Administrations and politicians can avoid reality for only so long. Eventually, reality intrudes on artful spinning and wishful thinking. Since last January, we have been arguing that the United States faces only two choices in dealing with Saddam Hussein: either remove him from power or learn to live with a dictator in Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction. The middle-ground policy of containment — featuring sanctions, inspections regimes, and diplomatic pressure, punctuated with occasional “whack-a-mole” cruise-missile strikes — was never sustainable. It has now collapsed. Fancy talk about how Saddam might be “kept in a box” or made to live by the rules of the game has been utterly discredited. Now, finally, there is broad agreement in Congress and, we suspect, even within the Clinton administration that the only solution to the present crisis is doing what is necessary to remove Saddam from power.
Now the task is actually to do what is necessary, and not to shy away from the full implications of that understanding. As we go to press, the Clinton administration appears to be on the verge of launching military action against Iraq. We trust that the bombing campaign will be large, sustained, and aimed at the destruction of Saddam’s conventional as well as unconventional military capabilities. Congressional leaders should certainly insist on that much. But everyone ought also to grasp that an air campaign alone will not solve the problem. A comprehensive political-military strategy to remove Saddam will require more: It will involve establishing liberated zones in Iraq where the Iraqi opposition can rally and offer a credible alternative to Saddam’s regime. And it will require an American commitment to use force, both from the air and on the ground, to defend those zones.
Honesty, however, requires that we squarely confront a further reality: The only sure way to remove Saddam is to send in American ground troops to complete the job that should have been completed in 1991. We think it will come to this, anyway. It would be better to make this clear at the beginning, and to begin preparing public opinion and building up the necessary military forces sooner rather than later.
Iraq is Bill Clinton’s supreme foreign-policy test. If we have a short-term military action that changes nothing, all he will be doing is passing on this crisis to the next president, with U.S. credibility destroyed and U.S. interests imperiled. If, on the other hand, he is at last serious and acts to remove the threat of Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, he will deserve support, and praise.
Robert Kagan, for the Editors
