Sanctions Redux

For those interested in the topic, David Rieff wrote a gloomy, information-packed article for The New York Times Magazine five weeks ago, including several thought-provoking interviews with former top policymakers.

Comments

[Zathras]

I read the piece. It looks as if we badly underestimated the impact of the sanctions on the Iraqi infrastructure, as well as the impact of the Shiite revolt in 1991 being crushed on the willingness of the countries largest faction to trust America to help repair the damage.

There is hardly anything we are trying to do now that would not have been exponentially easier to do beginning in March 1991.

[Matt Welch]

Zathras -- Sure, but lest we forget, there was very little appetite on the part of *anybody* to "finish the job" in March 1991. I wrote a column about this, and the unpredictability of making post-war predictions, this March:
http://mattwelch.com/NatPostSave/baker.htm

[Zathras]

Policy mistakes are not excused because they would have been approved in an opinion poll at the time they were made. A poster on this board, which regularly features howls of outrage about the alleged threats to liberty contained in a Patriot Act that passed with a majority so large the number of Congressmen voting "no" could fit in a Volkswagen, should of all people understand that.

The fact is that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait led the United States to send an army half a million strong to Saudi Arabia, fight a war, declare it over before the enemy had been destroyed in order to limit the number of unpleasant television images, was ordered to stand by idly as an Iraqi rebellion encouraged by the President of the United States was crushed, and was then brought home. Except for a remnant that was left in the region for the next dozen years in order to contain the government George H. W. Bush thought it would be destabilizing to remove, and we all know the rest of that story.

Policy makers are not often gifted with clairvoyance, but its absence is not that difficult to distinguish from the dull reactiveness, absence of imagination and failure of nerve that was the hallmark of the elder Bush's administration, so dramatically on display in the spring of 1991. Say what you want to about the younger Bush's foreign policy (I have elsewhere said quite a bit), but know that he was forced to deal with the Iraqi problem because of his father's abject failure as Commander in Chief.

[Zathras]

Well, Matt, I did, though then as now I was not in a position to do anything about it (too bad there wasn't a blogosphere in 1991!). You really didn't need a hawk's vision to see something was going very wrong when the Iraqi helicopters Schwarzkopf had agreed to let Iraqi officials use to bypass war-damaged roads started gunning down Shiites as the enormous American army stood by. In all honesty my reasoning at the time was more basic: UN resolution or no UN resolution you don't walk away from a war you can win without winning it, and this means destroying the enemy or forcing his surrender.

If any Democrats were really serious about national security policy maybe we might have seen a discussion of why exactly the younger Bush was justified in thinking the lack of a UN mandate on Iraq no big deal while the elder Bush was right to feel such a mandate dictated his every step. Personally I think the mandate was just an excuse for Bush to do what he thought would allow him to coast to reelection. In any event, if we don't give Stanley Baldwin a pass for looking the other way when the Germans took the Rhineland and do blame Lyndon Johnson for charging into Vietnam when hardly anyone disagreed we can't justify giving GHW Bush a pass for this, a sordid and disastrous episode in the history of American foreign policy.

[Matt Welch]

Zathras -- I would be interested to know whether you held, and expressed, this same opinion in March 1991. Regardless of anything else, the explicit mandate for the allied forces at the time was to roll back the invasion of Kuwait, not overthrow Saddam Hussein. Even if the latter should have happened, it was not much advocated at the time. If you plumped for that, I would find that interesting. I, for one, did not.