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The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
In The Threatening Storm , Kenneth M. Pollack, one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq, provides a masterly insider’s perspective on the crucial issues facing the United States as it moves toward a new confrontation with Saddam Hussein.
For the past fifteen years, as an analyst on Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, Kenneth Pollack has studied Saddam as closely as anyone else in the United States. In 1990, he was one of only three CIA analysts to predict the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. As the principal author of the CIA’s history of Iraqi military strategy and operations during the Gulf War, Pollack gained rare insight into the methods and workings of what he believes to be the most brutal regime since Stalinist Russia.
Examining all sides of the debate and bringing a keen eye to the military and geopolitical forces at work, Pollack ultimately comes to this controversial through our own mistakes, the perfidy of others, and Saddam’s cunning, the United States is left with few good policy options regarding Iraq. Increasingly, the option that makes the most sense is for the United States to launch a full-scale invasion, eradicate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society—for the good of the United States, the Iraqi people, and the entire region.
Pollack believed for many years that the United States could prevent Saddam from threatening the stability of the Persian Gulf and the world through containment—a combination of sanctions and limited military operations. Here, Pollack explains why containment is no longer effective, and why other policies intended to deter Saddam ultimately pose a greater risk than confronting him now, before he gains possession of nuclear weapons and returns to his stated goal of dominating the Gulf region. “It is often said that war should be employed only in the last resort,” Pollack writes. “I reluctantly believe that in the case of the threat from Iraq, we have come to the last resort.”
Offering a view of the region that has the authority and force of an intelligence report, Pollack outlines what the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are thinking, what is necessary to gain their support for an invasion, how a successful U.S. operation would be mounted, what the likely costs would be, and how Saddam might react. He examines the state of Iraq today—its economy, its armed forces, its political system, the status of its weapons of mass destruction as best we understand them, and the terrifying security apparatus that keeps Saddam in power. Pollack also analyzes the last twenty years of relations between the United States and Iraq to explain how the two countries reached the unhappy standoff that currently prevails.
Commanding in its insights and full of detailed information about how leaders on both sides will make their decisions, The Threatening Storm is an essential guide to understanding what may be the crucial foreign policy challenge of our time.
For the past fifteen years, as an analyst on Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, Kenneth Pollack has studied Saddam as closely as anyone else in the United States. In 1990, he was one of only three CIA analysts to predict the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. As the principal author of the CIA’s history of Iraqi military strategy and operations during the Gulf War, Pollack gained rare insight into the methods and workings of what he believes to be the most brutal regime since Stalinist Russia.
Examining all sides of the debate and bringing a keen eye to the military and geopolitical forces at work, Pollack ultimately comes to this controversial through our own mistakes, the perfidy of others, and Saddam’s cunning, the United States is left with few good policy options regarding Iraq. Increasingly, the option that makes the most sense is for the United States to launch a full-scale invasion, eradicate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society—for the good of the United States, the Iraqi people, and the entire region.
Pollack believed for many years that the United States could prevent Saddam from threatening the stability of the Persian Gulf and the world through containment—a combination of sanctions and limited military operations. Here, Pollack explains why containment is no longer effective, and why other policies intended to deter Saddam ultimately pose a greater risk than confronting him now, before he gains possession of nuclear weapons and returns to his stated goal of dominating the Gulf region. “It is often said that war should be employed only in the last resort,” Pollack writes. “I reluctantly believe that in the case of the threat from Iraq, we have come to the last resort.”
Offering a view of the region that has the authority and force of an intelligence report, Pollack outlines what the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are thinking, what is necessary to gain their support for an invasion, how a successful U.S. operation would be mounted, what the likely costs would be, and how Saddam might react. He examines the state of Iraq today—its economy, its armed forces, its political system, the status of its weapons of mass destruction as best we understand them, and the terrifying security apparatus that keeps Saddam in power. Pollack also analyzes the last twenty years of relations between the United States and Iraq to explain how the two countries reached the unhappy standoff that currently prevails.
Commanding in its insights and full of detailed information about how leaders on both sides will make their decisions, The Threatening Storm is an essential guide to understanding what may be the crucial foreign policy challenge of our time.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2002
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January 3, 2016
A book I'm reading mainly for research purposes that presents some interesting challenges. The obvious (but unfair) criticism of this book would be to say that Pollack was completely wrong given what we now know. The real approach to critiquing him is sorting through what information was available at the time and what options or possibilities were overlooked. The remarkable thing about this book is how thorough, informed, and measured it is. The author really knows Iraq, and it's clear that if the US was going to invade, they should have listened to more of his counsel. Unlike most of the key players in the Bush administration, he contends that the US needs an invasion force of several hundred thousand troops, that it should try to build a broad coalition of allies to fight the war, and that it should prepare for at least a 5 year presence in Iraq. He realizes that if the US simply topples the regime and leaves (as it seemingly planned to do), the country will either become chaotic or be taken over by another strongman. He makes the case that only a full invasion and commitment can achieve US goals of removing Saddam and rebuilding a more prosperous, democratic, and well-behaved Iraq. Say what you will about the feasibility of this goal, at least Pollack is thinking strategically. Pollack, unlike the Bush administration, was honest and more realistic about both the likely costs of the war and the nature of the Iraqi threat. You don't feel like you are being hoodwinked, patronized, or intimidated into supporting an invasion in this book. He's really building a policy case for war, even though that case is still deeply flawed.
The core of Pollack's argument is that the US has a number of policy choices on Iraq, none of which are good. In the 1990's, Saddam wriggled out of containment and many US allies lost the will or desire to contain him anyway. He (as most believed pre-war) is rebuilding his WMD arsenal as he recovers from sanctions and gets out from under weapons inspectors. Because the US can't get the containment coalition back together again (a flawed assumption), they are left with 2 realistic alternatives: deterrence and invasion. Pollack argues that deterrence won't work because Saddam is too much of a risk taker, too irrational, too fixated on his historical destiny, and too willing to sacrifice the lives of his people to be effectively deterred. He is rebuilding his WMD, and he's planning to make another bid for regional power in one of the most strategically and economically vital areas of the world. If US deterrence can't stop this, the US only has the choice of invading Iraq and solving the Saddam problem once and for all. For Pollack, it would be the strategically and morally right thing to do, although you can tell that he was not as excited about it as the neocons, who were unduly optimistic about America's ability to transform the country and the region.
Two strange things about his argument: 1. Almost none of it has to do with terrorism or 9/11. The Bush administration and Bush Doctrine led with the idea that the nexus of terrorism, rogue states, and WMD meant that the US could no longer contain or deter certain threats, forming a justification for pre-emption and/or preventive war. Pollack rightly dismisses the idea that Saddam was meaningfully connected to AQ or 9/11. He argues that Saddam has been very hesitant to support terrorists in the past, and that with WMD he would be even more hesitant. In other words, Pollack bolsters my hunch that 9/11 didn't transform Iraq policy that much for many thinkers and policy makers, especially for those who dismissed the terrorism angle. Pollack bolsters the continuation view of 9/11's impact on US foreign policy rather than the transformation view. 2. It is almost explicitly an argument for preventive war, which is frowned upon in the just war tradition and international law. Pollack is open with the idea that the US has no clear evidence of an imminent attack stemming from Iraq. This makes the invasion, which is designed to prevent Saddam from becoming a bigger problem down the road, a preventive conflict. I think Pollack could have been more open about the moral, legal, and strategic problems with this.
This brings me to the oddest aspect of this book: the argument just doesn't seem to add up to an invasion. There's no terrorist connection, and there's not likely to be one. Saddam is most likely to use WMD when he's cornered. He's pursuing WMD because he has virtually no hope of restoring his conventional strength. The real threat is SH using WMD to pursue regional hegemony is still at least 5 years down the road, and he's surrounded by many powerful enemies. The invasion and reconstruction will be difficult and consume a lot of time and resources. Pollack's assessment of the situation is thorough and realistic enough to undermine his case that invasion, possibly the most extreme policy possible, is the least bad option. One can easily see that if the Bush administration had made Pollack's measured case, they never would have garnered the support they did for the invasion by inflating the threat and downplaying the difficulties.
There are other many problems with his argument, but I'll focus on the 2 biggest, the 2 that shouldn't have required any hindsight or much special knowledge to anticipate. The first is his rejection of a renewed attempt to contain Iraq. I think the US could have used the "bloody shirt" of 9/11 and the shared danger of terrorism to rally the international community for a much smarter, more balanced, and more targeted campaign against international terrorist groups. The Bush administration largely ignored or turned down offers for help, and its rapid turn to planning an invasion of Iraq and pursuing illegal means of fighting and prosecuting terrorist groups rapidly dismantled the international goodwill that had arisen after 9/11. A leader with more vision, patience, and humility could have at least tried to rally the world for a renewal of containment and inspections against Iraq that could have kept him permanently in the box. We and the Iraqi people would still have had to suffer the perfidy and violence of his regime, but it would have been better than the alternative of invasion. The fact that the US and GB got the Security Council to authorize a new inspections regime in 2002 suggests that such a policy was more feasible than invasion. Also, for an excellent defense of the policy of deterring Iraq, see Mearsheimer and Walt's "An Unnecessary War," in which they show that deterrence was also a viable policy, even post-9/11.
The second glaring problem with this work is the discounting, indeed the lack of any discussion of the possibility of an insurgency in Iraq. Pollack realistically assesses the need for a large invasion force and international aid for reconstruction. However, he doesn't even use the word insurgency at all in this book. How hard was it to imagine that Shia religious militias or Sunnis, fearful of their decline from power after the US invasion, would have risen up in an attempt to destroy the American reconstruction project? It only required a small number of core insurgents to make it extremely hazardous for aid groups like the UN to operate in Iraq, putting a far greater burden on the US for aid and reconstruction. They attacked wavering US allies and got many of them to back out. They pushed the US to isolate themselves from the Iraqi people. Most importantly, they fired sectarian tensions into a massive civil war. Pollack and others' neglect of this quite foreseeable contingency speaks volumes to their assumptions about how the war would develop and how the Iraqi people would react to their presence.
In sum, this book is a testament to the fog of war and friction that should imbue readers with a sense of humility. Pollack is a smart guy. He knows the region and the country. He thinks through so many possibilities and questions in a rather long book. He's more realistic, and right about more things, than the Bush administration in general. And still, there were gaping holes in his judgement and vision. Some of these problems were foreseeable, others less so, and ultimately his failure is one of judgement. Invading was never the "least bad" or "least risky" decision. Alternative strategies were never fully or even partially explored. I say all this with hindsight, but I believe my criticism would have held up in 2002 just as strongly. Pollack, like the Bush administration, drastically underestimated the potential for war to make things fall apart. That was the crux of their failure.
The core of Pollack's argument is that the US has a number of policy choices on Iraq, none of which are good. In the 1990's, Saddam wriggled out of containment and many US allies lost the will or desire to contain him anyway. He (as most believed pre-war) is rebuilding his WMD arsenal as he recovers from sanctions and gets out from under weapons inspectors. Because the US can't get the containment coalition back together again (a flawed assumption), they are left with 2 realistic alternatives: deterrence and invasion. Pollack argues that deterrence won't work because Saddam is too much of a risk taker, too irrational, too fixated on his historical destiny, and too willing to sacrifice the lives of his people to be effectively deterred. He is rebuilding his WMD, and he's planning to make another bid for regional power in one of the most strategically and economically vital areas of the world. If US deterrence can't stop this, the US only has the choice of invading Iraq and solving the Saddam problem once and for all. For Pollack, it would be the strategically and morally right thing to do, although you can tell that he was not as excited about it as the neocons, who were unduly optimistic about America's ability to transform the country and the region.
Two strange things about his argument: 1. Almost none of it has to do with terrorism or 9/11. The Bush administration and Bush Doctrine led with the idea that the nexus of terrorism, rogue states, and WMD meant that the US could no longer contain or deter certain threats, forming a justification for pre-emption and/or preventive war. Pollack rightly dismisses the idea that Saddam was meaningfully connected to AQ or 9/11. He argues that Saddam has been very hesitant to support terrorists in the past, and that with WMD he would be even more hesitant. In other words, Pollack bolsters my hunch that 9/11 didn't transform Iraq policy that much for many thinkers and policy makers, especially for those who dismissed the terrorism angle. Pollack bolsters the continuation view of 9/11's impact on US foreign policy rather than the transformation view. 2. It is almost explicitly an argument for preventive war, which is frowned upon in the just war tradition and international law. Pollack is open with the idea that the US has no clear evidence of an imminent attack stemming from Iraq. This makes the invasion, which is designed to prevent Saddam from becoming a bigger problem down the road, a preventive conflict. I think Pollack could have been more open about the moral, legal, and strategic problems with this.
This brings me to the oddest aspect of this book: the argument just doesn't seem to add up to an invasion. There's no terrorist connection, and there's not likely to be one. Saddam is most likely to use WMD when he's cornered. He's pursuing WMD because he has virtually no hope of restoring his conventional strength. The real threat is SH using WMD to pursue regional hegemony is still at least 5 years down the road, and he's surrounded by many powerful enemies. The invasion and reconstruction will be difficult and consume a lot of time and resources. Pollack's assessment of the situation is thorough and realistic enough to undermine his case that invasion, possibly the most extreme policy possible, is the least bad option. One can easily see that if the Bush administration had made Pollack's measured case, they never would have garnered the support they did for the invasion by inflating the threat and downplaying the difficulties.
There are other many problems with his argument, but I'll focus on the 2 biggest, the 2 that shouldn't have required any hindsight or much special knowledge to anticipate. The first is his rejection of a renewed attempt to contain Iraq. I think the US could have used the "bloody shirt" of 9/11 and the shared danger of terrorism to rally the international community for a much smarter, more balanced, and more targeted campaign against international terrorist groups. The Bush administration largely ignored or turned down offers for help, and its rapid turn to planning an invasion of Iraq and pursuing illegal means of fighting and prosecuting terrorist groups rapidly dismantled the international goodwill that had arisen after 9/11. A leader with more vision, patience, and humility could have at least tried to rally the world for a renewal of containment and inspections against Iraq that could have kept him permanently in the box. We and the Iraqi people would still have had to suffer the perfidy and violence of his regime, but it would have been better than the alternative of invasion. The fact that the US and GB got the Security Council to authorize a new inspections regime in 2002 suggests that such a policy was more feasible than invasion. Also, for an excellent defense of the policy of deterring Iraq, see Mearsheimer and Walt's "An Unnecessary War," in which they show that deterrence was also a viable policy, even post-9/11.
The second glaring problem with this work is the discounting, indeed the lack of any discussion of the possibility of an insurgency in Iraq. Pollack realistically assesses the need for a large invasion force and international aid for reconstruction. However, he doesn't even use the word insurgency at all in this book. How hard was it to imagine that Shia religious militias or Sunnis, fearful of their decline from power after the US invasion, would have risen up in an attempt to destroy the American reconstruction project? It only required a small number of core insurgents to make it extremely hazardous for aid groups like the UN to operate in Iraq, putting a far greater burden on the US for aid and reconstruction. They attacked wavering US allies and got many of them to back out. They pushed the US to isolate themselves from the Iraqi people. Most importantly, they fired sectarian tensions into a massive civil war. Pollack and others' neglect of this quite foreseeable contingency speaks volumes to their assumptions about how the war would develop and how the Iraqi people would react to their presence.
In sum, this book is a testament to the fog of war and friction that should imbue readers with a sense of humility. Pollack is a smart guy. He knows the region and the country. He thinks through so many possibilities and questions in a rather long book. He's more realistic, and right about more things, than the Bush administration in general. And still, there were gaping holes in his judgement and vision. Some of these problems were foreseeable, others less so, and ultimately his failure is one of judgement. Invading was never the "least bad" or "least risky" decision. Alternative strategies were never fully or even partially explored. I say all this with hindsight, but I believe my criticism would have held up in 2002 just as strongly. Pollack, like the Bush administration, drastically underestimated the potential for war to make things fall apart. That was the crux of their failure.
May 20, 2021
Just Plain Wrong
This book was written during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. It was predicated upon the mistaken belief that Iraq had amassed an incredibly large and threatening collection of WMDs. While the Reagan/Bush administrations supplied Iraq with many items easily converted to biological weapons, no major collection of WMDs were ever found.
This mistaken call for the invasion of Iraq of the "lesser" risk approach to Iraq was entirely wrong, destabilized the region, led to a rise of Iran with their overt threats to acquire nuclear weapons, the rise of Isis, and generally adverse outcomes in so many ways.
In retrospect - it advocates for what many would now say was an errant policy. At the time of the invasion, as Saddam was cooperating with the UN and Hans Blix while trying to appear sly - the Iraq situation should have continued to be approached without an invasion.
It shows what was being said by many but by no means all people. It also demonstrates that there were egregious errors in analysis and conception of what was going on in Iraq while proposing a policy of massive and overwhelming invasion. In essence it proposed a drastic and mistaken and illegal policy in response to what was not a demonstrable threat. Don’t use this book to guide future thought. Use it to see how terribly wrong the well educated and supposed experts can be.
Just wrong in so many pages....
This book was written during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. It was predicated upon the mistaken belief that Iraq had amassed an incredibly large and threatening collection of WMDs. While the Reagan/Bush administrations supplied Iraq with many items easily converted to biological weapons, no major collection of WMDs were ever found.
This mistaken call for the invasion of Iraq of the "lesser" risk approach to Iraq was entirely wrong, destabilized the region, led to a rise of Iran with their overt threats to acquire nuclear weapons, the rise of Isis, and generally adverse outcomes in so many ways.
In retrospect - it advocates for what many would now say was an errant policy. At the time of the invasion, as Saddam was cooperating with the UN and Hans Blix while trying to appear sly - the Iraq situation should have continued to be approached without an invasion.
It shows what was being said by many but by no means all people. It also demonstrates that there were egregious errors in analysis and conception of what was going on in Iraq while proposing a policy of massive and overwhelming invasion. In essence it proposed a drastic and mistaken and illegal policy in response to what was not a demonstrable threat. Don’t use this book to guide future thought. Use it to see how terribly wrong the well educated and supposed experts can be.
Just wrong in so many pages....
August 22, 2012
Having read it in 2011, most of this turned out to be underwhelming, if informative.
This is a calm, lucid argument about the case for war against Iraq. Despite the flashy title, Pollack does not come across as a rabid war-monger. He musters his arguments and presents them in a dispassionate fashion. He makes a far better case than the Bush Administration offered. Kenneth Pollack, writing six months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, sets out a case legitimizing such a course of action. He makes it clear from the outset that there was no hard evidence of a mutual, symbiotic link between Iraq and al-Qa'eda and therefore his case is built on entirely different grounds. The current policy toward Iraq was established by the United Nations after the first Gulf War. It was one of containment and had two essential parts: weapons inspections and sanctions. For these to be effective, the cooperation of the United Nations and especially of Iraq's neighbours was necessary. And in the early 1990's everybody was on board and it seemed to be working.
It is important to stress that the purpose of the inspections was not to find weapons of mass destruction. It was to verify that Saddam had destroyed these weapons as he had claimed. How do we know he possessed weapons of mass destruction? Because he used them on his own people, the Kurds, as well as against the Iranians during his war with Iran. Regarding the former, by the time his campaign against the Kurds was over in 1989, some two hundred thousand Kurds had been killed and "huge swaths of Kurdistan had been scorched by chemical warfare" (p. 20).
Beginning in late 1994, evidence began to emerge that the U.N. inspectors were being deceived. The head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Wafiq al-Samarra'i, fled Iraq and during extensive debriefings, told UNSCOM that despite what it had been led to believe, Iraq had developed VX nerve agent and loaded it onto missiles during the Gulf War for use if the coalition had marched on Baghdad (p. 71). It was learned that Iraq had a far more advanced and extensive biological warfare program than the inspectors knew.
What were the options? Covert action by CIA operatives (or by any other nation's operatives) had not met with success and was unlikely to do so in the future as that effort played to Saddam's strengths: layer upon layer of armed protection and a police state so extensive that Iraqis could have no confidence that anything they said would not be heard by the wrong ears. The so-called "Afghan approach" whereby very limited American and international troops assist indigenous armed rebels would also be doomed to failure, as Saddam was able to crush an uprising when he was at his weakest, immediately after the first Gulf War. The opposition, whether they were Kurds in the north or Shi'ites in the south, were not nearly as strong as the Northern Alliance was in opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
So we were left with deterrence or full-scale invasion. Deterrence meant allowing the elements of containment to lapse and instead relying on the threat of American military action to prevent Iraq from making mischief in the Persian Gulf region. The core assumption of deterrence was that Saddam would make the same calculation as the Soviets had - that the risk of nuclear annihilation by the United States would be too great to risk any aggressive military moves beyond his borders. But Saddam's behaviour in the past could give no confidence that he would in fact behave this way. According to Pollack, "Saddam's decision making has been characterized by miscalculation, extreme risk taking, a total disregard for human life, a willingness to suffer tremendous damage in pursuit of his goals, and a terrifying willingness to interpret reality in fantastic ways to suit the needs of the moment" (p. 416).
Furthermore, deterrence would be a policy with terrible costs. It would mean condemning the Iraqi people to decades more terror and torture under Saddam's totalitarianism. Unlike containment, deterrence also would mean giving up our ability to protect the Kurds. Human Rights Watch argued that Saddam's Anfal campaign (1987-89) constituted genocide against the Kurds, with some 200,000 dead. Pollack quotes a U.N. representative who reported that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was "of an exceptionally grave character - so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War" (p. 123). Saddam was able to "create a pervasive climate of terror throughout the country, which is the linchpin of Iraqi totalitarianism."
His was a state that "employed arbitrary execution, imprisonment, and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis." Pollack has a long list of indescribably monstrous practices of which I will reluctantly relate just two. "This is a regime that will crush all of the bones in the feet of a two year old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts". It is one "that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution" (p. 123). John Sweeney of the BBC said of being in Baghdad, "the fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks" (p. 122). The scale of Saddam's repression is such that over the last twenty years more than 200,000 people have disappeared into his prison system, never to be heard from again (p. 124).
Finally, those who said that "Bush is a maniac, an out of control cowboy" need to realize that the plan to overthrow Saddam did not originate with him. He inherited this plan from President Clinton, who, on December 19, 1998 announced that the policy of the U.S. government was now to replace Saddam Hussein's regime (p. 94). And one of the most vocal "hawks" in the Clinton administration who favored military action against Iraq was Vice-President Al Gore. What this tells us is that this was not a partisan decision but was made by both Democrat and Republican administrations. It took the events of 9/11 to galvanize the American people sufficiently that such a course of action was politically feasible. Iraq, like al-Qaeda, was not a problem that one administration had the sole responsibility for "screwing up" despite what all the conservative and liberal pundits claim.
What about the need for U.N. approval for invasion? Former President Carter, among others, made it clear that the moral legitimacy of this course depended on U.N. support. But this is dangerous moral reasoning. When morality is determined by counting noses, by community consensus, it is reduced to mere power. This would mean that the international court of opinion can never be wrong. What the former President should have been arguing was the merits of the case before him, not whether a bunch of other nations agree.
As I am writing this,almost ten years after the invasion actually occurred, I am well aware of how poorly it has unfolded. Certainly the logistics and execution of the invasion should have been carried out differently. But it is important to remember that the justification for the invasion itself is a separate issue, and as such, Pollack's 2002 analysis still has merit.
Pollack spends nearly the last third of the book building an strong case against the invasion now. The serious threat to the safety and security of America is way beyond Iraq.
"It would be best to hold off on plans for an invasion until al-Qa'ada is iradicated." He calls regime change in Iraq a
distraction from the war on terriorism. Further, he states a successful invasion of Iraq will require the support of Egypt, and general stability among the other Arab nations. Pollack identifies the central problem in the mid-East is not Iraq or Saddam, but the Israeli-Palestinian bedlam.
This book, taken as a whole, is not the case for US invasion of Irag now. It is a strong argument that President Bush may become the biggest April Fool in history.
This book offers much important background on Saddam and Iraq, and is strongest in making a case for doing something new about or with Saddam. His case for invading Iraq, however, fails to ENTIRELY convince me that the danger from Saddam was serious and imminent, and that it could not be addressed in any peacable way. Nor does he show the destruction caused by an invasion would be outweighed by the benefits. If this book convinces some people to favor invading Iraq, I hope they at least consider these two points the author makes: 1.War against Iraq could be "quite costly." "The cost in casualties could vary considerably based on three critical factors: how hard the Iraqi armed forces fight, whether they are willing and able to defend Iraq's cities, and how able they are to employ their weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces. We don't know the answer to any of these questions." (Page 344). 2. "We have a lot of work to do in terms of political, military and diplomatic preparations; the need to get the more immediate threat from al-Qa'eda under control; and the need to reduce the bedlam in the Middle East to lower levels. Unless and until we have done that preparatory work, an invasion of Iraq itself would be the risky option." (Page 421) How fascinating it would be to see the author debate Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who inspected weapons in Iraq seven years for the UN! An example of their differences: Pollack partly supports his case by quoting Khidhir Hamza (Pages 174, 266), who Ritter says was rejected by the CIA and the entire intelligence community "because they knew he wasn't who he said he was" (War on Iraq, by William Rivers Pitt with Scott Ritter, 2002, Page 52).
But, then again, Due to to the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 (signed by Clinton, but introduced by the Republicans) made Iraqi regime change the law. This could have been done through covert action, but Saddam's powerful and ruthlessly controlled regime, protected by multiple layers of ruthless secret police services, the Special Republican Guard, the Republican Guard, the fedayeen, and the Iraqi Army, made covert action an unattractive option.
I found the history of Iraq fascinating, and the book is well-written and well-researched.
I fail, however, to understand what Pollack means when he writes about "Arab-style democracy," which in my mind is either condescending or, worse, an open-ended concept meaning that dictatorship, as long as it serves American interests, would not altogether be unpalatable (yet another name to add to a list which, among others, includes the likes of Karimov in Uzbekistan, the al-Sauds in Saudi Arabia, and Musharraf in Pakistan).
It must be noted that, since Iraqi independence in the early 1930s, not a single leader has come to power in Iraq by means other than coups, violent or otherwise. Why is it that the perpetuation of this ignoble tradition - this time from the outside - would, all of a sudden and because we have good intentions, make things different? We all know that democracy cannot be imposed. No magic wand here, for sure...
The passage of time has been devastating for this book, and the analysis of its author. While it could be argued that the removal of Saddam was certainly a plus for the people of Iraq, it was inconsequential on any geopolitical level. As was clear to anyone who properly studied the issue before the war, Iraq circa 2003 was no longer a threat to its neighbors, and now after the war this fact becomes doubly obvious. Those who had experience in Iraq, and specific knowlege of Iraq's weapons capabilities (Scott Ritter, the IAEA, Hans Blix, David Albright) were pretty uniform in their assessment that Iraq of 2003 was simply not the threat Pollack claimed.
Any evaluation on the pros and cons of the war must conclude that this has been a net loss for America, and the world. While undoubtedly an improvement for Iraqi citizens, it has made the world at large more dangerous, and America in particular more open to pre-emptive attack. The rationale of pre-emption is now a reality, waiting to strike America, or other nations, at an opportune moment. The overall geopolitical consequences of the Iraq War are devastating for America, and we now face a much larger conflict with the Muslim world than we ever did before. Sixty-year alliances are now shattered, and America is distrusted--for what? A free Iraqi soccer team?
This is a calm, lucid argument about the case for war against Iraq. Despite the flashy title, Pollack does not come across as a rabid war-monger. He musters his arguments and presents them in a dispassionate fashion. He makes a far better case than the Bush Administration offered. Kenneth Pollack, writing six months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, sets out a case legitimizing such a course of action. He makes it clear from the outset that there was no hard evidence of a mutual, symbiotic link between Iraq and al-Qa'eda and therefore his case is built on entirely different grounds. The current policy toward Iraq was established by the United Nations after the first Gulf War. It was one of containment and had two essential parts: weapons inspections and sanctions. For these to be effective, the cooperation of the United Nations and especially of Iraq's neighbours was necessary. And in the early 1990's everybody was on board and it seemed to be working.
It is important to stress that the purpose of the inspections was not to find weapons of mass destruction. It was to verify that Saddam had destroyed these weapons as he had claimed. How do we know he possessed weapons of mass destruction? Because he used them on his own people, the Kurds, as well as against the Iranians during his war with Iran. Regarding the former, by the time his campaign against the Kurds was over in 1989, some two hundred thousand Kurds had been killed and "huge swaths of Kurdistan had been scorched by chemical warfare" (p. 20).
Beginning in late 1994, evidence began to emerge that the U.N. inspectors were being deceived. The head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Wafiq al-Samarra'i, fled Iraq and during extensive debriefings, told UNSCOM that despite what it had been led to believe, Iraq had developed VX nerve agent and loaded it onto missiles during the Gulf War for use if the coalition had marched on Baghdad (p. 71). It was learned that Iraq had a far more advanced and extensive biological warfare program than the inspectors knew.
What were the options? Covert action by CIA operatives (or by any other nation's operatives) had not met with success and was unlikely to do so in the future as that effort played to Saddam's strengths: layer upon layer of armed protection and a police state so extensive that Iraqis could have no confidence that anything they said would not be heard by the wrong ears. The so-called "Afghan approach" whereby very limited American and international troops assist indigenous armed rebels would also be doomed to failure, as Saddam was able to crush an uprising when he was at his weakest, immediately after the first Gulf War. The opposition, whether they were Kurds in the north or Shi'ites in the south, were not nearly as strong as the Northern Alliance was in opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
So we were left with deterrence or full-scale invasion. Deterrence meant allowing the elements of containment to lapse and instead relying on the threat of American military action to prevent Iraq from making mischief in the Persian Gulf region. The core assumption of deterrence was that Saddam would make the same calculation as the Soviets had - that the risk of nuclear annihilation by the United States would be too great to risk any aggressive military moves beyond his borders. But Saddam's behaviour in the past could give no confidence that he would in fact behave this way. According to Pollack, "Saddam's decision making has been characterized by miscalculation, extreme risk taking, a total disregard for human life, a willingness to suffer tremendous damage in pursuit of his goals, and a terrifying willingness to interpret reality in fantastic ways to suit the needs of the moment" (p. 416).
Furthermore, deterrence would be a policy with terrible costs. It would mean condemning the Iraqi people to decades more terror and torture under Saddam's totalitarianism. Unlike containment, deterrence also would mean giving up our ability to protect the Kurds. Human Rights Watch argued that Saddam's Anfal campaign (1987-89) constituted genocide against the Kurds, with some 200,000 dead. Pollack quotes a U.N. representative who reported that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was "of an exceptionally grave character - so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War" (p. 123). Saddam was able to "create a pervasive climate of terror throughout the country, which is the linchpin of Iraqi totalitarianism."
His was a state that "employed arbitrary execution, imprisonment, and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis." Pollack has a long list of indescribably monstrous practices of which I will reluctantly relate just two. "This is a regime that will crush all of the bones in the feet of a two year old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts". It is one "that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution" (p. 123). John Sweeney of the BBC said of being in Baghdad, "the fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks" (p. 122). The scale of Saddam's repression is such that over the last twenty years more than 200,000 people have disappeared into his prison system, never to be heard from again (p. 124).
Finally, those who said that "Bush is a maniac, an out of control cowboy" need to realize that the plan to overthrow Saddam did not originate with him. He inherited this plan from President Clinton, who, on December 19, 1998 announced that the policy of the U.S. government was now to replace Saddam Hussein's regime (p. 94). And one of the most vocal "hawks" in the Clinton administration who favored military action against Iraq was Vice-President Al Gore. What this tells us is that this was not a partisan decision but was made by both Democrat and Republican administrations. It took the events of 9/11 to galvanize the American people sufficiently that such a course of action was politically feasible. Iraq, like al-Qaeda, was not a problem that one administration had the sole responsibility for "screwing up" despite what all the conservative and liberal pundits claim.
What about the need for U.N. approval for invasion? Former President Carter, among others, made it clear that the moral legitimacy of this course depended on U.N. support. But this is dangerous moral reasoning. When morality is determined by counting noses, by community consensus, it is reduced to mere power. This would mean that the international court of opinion can never be wrong. What the former President should have been arguing was the merits of the case before him, not whether a bunch of other nations agree.
As I am writing this,almost ten years after the invasion actually occurred, I am well aware of how poorly it has unfolded. Certainly the logistics and execution of the invasion should have been carried out differently. But it is important to remember that the justification for the invasion itself is a separate issue, and as such, Pollack's 2002 analysis still has merit.
Pollack spends nearly the last third of the book building an strong case against the invasion now. The serious threat to the safety and security of America is way beyond Iraq.
"It would be best to hold off on plans for an invasion until al-Qa'ada is iradicated." He calls regime change in Iraq a
distraction from the war on terriorism. Further, he states a successful invasion of Iraq will require the support of Egypt, and general stability among the other Arab nations. Pollack identifies the central problem in the mid-East is not Iraq or Saddam, but the Israeli-Palestinian bedlam.
This book, taken as a whole, is not the case for US invasion of Irag now. It is a strong argument that President Bush may become the biggest April Fool in history.
This book offers much important background on Saddam and Iraq, and is strongest in making a case for doing something new about or with Saddam. His case for invading Iraq, however, fails to ENTIRELY convince me that the danger from Saddam was serious and imminent, and that it could not be addressed in any peacable way. Nor does he show the destruction caused by an invasion would be outweighed by the benefits. If this book convinces some people to favor invading Iraq, I hope they at least consider these two points the author makes: 1.War against Iraq could be "quite costly." "The cost in casualties could vary considerably based on three critical factors: how hard the Iraqi armed forces fight, whether they are willing and able to defend Iraq's cities, and how able they are to employ their weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces. We don't know the answer to any of these questions." (Page 344). 2. "We have a lot of work to do in terms of political, military and diplomatic preparations; the need to get the more immediate threat from al-Qa'eda under control; and the need to reduce the bedlam in the Middle East to lower levels. Unless and until we have done that preparatory work, an invasion of Iraq itself would be the risky option." (Page 421) How fascinating it would be to see the author debate Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who inspected weapons in Iraq seven years for the UN! An example of their differences: Pollack partly supports his case by quoting Khidhir Hamza (Pages 174, 266), who Ritter says was rejected by the CIA and the entire intelligence community "because they knew he wasn't who he said he was" (War on Iraq, by William Rivers Pitt with Scott Ritter, 2002, Page 52).
But, then again, Due to to the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 (signed by Clinton, but introduced by the Republicans) made Iraqi regime change the law. This could have been done through covert action, but Saddam's powerful and ruthlessly controlled regime, protected by multiple layers of ruthless secret police services, the Special Republican Guard, the Republican Guard, the fedayeen, and the Iraqi Army, made covert action an unattractive option.
I found the history of Iraq fascinating, and the book is well-written and well-researched.
I fail, however, to understand what Pollack means when he writes about "Arab-style democracy," which in my mind is either condescending or, worse, an open-ended concept meaning that dictatorship, as long as it serves American interests, would not altogether be unpalatable (yet another name to add to a list which, among others, includes the likes of Karimov in Uzbekistan, the al-Sauds in Saudi Arabia, and Musharraf in Pakistan).
It must be noted that, since Iraqi independence in the early 1930s, not a single leader has come to power in Iraq by means other than coups, violent or otherwise. Why is it that the perpetuation of this ignoble tradition - this time from the outside - would, all of a sudden and because we have good intentions, make things different? We all know that democracy cannot be imposed. No magic wand here, for sure...
The passage of time has been devastating for this book, and the analysis of its author. While it could be argued that the removal of Saddam was certainly a plus for the people of Iraq, it was inconsequential on any geopolitical level. As was clear to anyone who properly studied the issue before the war, Iraq circa 2003 was no longer a threat to its neighbors, and now after the war this fact becomes doubly obvious. Those who had experience in Iraq, and specific knowlege of Iraq's weapons capabilities (Scott Ritter, the IAEA, Hans Blix, David Albright) were pretty uniform in their assessment that Iraq of 2003 was simply not the threat Pollack claimed.
Any evaluation on the pros and cons of the war must conclude that this has been a net loss for America, and the world. While undoubtedly an improvement for Iraqi citizens, it has made the world at large more dangerous, and America in particular more open to pre-emptive attack. The rationale of pre-emption is now a reality, waiting to strike America, or other nations, at an opportune moment. The overall geopolitical consequences of the Iraq War are devastating for America, and we now face a much larger conflict with the Muslim world than we ever did before. Sixty-year alliances are now shattered, and America is distrusted--for what? A free Iraqi soccer team?
February 10, 2016
If any book shaped the thinking on Iraq policy back in 2002, this one was it it. The author made his reputation as a young CIA analyst who predicted Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He has since worked in think tanks and on the National Security Council and has long been a prominent voice in this debate. He walks his reader through a brief history of the Ba'athist Iraqi state, the Gulf War, and the tortured history of Iraq's relations with the world since 1991. He examines the options for dealing with Saddam Hussein and boils them down to two: deterrence or invasion. The former, he argues, is the riskier course, because the Iraqi dictator has consistently flouted the rules of rational calculation beloved by political scientists. Pollack is sober about the dangers, costs, and implications of invasion but ends by concluding that it is the best option. This well-written work will no doubt attract much controversy. But it will be indispensable, even for those who disagree with its conclusions
February 23, 2007
ummmm....so much for weapons of mass destruction in iraq theory...thanks for nothing pollack. a 900 page book full of CIA bs.
January 23, 2014
I read this before the Iraq War, and although it was compelling, almost everything in it was wrong.
August 6, 2011
Kenneth Pollack, writing six months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, sets out a case legitimizing such a course of action. He makes it clear from the outset that there was no link between Iraq and al-Qa'eda and therefore his case is built on entirely different grounds. The current policy toward Iraq was established by the United Nations after the first Gulf War. It was one of containment and had two essential parts: weapons inspections and sanctions. For these to be effective, the cooperation of the United Nations and especially of Iraq's neighbours was necessary. And in the early 1990's everybody was on board and it seemed to be working.
It is important to stress that the purpose of the inspections was not to find weapons of mass destruction. It was to verify that Saddam had destroyed these weapons as he had claimed. How do we know he possessed weapons of mass destruction? Because he used them on his own people, the Kurds, as well as against the Iranians during his war with Iran. Regarding the former, by the time his campaign against the Kurds was over in 1989, some two hundred thousand Kurds had been killed and "huge swaths of Kurdistan had been scorched by chemical warfare" (p. 20).
Beginning in late 1994, evidence began to emerge that the U.N. inspectors were being deceived. The head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Wafiq al-Samarra'i, fled Iraq and during extensive debriefings, told UNSCOM that despite what it had been led to believe, Iraq had developed VX nerve agent and loaded it onto missiles during the Gulf War for use if the coalition had marched on Baghdad (p. 71). It was learned that Iraq had a far more advanced and extensive biological warfare program than the inspectors knew.
Probably the most frightening aspect of Saddam's program of WMD was his intent, and progress toward, the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In August 1990, he had ordered a crash program to build a single nuclear weapon that could be placed in a missile warhead and used against Tel Aviv if his regime was at risk. Though he was not successful, U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq could have achieved a fully workable nuclear weapon in another year had the war not set back the program.
A recent defector who worked as a design engineer stated that Saddam had ordered the entire nuclear program reconstituted in August 1998, when he announced that he had ceased all cooperation with the U.N. inspectors. The U.S. intelligence community estimated that it would take Iraq five to ten years from the start of a crash program to enrich enough uranium to make one or more weapons. The German intelligence service estimated it at only three to six years. Thus if left to its own devices it would be only a matter of time before Saddam's regime could acquire nuclear weapons (p. 174).
By the late 1990's flagrant disregard of sanctions toward Iraq by its Arab neighbours and even by countries like China showed that the climate had changed (p. 216). Iraq was bringing in around $3 billion in illegal trade, and the international community had lost interest in enforcing U.N. resolutions. Saddam, sensing this, was emboldened and kicked out the inspectors in 1998. The policy of containment, then, clearly had failed.
What were the options? Covert action by CIA operatives (or by any other nation's operatives) had not met with success and was unlikely to do so in the future as that effort played to Saddam's strengths: layer upon layer of armed protection and a police state so extensive that Iraqis could have no confidence that anything they said would not be heard by the wrong ears. The so-called "Afghan approach" whereby very limited American and international troops assist indigenous armed rebels would also be doomed to failure, as Saddam was able to crush an uprising when he was at his weakest, immediately after the first Gulf War. The opposition, whether they were Kurds in the north or Shi'ites in the south, were not nearly as strong as the Northern Alliance was in opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
So we were left with deterrence or full-scale invasion. Deterrence meant allowing the elements of containment to lapse and instead relying on the threat of American military action to prevent Iraq from making mischief in the Persian Gulf region. The core assumption of deterrence was that Saddam would make the same calculation as the Soviets had - that the risk of nuclear annihilation by the United States would be too great to risk any aggressive military moves beyond his borders. But Saddam's behaviour in the past could give no confidence that he would in fact behave this way. According to Pollack, "Saddam's decision making has been characterized by miscalculation, extreme risk taking, a total disregard for human life, a willingness to suffer tremendous damage in pursuit of his goals, and a terrifying willingness to interpret reality in fantastic ways to suit the needs of the moment" (p. 416).
Furthermore, deterrence would be a policy with terrible costs. It would mean condemning the Iraqi people to decades more terror and torture under Saddam's totalitarianism. Unlike containment, deterrence also would mean giving up our ability to protect the Kurds. Human Rights Watch argued that Saddam's Anfal campaign (1987-89) constituted genocide against the Kurds, with some 200,000 dead. Pollack quotes a U.N. representative who reported that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was "of an exceptionally grave character - so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War" (p. 123). Saddam was able to "create a pervasive climate of terror throughout the country, which is the linchpin of Iraqi totalitarianism."
His was a state that "employed arbitrary execution, imprisonment, and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis." Pollack has a long list of indescribably monstrous practices of which I will reluctantly relate just two. "This is a regime that will crush all of the bones in the feet of a two year old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts". It is one "that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution" (p. 123). John Sweeney of the BBC said of being in Baghdad, "the fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks" (p. 122). The scale of Saddam's repression is such that over the last twenty years more than 200,000 people have disappeared into his prison system, never to be heard from again (p. 124).
Finally, those who said that "Bush is a maniac, an out of control cowboy" need to realize that the plan to overthrow Saddam did not originate with him. He inherited this plan from President Clinton, who, on December 19, 1998 announced that the policy of the U.S. government was now to replace Saddam Hussein's regime (p. 94). And one of the most vocal "hawks" in the Clinton administration who favored military action against Iraq was Vice-President Al Gore. What this tells us is that this was not a partisan decision but was made by both Democrat and Republican administrations. It took the events of 9/11 to galvanize the American people sufficiently that such a course of action was politically feasible.
What about the need for U.N. approval for invasion? Former President Carter, among others, made it clear that the moral legitimacy of this course depended on U.N. support. But this is dangerous moral reasoning. When morality is determined by counting noses, by community consensus, it is reduced to mere power. This would mean that the international court of opinion can never be wrong. What the former President should have been arguing was the merits of the case before him, not whether a bunch of other nations agree.
As I am writing this, five and one half years after the invasion actually occurred, I am well aware of how poorly it has unfolded. Certainly the logistics and execution of the invasion should have been carried out differently. But it is important to remember that the justification for the invasion itself is a separate issue, and as such, Pollack's 2002 analysis still has merit.
It is important to stress that the purpose of the inspections was not to find weapons of mass destruction. It was to verify that Saddam had destroyed these weapons as he had claimed. How do we know he possessed weapons of mass destruction? Because he used them on his own people, the Kurds, as well as against the Iranians during his war with Iran. Regarding the former, by the time his campaign against the Kurds was over in 1989, some two hundred thousand Kurds had been killed and "huge swaths of Kurdistan had been scorched by chemical warfare" (p. 20).
Beginning in late 1994, evidence began to emerge that the U.N. inspectors were being deceived. The head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Wafiq al-Samarra'i, fled Iraq and during extensive debriefings, told UNSCOM that despite what it had been led to believe, Iraq had developed VX nerve agent and loaded it onto missiles during the Gulf War for use if the coalition had marched on Baghdad (p. 71). It was learned that Iraq had a far more advanced and extensive biological warfare program than the inspectors knew.
Probably the most frightening aspect of Saddam's program of WMD was his intent, and progress toward, the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In August 1990, he had ordered a crash program to build a single nuclear weapon that could be placed in a missile warhead and used against Tel Aviv if his regime was at risk. Though he was not successful, U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq could have achieved a fully workable nuclear weapon in another year had the war not set back the program.
A recent defector who worked as a design engineer stated that Saddam had ordered the entire nuclear program reconstituted in August 1998, when he announced that he had ceased all cooperation with the U.N. inspectors. The U.S. intelligence community estimated that it would take Iraq five to ten years from the start of a crash program to enrich enough uranium to make one or more weapons. The German intelligence service estimated it at only three to six years. Thus if left to its own devices it would be only a matter of time before Saddam's regime could acquire nuclear weapons (p. 174).
By the late 1990's flagrant disregard of sanctions toward Iraq by its Arab neighbours and even by countries like China showed that the climate had changed (p. 216). Iraq was bringing in around $3 billion in illegal trade, and the international community had lost interest in enforcing U.N. resolutions. Saddam, sensing this, was emboldened and kicked out the inspectors in 1998. The policy of containment, then, clearly had failed.
What were the options? Covert action by CIA operatives (or by any other nation's operatives) had not met with success and was unlikely to do so in the future as that effort played to Saddam's strengths: layer upon layer of armed protection and a police state so extensive that Iraqis could have no confidence that anything they said would not be heard by the wrong ears. The so-called "Afghan approach" whereby very limited American and international troops assist indigenous armed rebels would also be doomed to failure, as Saddam was able to crush an uprising when he was at his weakest, immediately after the first Gulf War. The opposition, whether they were Kurds in the north or Shi'ites in the south, were not nearly as strong as the Northern Alliance was in opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
So we were left with deterrence or full-scale invasion. Deterrence meant allowing the elements of containment to lapse and instead relying on the threat of American military action to prevent Iraq from making mischief in the Persian Gulf region. The core assumption of deterrence was that Saddam would make the same calculation as the Soviets had - that the risk of nuclear annihilation by the United States would be too great to risk any aggressive military moves beyond his borders. But Saddam's behaviour in the past could give no confidence that he would in fact behave this way. According to Pollack, "Saddam's decision making has been characterized by miscalculation, extreme risk taking, a total disregard for human life, a willingness to suffer tremendous damage in pursuit of his goals, and a terrifying willingness to interpret reality in fantastic ways to suit the needs of the moment" (p. 416).
Furthermore, deterrence would be a policy with terrible costs. It would mean condemning the Iraqi people to decades more terror and torture under Saddam's totalitarianism. Unlike containment, deterrence also would mean giving up our ability to protect the Kurds. Human Rights Watch argued that Saddam's Anfal campaign (1987-89) constituted genocide against the Kurds, with some 200,000 dead. Pollack quotes a U.N. representative who reported that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was "of an exceptionally grave character - so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War" (p. 123). Saddam was able to "create a pervasive climate of terror throughout the country, which is the linchpin of Iraqi totalitarianism."
His was a state that "employed arbitrary execution, imprisonment, and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis." Pollack has a long list of indescribably monstrous practices of which I will reluctantly relate just two. "This is a regime that will crush all of the bones in the feet of a two year old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts". It is one "that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution" (p. 123). John Sweeney of the BBC said of being in Baghdad, "the fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks" (p. 122). The scale of Saddam's repression is such that over the last twenty years more than 200,000 people have disappeared into his prison system, never to be heard from again (p. 124).
Finally, those who said that "Bush is a maniac, an out of control cowboy" need to realize that the plan to overthrow Saddam did not originate with him. He inherited this plan from President Clinton, who, on December 19, 1998 announced that the policy of the U.S. government was now to replace Saddam Hussein's regime (p. 94). And one of the most vocal "hawks" in the Clinton administration who favored military action against Iraq was Vice-President Al Gore. What this tells us is that this was not a partisan decision but was made by both Democrat and Republican administrations. It took the events of 9/11 to galvanize the American people sufficiently that such a course of action was politically feasible.
What about the need for U.N. approval for invasion? Former President Carter, among others, made it clear that the moral legitimacy of this course depended on U.N. support. But this is dangerous moral reasoning. When morality is determined by counting noses, by community consensus, it is reduced to mere power. This would mean that the international court of opinion can never be wrong. What the former President should have been arguing was the merits of the case before him, not whether a bunch of other nations agree.
As I am writing this, five and one half years after the invasion actually occurred, I am well aware of how poorly it has unfolded. Certainly the logistics and execution of the invasion should have been carried out differently. But it is important to remember that the justification for the invasion itself is a separate issue, and as such, Pollack's 2002 analysis still has merit.
December 18, 2020
Very good but outdated, it shows the thinking of that time and you learn some about Iraq. Worth the read
April 18, 2022
This one didn't age too well, did it?
November 15, 2025
The author has a cogent response to those who say the invasion of Iraq was wrong. It is always informative to read a book that counters one's own beliefs.
February 11, 2016
I read this in the months leading up to the start of the Iraq War in 2003, and it really affected my viewpoint. It was an extremely well-informed book that made a completely convincing case that an invasion of Iraq was the only sensible way to address the threats posed by Saddam and to pave the way for peace and justice in the Middle East. The author had been studying US-Iraq relations since 1990, and he seemed to have a complete understanding of the motivations of the various parties involved and was able to predict their actions well. Some things he wrote of had come to pass by the time I read the book (he was right on target about predicting the actions of France, for instance.) He reviewed the history of Iraq from its beginnings and spent considerable time describing how the Iraq-US relationship had evolved to its then-current (pre-war) state. He thoroughly explained the threats posed by Saddam and why they could not simply be ignored, and then presented the possible paths the US could take in response, which included continued containment, simple deterrence, covert action, the Afghan approach, and outright invasion. Each option was presented solidly and reluctantly dismissed for various reasons until invasion was the only option left.
Of course, much has happened since then, and I would be interested to know what the author thinks of the developments and how later revelations about WMDs would have affected his analysis.
Of course, much has happened since then, and I would be interested to know what the author thinks of the developments and how later revelations about WMDs would have affected his analysis.
Want to read
February 8, 2008Though I haven't read this book, I still plan to even though it seems a little dated.
Kenneth Pollack is a pre-eminent scholar of middle-eastern issues and particularly Iraq and Iran.
Though the content seems a little irrelevant, this book will be interesting to read so that the current state of affairs in Iraq can be compared to what was being said before the U.S. invasion.
Kenneth Pollack is a pre-eminent scholar of middle-eastern issues and particularly Iraq and Iran.
Though the content seems a little irrelevant, this book will be interesting to read so that the current state of affairs in Iraq can be compared to what was being said before the U.S. invasion.
December 2, 2024
Worst reading experience of my life. Read this during the build up to the Iraq war. It was well written and convincing. After reading it I felt that going to war was the right thing to do. A few years later I saw shelves full of this book at Strand Used Books and at library book sales. Abandoned copies. I felt the author violated his readers.
November 25, 2010
The case for an invasion was not confined to gun-toting warmongers. There was a deep, profound, and convincing case for removing Saddam.
The author covers all of the most touted alternatives to war, including smart-sanctions, and explains why none of them were likely to be successful.
The author covers all of the most touted alternatives to war, including smart-sanctions, and explains why none of them were likely to be successful.
April 6, 2007
For those who believed that going into Iraq was the right move- these arguements are what drove that conclussion
August 24, 2008
Written prior to the US invasion of Iraq, a compelling argument for the invasion.
March 11, 2010
It was ok. Just kind of out-of-date. The Persian Puzzle was much better.
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