WORLD VIEW/Paul Gillespie: Preventive war is like committing suicide from fear of death." Bismarck's definition is worth pondering as just such a war against Iraq, led by the United States, is seriously contemplated. Opposition comes not only from left-wing or liberal critics, but from many conservatives and international relations realists.
They ask why Saddam Hussein cannot be contained and deterred, as was the vastly stronger and more dangerous Soviet Union during the Cold War. They quote an article by George Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in Foreign Affairs magazine (January/February 2000) describing how the US should react if Iraq acquired weapons of mass destruction (WMD). "The first line of defence should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence - if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration." When asked about this last autumn she replied lamely that academics can write anything, and referred to the awful warning of 9/11.
The problem is that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq may provoke the very action it is designed to prevent. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Richard Betts says the US "is about to poke a snake out of fear that the snake might strike sometime in the future, while virtually ignoring the danger that it may strike back when America pokes it." There is little risk Iraq might attack the US with such weapons. They are more likely to be used against an invading force or Israel if Saddam feels terminally threatened.
Iraq developed anthrax, West Nile virus and botulinal toxin in the 1980s, under the direction of Donald Rumsfeld, no less, in pursuit of a strategy summarised as follows by George Bush senior in October 1989, one year after poison gases were used on the Kurds and 10 months before Iraq invaded Kuwait: "Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East."
It is worth remembering the US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie's advice to Saddam Hussein in July 1990 - "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait."
Quoting it, two realist international relations scholars, John Meirsheimer and Stephen Walt, argue that deterrence did not fail in 1990 - "it was never tried" (see http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu). Supporters of a preventive war believe Saddam must be toppled because his past behaviour proves he is too reckless, relentless and aggressive to be allowed to possess WMD. But these writers say the historical argument does not stand up. The case that Saddam is a serial aggressor hinges on the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 and on Kuwait. The first arose from a real threat to his regime after the Iranian revolution of 1979, which he resisted not recklessly but rationally - if opportunistically. The invasion of Kuwait was miscalculated, they argue, but he chose to use force because he was facing a serious challenge after a row about oil prices, output and loans and he had good reasons to think his invasion would not provoke serious opposition.
Deterrence is about the facility to respond in kind when attacked. Thus Saddam could use poison gas against his own people, who did not possess such weapons, whereas he has not used it against the US, which does. As they put it, Saddam "has no incentive to use chemical or nuclear weapons against the US and its allies - unless his survival is threatened".
Using the same logic - that a nuclear state cannot carry out a threat to use these weapons against another such state without triggering its own destruction - it is highly unlikely, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, that Saddam would dare hand over nuclear weapons to groups like al-Qaeda. He has always opposed such fundamentalist movements and there is no credible evidence that he has helped them. It would be open to the Bush administration to say it would hold him responsible for any use of WMD against the US by such groups.
The administration will certainly not accept their conclusion that "if the United States is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq, Americans should understand that a compelling stategic rationale is absent." These authors do not accept the credibility of preventive war as a strategic doctrine, despite its adoption in the National Security Strategy by the Bush administration last June. They believe the very strength of the US guarantees its safety. In contrast, the new Bush doctrine is based on a fear that newly emerging powers will eventually threaten US hegemony and must be prevented from doing so. Iraq is presented as its first test. The theory was developed by the group of neo-conservatives who were relatively junior figures in the 1988-92 Bush administration but dominate this one - Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle.
The changing strategic posture is highlighted in criticisms of a preventive war against Iraq by leading figures of the first Bush administration such as James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleberger. It will divert attention from the US's "war against terrorism", endanger relations with necessary allies in Europe and put at risk the stability of the entire Middle East region.
Similar criticisms are made by many European governments. Their intellectual strength shows up in the increasing move of US public opinion away from unilateral US action towards a UN-endorsed approach, unconvinced of the strategic necessity to fight a preventive war against Iraq.
Thus another maxim of Bismarck's should be remembered as we watch these events unfold:"Never believe in anything until it has been officially denied." That should include references to an oil war.