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from: Christopher Caldwell

Bombs and Embargoes

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1998, at 3:23 PM ET

Yes, that was a strange and unsettling headline: "Inevitable," I think the NYT called it. If that's the case, and if bombing is our policy, it should have been bombs away.

There seem to be two extremes out of which a defensible Iraq policy can be built, and we're at an uncomfortable halfway point between them.

The first is just to leave Saddam Hussein alone.

Advantages: 1) It avoids the needle-in-a-haystack searches that the Iraqis have quite successfully thwarted. 2) It eliminates the possibility that we'll rain destruction on thousands or tens of thousands on the grounds that "informed sources said" there was a "high likelihood" there were "the makings" of chemical weapons--and that we'll be wrong. (A small worry that has turned into a big one since our Wag the Dog bombing in Sudan.) 3) It stops the embargo and thus makes clear that our beef is with the Iraqi leadership rather than its people.

The policy has one big disadvantage. If it's to be more than mere cowardice, it has to be based on some kind of principle of massive retaliation along the Cold War model. This would mean that a light rain of Scuds on Tel Aviv (of the sort that we saw in the first days of the Gulf War) would be met with something like a Dresden-style bombing of Baghdad--at the very, non-nuclear, least. Do you have the stomach for that?

The second policy is bomb-invade-remove. Advantages: obvious, if we can do it without difficulty.

Disadvantages (potentially colossal and largely unpredictable): 1) How do you rally the public to an operation that would endanger a million men? Until we find some chemical weapons in Iraq, all we've got is the assurance of a draft-dodging commander-in-chief with a reputation for lying (whom the majority party not just resents but loathes) and the yuppie experts he's gathered around him. And they've relied on lies and empty threats throughout this crisis. How many deaths-in-combat do you think they could handle before the bottom fell out of support for this war? 2) It won't just be the Arab world that will bail out once they see the stakes but all of Europe--France and Russia immediately, Germany soon after, Britain ultimately. 3) Any successful invasion will stretch our dangerously shrunken army to the limit. What will this mean for ex-Yugoslavia? For Israel? 4) And once we've stuck Saddam in a jail cell somewhere, the necessity of a satisfactory post-Saddam regime will make us willing to compromise the very democratic principles for which we've claimed to be fighting. How do we know we'll be left with Turkey and not with Algeria?

So I'm glad, too, that we didn't bomb. The way we're going is worth trying for as long as possible. But if it fails, we're going to have to choose between the two solutions above.

That's why I found the Luttwak piece excellent, and reassuring. It made me reconsider one of my cardinal political principles--that trade embargoes never help anything anywhere. Luttwak seems to be saying that if we can just get past the interval in which Saddam can use his hard currency to buy all the black-market Russian military hardware that's now floating out of Central Asia and the Baltics, we'll be OK. Let's hope he's right.

Saddam's survival rather clouds George Bush's legacy, though, doesn't it? Now he's left with only one claim to presidential greatness: getting Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415
from: Christopher Caldwell

Bombs and Embargoes

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1998, at 3:23 PM ET
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Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Judith Shulevitz is the New York editor of Slate.
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