This does not mean that such states pose no threat to their neighbors or to international order, simply that they can and have been deterred from using WMD. Saddam Hussein sought and used chemical weapons as a means of offsetting Iran's numerical advantage on the ground in the Iraq-Iran War; those weapons also served as a handy means of terrifying rebellious Kurds. With respect to nuclear weapons, he almost certainly would have sought to acquire them even had he not regarded the United States as an obstacle to his regional ambitions. The prestige of nuclear weapons dwarfs that of other WMD, especially chemical weapons, and of Iraq's two regional archenemies, Israel and Iran, one already had them and the other was striving to get them. Prestige and Israeli possession of nuclear weapons have been no less motivational for Iran, which also regarded Saddam's bid for nuclear weapons as a clear threat. Iranian interest in nuclear weapons began under the Shah and was undoubtedly heightened by Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian front-line forces and missile attacks on Iranian cities during the Iraq-Iran War.

North Korea also lives in a tough neighborhood and views its actual or threatened nuclear capacity, along with its very destructive conventional military threat to Seoul, as a means of simultaneously deterring a U.S. attack and extorting food and fuel aid from the United States and Japan. Military power, especially its capacity to "go nuclear," is Pyongyang's only source of international significance, and if it has so far deterred U.S. military action against North Korea, it has also been deterred from attacking South Korea or Japan by the threat of unacceptable American retaliation.

Americans have difficulty placing themselves in another country's shoes, and when it comes to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by nondemocratic states they tend to dismiss the possibility that such states might have legitimate reasons for doing so, including a desire to deter attack by real and potential enemies, including the United States. Neoconservative opinion is, ironically, exceptional; it has long argued for "anticipatory" military action and national ballistic missile defenses precisely to prevent rogue states from deterring U.S. military action against them. David Hastings Dunn, in his critique of the Bush doctrine, addresses the administration's conclusion that the only purposes for which Saddam Hussein -- and by implication, other rogue state dictators -- sought to acquire WMD was to intimidate or attack: "The possibility that he wanted these weapons to deter or repulse an attack from the US is presumably discounted on the assumption that without such weapons he would have nothing to fear from the US. That the US sees no contradiction in applying these stringent criteria to others and yet sees no grounds for others to view its own defense policy in this way illustrates the limitations of this approach to national security policy."

(3) Saddam Hussein posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States or U.S. interests in the Middle East because he lacked deliverable WMD and offensive conventional military capacity and was in any event effectively deterred from any form of external aggression by credible American threats.

The grim and urgent Iraqi threat depicted by the Bush administration before the war was challenged by many at the time and subsequently discredited by the impotent performance of Iraqi conventional forces and U.S. failure to discover usable WMD. The administration chose war over a continuation of a UN inspection regime that had uncovered no evidence of any WMD, including a reconstituted nuclear weapons program, and whose continued presence would have precluded such a program. Indeed, prewar evidence cited by the administration that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program and was moving from a "smoking gun" toward a "mushroom cloud" turned out to be bogus or unreliable. As a threat to U.S. global security interests, Saddam Hussein's Iraq paled in comparison to North Korea and Pakistan, possessors as well as proliferators of nuclear weapons and their ballistic means of delivery, and, in the case of autocratic Pakistan, a continuing sponsor of terrorism against democratic India and host to rising Islamic extremism. Yet the administration chose war against Saddam Hussein, multilateral diplomacy for Kim Jong Il, and strategic partnership with Pervez Musharraf.

Saddam Hussein's behavior before and after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom reflected that of a would-be aggressor who was being effectively deterred. Saddam always loved himself more than he hated the United States. In 1990 he had no good reason to believe the United States would go to war over Kuwait in part because no credible American threat of retaliation was even attempted. Once the Americans surprised him, however, he remained deterred from taking any action that risked his regime's destruction. Though he had used WMD against helpless Kurds and Iranians, he never used them against any enemy capable of effective retaliation, and he remained consistent on this issue for the remainder of his time in power. His behavior in this regard was consistent with that of Communist North Korea, which though much better armed with WMD than post-1991 Iraq, remains deterred at both the conventional and nuclear levels of conflict. The Bush doctrine's assertion that credible deterrence is not reliable against rogue states (as opposed to nonstate terrorist organizations) awaits validation.

(4) The primary explanation for war against Iraq is the Bush White House's post-9/11 embrace of the neoconservatives' ideology regarding U.S. military primacy, use of force, and the Middle East.

The neoconservatives who populated the upper ranks of the Bush administration had been gunning for Saddam Hussein for years before 9/11. They had an articulated, aggressive, values-based foreign policy doctrine and a specific agenda for the Middle East that reflected hostility toward Arab autocracies and support for Israeli security interests as defined by that country's Likud political party. Before 9/11, however, they served a president who was focused on domestic policies and who was a self-avowed "realist" when it came to foreign policy. Then came 9/11 and what a perceptive account in the National Journal called President Bush's "borrowing wholesale from neoconservative arguments about how the United States should reposition itself in the world and use its unprecedented power." As for Saddam Hussein, "[w]e were talking about Iraq a long time before 9/11, but since 9/11 it became part of the new wisdom about how to shape the Middle East," commented Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Robert Jervis speculates that "Bush's transformation after September 11 may parallel his earlier religious conversion: Just as coming to Christ gave meaning to his previously dissolute personal life, so the war on terrorism has become the defining characteristic of his foreign policy and his sacred mission."

The neoconservative foreign policy doctrine and agenda offered an intellectual explanation of the world to a decidedly nonintellectual president, and some have even argued that President Bush's embrace of it was a case of the neoconservatives duping a witless White House. "The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience," asserts Michael Lind, adding that President Bush "seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's [WMD], something the leading neo-cons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves." This argument, however, does an injustice to both President Bush and the history of the office he holds. Few of America's forty-three presidents have been intellectuals, and many have been influenced by the ideas of others, as was Harry Truman by George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Paul H. Nitze, and the other intellectual and policy godfathers of Cold War containment. President Bush is certainly not the first president to believe himself embarked on a crusade against evil overseas; indeed, Bush's global democratic crusade is essentially an updated extension of Woodrow Wilson's. American foreign policy has always reflected tension between interests and values, realism and idealism.

Moreover, any administration that inherited the unprecedented global military primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union could not fail to be tempted to use military power in circumstances where no one else could effectively challenge it. In a piece in Foreign Affairs, Robert Jervis, an established scholar of international politics, concludes that more than 9/11 "or some shadowy neoconservative cabal" explains America's recent assertive unilateralism: "it is the logical outcome of the current unrivaled U.S. position in the international system. Put simply, power is checked by counterbalancing power, and a state that is not [counterbalanced] tends to feel few restraints at all." And it is difficult to characterize as a "cabal" a group of like-minded, outspoken intellectuals whose policy views have been known for years and who do not need secretive plotting to advance their cause inside the Bush White House.

(5) Conflating Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was a strategic mistake of the first order because it propelled the United States into an unnecessary war and weakened potential homeland defenses against terrorist attack.

Conversion of 9/11 into a case for war against Iraq required postulation of Saddam Hussein as Osama bin Laden's friend, operational collaborator, and potential source of WMD. This postulation in turn required a willful disregard of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To date, there is still no evidence of Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 attacks -- a fact finally conceded in mid-September 2003 by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Rice -- or in any other al-Qaeda attacks on Western targets before or since. Nor has evidence emerged of an operational relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. And none of this should have been a surprise, given the vastly different and inherently antagonistic identities and agendas of secular Saddam's state and antisecular Osama's stateless organization.

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