War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's mission
- California Encounter Books 2003
- 153 p.
In this timely book, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol take a hard look at Saddam Hussein. And they see the face of evil: someone who embraced a cruel blend of socialism, fascism and pan Arab nationalism when young, and later became a coup plotter and a member of the Iraqi equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts. Once in power, Saddam methodically created a terror state where thousands of citizens have been made to disappear, and where the wives of government officials are raped by secret policemen to extort loyalty from the officials or their colleagues.
Saddam's brutality has targeted Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities, particularly the Shiites and Kurds, whom he subdued with poison gas. The same genocidal techniques he used against his own people also characterized Saddam's war on Iran, where he ordered artillery barrages of nerve gas and cyanide shells. But Kaplan and Kristol argue that to understand the choice we face in dealing with Saddam, it is necessary to go beyond the details of his weapons of mass destruc tion, his violence against his own people and others, and his flouting of U.N. resolu tions. They believe the choice is whether the twenty-first century will see a world of civilized norms that is congenial to Amer ica, or a world where dictators feel no con straints against developing terror weapons and no compunction about using them at home and abroad and in support of terrorism. The authors analyze how the three post-Cold War presidencies have dealt with Saddam. Guided by a narrow realpolitik that defined America's vital interest in terms of oil wells, strategic chokepoints and regional balance, the first Bush administration regarded Iraq as a move on a diplomatic board game, and thus failed to remove Saddam when it had a chance. Then came the Clinton administration, which subscribed to a post-Vietnam brand of wishful liberalism that led to avoid facing up seriously to Saddam's threat. But President George W. Bush, the authors show, does not intend merely to contain or even disarm Iraq, as his predecessors did. Instead, he plans to liberate this benighted country and bring democracy to a land that for decades has known only dictatorship. Kaplan and Kristol provide a definitive analysis of the Bush Doctrine and its shaping of a foreign policy that projects American influence on behalf of American inter ests and human freedom. They show that by enshrining in official policy the strategy of military preemption, regime change and a vision of American power that is fully engaged on behalf of American principles, the Bush administration plans not only to liberate Iraq but to set a new course for American policy in the twenty-first century. The War over Iraq looks back at how a sadistic dictator was allowed to acquire so much power on the world stage. But it also offers a roadmap for a more hopeful future.