IRAQ: Former senior Clinton aide and Iraq expert, Dr Kenneth Pollack, believes the US should go to war against Saddam, writes Patrick Smyth
The "uniqueness" of the threat from Saddam Hussein, specifically his eventual inevitable access to nuclear weapons and his history of dangerously irrational decision making, make for an unanswerable case for US action to topple him, Dr Kenneth Pollack argues.
Traditional deterrence theory - the idea that nuclear powers are restrained from military action by the guarantee of "mutually assured destruction" - simply will not work in Iraq, he says, because Saddam does not believe the US will dare to use such weapons unless attacked directly on its own soil. His acquisition of such weapons will thus free him, in his mind at least, to relaunch his campaign to dominate the region, Dr Pollack argues.
It is an important argument. Dr Pollack is a well-regarded Iraq expert, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former Clinton National Security Council Persian Gulf director and a former CIA Middle East analyst. His views, reflecting the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party, provide important bipartisan cover for the Bush Administration.
But his support for invasion is also significantly qualified. He argues that the US would be far better off with a UN mandate, and at the very least must be part of a substantial multilateral force. And its case to allies must be based on the "uniqueness" of the threat to persuade them that this is not the beginning of a new grand imperial design.
"What I'd like to see the US do is to say that there should be a very high set of standards for this kind of operation, the pre-emptive use of force to prevent another country from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
"I think that Iraq can meet those very high standards," he says. In making that case "we make it clear to the rest of the world that, both, we are not likely to embark on new aggressions around the world and not going to use Iraq as simply the first of many wars that we intend to fight in the world, and which I think the world is justifiably concerned about." And he insists that it must at least convince Arab allies that it is engaged in mediating peace in Palestine.
His views are significant because Dr Pollack was one of the main architects of the policy of containment of Iraq, the regime of sanctions, which clearly have failed to stop Iraq's rearmament.
In his new book* he examines the failure and the alternatives, from relying on an Iraqi opposition to a campaign based on airpower alone, and "grudgingly" concludes that the only option is invasion in the near future using overwhelming force, and "regime change".
"All the information we have is that Saddam believes once he acquires a nuclear weapon it is the US that will then be deterred" he told The Irish Times in a video link-up from Washington. "The US will be so terrified of getting into some kind of nuclear exchange with Iraq that we will not be willing to intervene if Saddam Hussein once again embarks on some new regional aggression, if he attacks one of his various neighbours . . .
That incorrect perception, he says, "is a tremendously dangerous way of thinking about the world," reflecting a "consistent pattern of very dangerous decision-making."
Deterrence theory does not work with the irrational, suicidal, or those for whom revenge is a primary motivation, and Saddam's thinking, he argues "if not irrational, is based on delusional ideas about how the world works. He is not purposely suicidal, but what we have seen time and time again from Saddam Hussein is that he acts in ways that are unintentionally suicidal" Yet, was Saddam not effectively deterred in 1991, during the Gulf War, from using weapons of mass destruction - chemical or biological - against either Israel or coalition forces? He acknowledges a partial success for deterrence, but believes the case has been much overstated. The invasion of Kuwait in 1990 reflected the sort of dangerous strategic miscalculation which he believes is typical of Saddam's wishful thinking.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, Dr Pollack insists, Saddam did believe the US would respond to the invasion with force. But he believed it would send a lightly armed force which would be repulsed at heavy cost by the elite Republican Guard, at such a cost that the US would find itself domestically constrained from future action.
He argues, moreover, that Iraq's failure to attack Israel with chemical weapons may well, in part, have been to do with the technical inadequacy of its Scud missiles as a delivery system. But Saddam had created a stand-alone missile unit that was "pre-authorised" to automatically launch an attack on Israel had the coalition used nuclear weapons or attacked Baghdad.
That unit was not a traditional deterrence force, but rather a means of enacting a deadly revenge. Recalling Stanley Kubrick's classic film noir about nuclear deterrence, Dr Pollack argues that "the whole point about Dr Strangelove is that you have to tell your enemy you have the weapon. They did not. If this was meant as a deterrent Saddam should have let us know."
Saddam's strategic irrationality and ambitions have been reflected time and time again, he says - against the Kurds in 1974, against Iran in 1980, Kuwait in 1990, in his decision to stay in Kuwait in 1991, when he tried to kill George Bush in 1993, when he threatened Kuwait again in 1994, when he threatened to move troops to Golan in 2000. And yet he used to believe that containment would be sufficient to thwart Saddam's ambitions. What made him change his mind? No one event, Dr Pollack replies. Primarily the gradual failure of the containment policy, but also September 11th.
"Before 9/11 the idea that the US would mount an invasion of Iraq was considered ridiculous in Washington," he says. "There was simply no sense that the American people would be willing to support an invasion of Iraq or be willing to make the sacrifices necessary." 9/11, he believes, shook the US public out of a dangerous complacency about external threats. "It led to a sea change in the American public on its willingness to mount a full-scale invasion and pay all the attendant costs that would go along with it. All of a sudden today we have a realistic option." Some might say al-Qaeda has awoken a monster.
* The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (2002), By Dr Kenneth Pollack