The War against Iraq fizzling out?

Great Debates
21

Another thing to consider: if the US decides to go to war (undeclared, of course) with Iraq, who’s going to pay for it? Back in 1990-91, more than half the cost of the action was paid for by the allied powers, most notably Saudi Arabia. Without the support of the international community (and let’s face it, the Bush administration has been giving the world the finger for too long to get anyone to get out their checkbooks to pay for this) the cost will have to be paid by an already cash-strapped US government, which ultimately means you and me.

And another thing: why did George the First stop when he did? Alrighty then, my approval ratings are good enough, it’s time to go home and get some ticker-tape parades? Even I’m not cynical enough to believe that. He probably thought that toppling Saddam would cause even more problems than letting him go. Has the situation changed? That would make a sizable power vacuum in an already unstable area.

As for Saddam using WMD on Israel, I think he doesn’t rule out attacking them, but he would have to consider the effects of nuclear or biological weapons on an enemy that is surrounded by people he needs as friends (Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians… I doubt he’d care a whole lot about Jordan). Say he nukes Tel Aviv, and fallout starts moving into Syria. What’s he going to say? Oops?

I’ll admit I’m on the fence on the whole issue even if the arguments I’ve raised make it sound like I’m firmly set in the “no” camp. But I think I need t see better arguments out of the “yes” people, not only why it should be done and how, but what comes after he’s gone.

22

Sua Sponte wrote in part above:

"As an article I recently read argued, if Saddam had had the Bomb in 1990, Kuwait would be the 19th province of Iraq to this day. "
Sua, for my own edification, do you have a cite to that article, or remember when and where you saw it?

23

Semp: Bush I didn’t go into Baghdad because he had to agree not to in order to get permission to stage out of Saudi Arabia. The coalition in general demanded that as a condition before the war started.

Also, conventional wisdom at the time was that the Iraqi government would fall after their resounding defeat and subsequent embargo. Pretty much everyone underestimated Saddam’s ability to stay in power.

Finally, it wasn’t until inspectors went in after the war that we all realized just how advanced Saddam’s nuclear program was. As I understand it, that was quite a surprise to all involved.

24

Sua,
First of all I think that it is up to the hawks to bear the burden of proof and show that inspections are useless before the US goes to war. Just saying that Saddam has had time to improve his anti-inspections tricks is no argument at all; it pretty much amounts to an assertion that inspections are useless. What evidence do you have for this assertion? If you want a second expert who believes in the efficacy of inspections you have Scott Ritter who actually conducted those inspections and knows a thing or two about Saddam’s tricks.

"Reducing the number of bombs he would be able to manufacture from 50 a year to as little as 5 a year "
Um do you have a shred of evidence that Saddams can build 5 a year despite a tough inspections regime?

“OTOH, Saddam was not deterred from attacking a nuclear-armed country by that country’s nukes”
Once again Saddam was careful enough to use only conventional weapons which IIRC hardly killed anyone. That is hardly evidence of massive recklessness. Your argument that Israel might have responded to “Scuds on the radar” with nukes is hardly plausible not only because Israel didn’t in fact do this but nothing I have read about Israeli nuclear doctrine suggest it is that reckless and trigger-happy about nukes.

And once again Saddam’s refusal to use chem. weapons against US soldiers is a good indication of him being deterred.

About deterring a nuclear-armed Saddam:
First of all the fact that Saddam does become nuclear armed could very likely change the rules and make it politically possible for the US to deter Saddam’s conventional attack with nukes. As I am sure you know the US hasn’t hesitated to threaten nukes against non-nuke powers; against the Chinese during the Korean war for instance. So I am not sure why the US won’t threaten a nuclear Saddam: if you invade another country we nuke you.

Secondly the US would have several huge advantages in any containment against Iraq:

  1. It can whoop Iraq’s ass conventionally any time it wants something it could never be sure of wrt. the USSR.
  2. Iraq won’t plausibly have any second-srike capacity.
  3. Iraq probably won’t even be able to reach the US mainland for many years and perhaps not even then. The best Saddam can do is to threaten Israel, OTOH the US can threaten to destroy Saddam.
    I don’t want to get side-tracked into a Cold War discussion here but I don’t know how you can confidently assert that post-Stalin leaders had no ambitions over W. Europe. Certainly Western strategy was premised on different notions; eg. Kennedy ,during the Cuban missile crisis worried about the reputation effect of a back-down on the Berlin issue. In any case the main point is that containment of Saddam would be a lot easier than than containment of the USSR.

And in any case containment only arises if inspections fail which you haven’t really shown will happen.

Sam Stone,
Of course I agree that leaving Saddam in power presents some risk. It’s just that fighting a war presents much bigger risks on more fronts.

About inspections don’t forget that we aren’t just talking about inspectors but inspectors combined with satellites,spies,defectors etc. So I agree that nothing is certain but I think it’s quite likely that such a regime would succeed in delaying Saddam for many years or decades (by which time he might not even be around) or even indefinitely. Certainly many experts, including the actual inspectors believe this is possible.

And even if inspections fail, I think there are good reasons for believing that containment will work since the US will have many advantages some of which I have outlined above.

“Another big risk (perhaps THE biggest) is that Saddam will release smallpox on Israel or the U.S.”
I think this is vastly more likely to happen if the US attacks and Saddam has nothing to lose.

The case for fighting a war seems to be premised on painting a worst-case scenario for containment and ignoring the worst-case scenario for invasion.

Let me sketch it out:
1)After Saddam realizes that the US preparations have reached the point of no return and that he has nothing to lose, he establishes strong ties with various Islamic terrorist groups and prepares to supply them massively with WMD (as I mentioned he has good reasons to be very careful about such contacts as of now). As a result Al-Queeda et al become supplied with the latest bio/chem weapons and now have the capacity to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

2)At the same time Saddam centralizes the Scuds that he has under his die-hard loyalists and in secure locations. At the right time he launches them with maximum WMD at Israel and maybe other countries.

3)Iraqi scuds kill tens of thousands of Israelis and Israel retaliates with nuclear weapons killing millions of Iraqis.

4)After Israeli nuclear retaliation , there is uproar in various Arab countries and revolutions in a number of them.

5)Post-nuclear Iraq is a complete mess. Various war-lords and factions grab all the remaining WMD as bargaining chips and there is civil war and chaos in Iraq . There is another leak of WMD to terrorist groups.

Now I am not saying that this worst-case scenario is likely but I think it is at least as likely as the worst-case scenario with containment and a good deal more scary. And you would have to have only one of the above mentioned possibilites to have a truly god-awful mess.

So overall I think that a combination of inspections and containment is by far the more prudent course for the US and the region.

25

No, Cyberpundit. I certainly cannot prove that nuclear weapons inspections will be fruitless. But neither can the doves prove that they will be successful. It has never been attempted before under these conditions. And just as importantly, even if nuclear weapons inspectors are allowed back in, no one will ever be able to prove if they were successful.
So, it’s an assessment of risks. What is less risky, war now or the chance Saddam will manage to evade the inspectors and produce nuclear weapons? I vote for the former.

That was called an example.
You keep asking for evidence. There is no evidence, either for your side or mine. It comes down to who’s proposed course of action is riskier. I say yours is.

See above.

Sua

26

This is the first time I’ve heard that (the first paragraph, I mean), and I’ll assume you are correct. But why did people think this way? I agree with your second paragraph, the general consensus was that infrastructure would be dismantled to such a degree that revolution of some kind would occur, but when the dominoes started to fall and that belief turned out to be betrayed by the fact that Saddam wasn’t weakened enough, why did we not act then? Why did we, and specifically the first Bush administration (I’d lump in Clinton, but I think the uprisings were kaput by the time he was inaugurated), sit on our hands? Oh sure, you have the no-fly zones, but considering that the Iraqi military was a ground based operation, why bother? Simple. It would have made a power vacuum that they didn’t want to deal with at the time. They just put it off for the future, blindly hoping the situation would go away. And now we are faced with a question without a an easy answer, no matter what the pros and cons say. Well, at least we had cheap oil for a while…

27

“There is no evidence, either for your side or mine.”
Fair enough if you are talking about the efficacy of inspections in the same conditions. However that is an awfully high standard in policy matters since you rarely have the luxury of replicating conditions. All you can do is make an educated guess based on similar but different past conditions. Here I think that there is some evidence in terms of the success of inspections with nuclear weapons after the Gulf War and the expert opinions of the likes of Ritter and Snowcroft.

I still think that it is up to your side to meet the burden of proof before going to war and your side hasn’t done it yet either wrt. inspections or containment.

28

I think we need to rein back the horses just a little here folks. What Bush wants is the option to use military means to remove Saddam – engineering the availability of that option may well, in itself, remove the UN Inspector log jam. Or make something happen (the region not being the most predictable neck of the woods at the best of times).

Of course, he has a mighty task – one might argue near impossible – in even making that option convincingly real enough for Saddam to consider his options – how about listing our top ten chart of hurdles Bush has to overcome to make this look plausible ?

Personally and with all things considered, I currently view the likelihood of an Iraqi invasion less likely than invasion of Earth by Klingons. But the possibility of a war will continue to suit Bush from a number of perspectives for some time to come.

29

Sure. That’s definitely part of the strategy going on here. Gear up for war, and hope that you cause the other regime to buckle under the stress, or for them to capitulate before a shot is fired.

As for the difficulties Bush has to overcome:

  1. Get a buy-off from Congress. Bad idea going to war without it.

  2. Get a workable war plan from the Generals that they will sign off on. I think this is a real sticking point right now - The military can’t come up with a plan that fits within the desired levels of risk and funding.

  3. Get a buy-off from the world community. Britain is on the U.S.'s side. Canada and Australia will go with the U.S. on Iraq. The rest of Europe is still up in the air.

30

Well, here you go Sam. Ten that spring to my mind:

[ul]

[li]No evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WOMD)[/li]
Without evidence even Tony Blair is going to struggle to carry UK public opinion – and that’s Bush’s best chance of a combat ally. The rest of Europe has pretty much tuned out this Administration until a politician replaces the CEO. Of course, we are promised evidence but this conflicts with the view of Scott Ritter, former head of the UN Inspection team in Iraq, who doesn’t believe such evidence exists. Fuzzy satellite imagery talked up by Pentagon officials unlikely to unconvince.

[li]No evidence of Iraqi links to ‘terrorism’ and/or a-Q[/li]
Hasn’t been possible to link Iraq with the ‘War on Terrorism’ (sic) in general or 9/11 in particular. Unfortunately, the best evidence (to my knowledge) remains against the people whose affections Bush bought with aid and cash in last three months of 2001 i.e. The Pakistani ISI. Bush needs evidence of WOMD and/or a link with Iraq…?

[li]Contrary to International Law/UN mandate extremely unlikely[/li]
More problems for the UK and any other potential allies. Whether Bush likes it or not, Blair will not persuade UK public opinion with a 10 year-old UN Resolution that’s open to interpretation. Bush might like to re-define the playing field but he can only do that in his own back yard.

France, Russia and China are amongst the UN big players against action.

[li]Progress on a provisional Palestinian State[/li]
Without which, Bush will struggle for regional allies - hell, he’ll struggle to avoid world-wide condemnation. I was trying to think of Sharon’s diplomatic achievements and it’s a little like netting the Lock Ness monster. Ditto Bush. Subtle and sophisticated these boys ain’t. In addition, Sharon pretty much wears the trousers so his domestic (electorate) agenda holds precedence. Bush very badly needs progress, how badly does Sharon (re-electorally) want Saddam ?

Even the King of Jordan – America’s most sympathetic ear in the Arab world and not a man to voice concerns publicly (strictly a behind-the-scenes- dude) – says it’s a non-starter without progress.

[li]Military planners voicing concerns over all options (Washington Post, NYT)[/li]
Throw in the CIA as well.

Two angles:

One - Taking a particularly cynical line, just who can be demonised and deployment be planned against with Saddam gone ? Where lies the justification for a £300 billion+ budget when you could buy North Korea for less ?

Two – The operational problems, as outlined above (on going ground force involvement, on going logistics, on going casualties, no end game…)

[li]No credible Iraqi alternative (power vacuum)[/li]
Debated elsewhere on the board, but without an alternative what’s to do ?

[li]Unknowable regional consequences (Kurdistan ? Iran ? Shia Muslims ? Israel ?)[/li]
Scary because it’s not quantifiable. Can’t predict the fall out from cutting away the dictatorial binding e.g. the former Yugoslavia. Pressure for a Kurdistan state (want to resist that as well ?), what of the Shiite Muslims in the south ? prevent Iran from seizing regional opportunities…for how long ?

[li]Potential on going US military presence in Iraq (no end game)[/li]
Or what was Iraq. Maybe, in the medium term, a UN peacekeeping operation but with troops from which countries: Turkey (always keen to impress but what of Kurdisatan ?) the UK…France… ?

[li]Breaking the Prime re-election Directive[/li]
Whether you trace it directly from Vietnam or from the Beirut barracks and embassy bombings in 1982, the world, particular the radicalised Arabic world, believes no US sitting president can commit US ground forces, bring home body bags on an indefinite basis and hope to get re-elected. There is precious evidence that presidents don’t subscribe also to that philosophy – that’s the entire raison detre of ‘smart’ weaponry technology: Do the job and have others mopping up on the ground.

[li] The convenience of a Plan B[/li]
The convenience of a get-out clause for Georgie i.e. as the credibility gap begins to swallow him up, he allows himself to be convinced ‘containment’ is working. Always a good idea to plan for a strategic withdrawl.

[/ul]

Go figure.