Policy Towards Iraq
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A Nuclear Saddam
As challenging as this endeavor may seem, it may not be as bad as a future with a
nuclear-armed Iraq. Not all proliferation is equally bad. We worry much less about
India, Pakistan or Israel possessing nuclear weapons than North Korea or Libya.
Saddam Hussein is arguably the most dangerous man in the world, even without a
ready nuclear capability. If Saddam were to acquire nuclear weapons, the world
would suddenly become a very dangerous place.
Certain facets of Saddam Hussein's personality make Iraqi possession of nuclear
weapons almost uniquely dangerous. In the past, the U.S. has been able to count on
nuclear-armed states behaving within certain established parameters. Even when
these states were adversaries - such as the USSR or China - this knowledge
provided some margin of security. But the world has never had to deal with a
nuclear - armed state led by someone like Saddam Hussein before. The entire
corpus of arms control regimes, confidence building measures and deterrence logic
that underpinned the nuclear age thus far could prove meaningless to Saddam. Like
the terrible dictators of our past, he plays by different rules.
This is not to say that Saddam is "undeterrable." On numerous occasions in the
past, he has demonstrated that when faced with superior force and a willingness to
use that force, he will back down. Indeed, Saddam refrained from employing
biological or chemical agents against either Israel or the forces of the U.S.-led
Coalition during the Gulf War because he was deterred by the Israeli and
American (and French and British) nuclear arsenals. But that card might be
removed should Iraq's nuclear program realize its objective.
Deterring Saddam is much more difficult than deterring other leaders. Moreover,
what deters Saddam is often difficult for others to discern. Because Saddam has
such disregard for lives other than his own, threatening to kill large numbers of his
people per se is meaningless to him and therefore inadequate to deter him. It
becomes a deterrent only if Saddam believes that so many deaths would prompt
some kind of move against him - by the Iraqi military, the Iraqi people, his
loyalists, etc., - that would threaten his control over Iraq. However, if Saddam
calculates that he runs no such risk, or that he runs a greater risk of being ousted if
he backs down, he will not be deterred. A good example of this problem was his
decision not to withdraw from Kuwait in the fall of 1990. Saddam recognized that
tens of thousands of Iraqis would die in a war with the U.S.-led coalition, but this
mattered little to him because he feared that if he were to retreat from Kuwait his
supporters would turn on him. Thus, he chose to gamble that he could win the war
despite the certainty that Iraq would take heavy losses.
Because Saddam consistently exaggerates his own strength and his adversaries'
weaknesses, possession of nuclear weapons is likely to encourage his propensity
toward risk-taking. In the past, improvements in Iraqi military power have always
emboldened him to take ever more reckless foreign adventures. For instance, in
1975, when Iraq was weak, Saddam backed down in the face of the Shah's U.S.-
equipped military. Iraq then went on a massive military modernization and
expansion program, so that by 1980, after the Iranian revolution (which also
greatly weakened the Iranian military), he gambled on an invasion of Iran.
Similarly, Iraq emerged from the Iran-Iraq war with a massive conventional
military as well as a large arsenal of BW and CW weapons and ballistic missiles.
These new capabilities were critical to Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait and
then try to hold it against the U.S.-led Coalition.
If Saddam were to acquire nuclear weapons, there can be no doubt that he would
attempt to use them to achieve tangible foreign policy gains. As he has done so
often in the past, Saddam almost certainly would miscalculate the risks and again
embroil Iraq, the Middle East, possibly Europe, and probably the United States in a
new war—one in which Saddam had nuclear weapons to add to his side of the
balance sheet.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq is to
compare it to North Korea. Because we were unable to enforce an Iraq-like set of
restrictions on North Korea, Pyongyang was able to develop nuclear weapons
despite Western efforts to control proliferation. Today, we live with great unease
about how North Korea will behave with its nuclear arsenal and have gone to great
lengths to "buy" it from them. Yet North Korea is almost peaceful and cautious
when compared to Saddam's Iraq. North Korea has mostly contented itself with
limited terrorism and subversion in the 45 years since the end of the Korean War.
Moreover, it appears to have no ambitions outside the Korean peninsula—if it still
harbors those old designs at all.
By contrast, Iraq has fought four major wars, attacked or threatened to attack seven
different nearby states, and provoked countless smaller clashes in the thirty years
since Saddam's Ba'thist regime took power. If we are nervous that deterrence alone
will not be enough to prevent North Korea from employing its nuclear arsenal, we
should be downright terrified of how Saddam would behave with nuclear weapons
of his own. Many in the foreign policy community criticized Washington's buy-out
of North Korea as caving in to international blackmail. Whatever Pyongyang's
goals, there can be little doubt that Saddam would try (at the very least) to use his
own nuclear arsenal in grand-scale extortion of his neighbors and the U.S. In these
circumstances, the United States would be confronted with a variety of bad
options. We could learn to live with Saddam's nuclear arsenal and hope that our
deterrent was so overwhelming that even Saddam would understand it. Or we
could invade Iraq before Saddam has completed development of the weaponry.
Doing so would have the advantages of dismantling the Iraqi WMD program once
and for all, and removing Saddam from power. Under these conditions, even the
litany of problems the U.S. would have to address in an invasion might be a lesser
burden than living in a world in which Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear
weapons.
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