Mearsheimer and Walt: An Unnecessary War

Mearsheimer, J. & Walt, S., 2003. An Unnecessary War. Foreign Policy, 134(1), 2003.

*this was a word document version of the article, so pagination may be problematic

“In the full-court press for war with Iraq, the Bush administration deems Saddam Hussein reckless, ruthless, and not fully rational. Such a man, when mixed with nuclear weapons, is too unpredictable to be prevented from threatening the United States, the hawks say. But scrutiny of his past dealings with the world shows that Saddam, though cruel and calculating, is eminently deterrable” (1).

The main argument of those that support the preemptive invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that Saddam could not be trusted with nuclear weapons and that, for this reason alone, he had to go. Even though proponents of the preemptive attack on Saddam acknowledged that the war could lead to a costly occupation, they believed that a nuclear armed Saddam was not tolerable.

Mearsheimer and Walt explore the notion that Saddam was a mad-man. They find that the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s was defensive, from the Iraqi perspective. The invasion of Kuwait can also be seen as being rational: Kuwait was being non-compliant and diplomatic alternatives were exhausted and the US seemed to signal that it would not involve itself in the matter. What about Saddam’s use of chemical and biological weapons on his own people? That calculation taken on the part of Saddam was also through a metric that didn’t see those people possibly responding in a way that would be damaging to Saddam’s critical interests. The calculation of using WMDs against Western targets would be radically different. Also, Saddam used these chemical and biological weapons at a time when we were, and remained, friends of him and Iraq. The US can contain Iraq, even a nuclear armed Iraq, as it did the Soviet Union.

What about the possibility of a “nuclear handoff”? (7). Firstly, Iraq and al Qaeda have no substantive proven connection. In fact, prior to 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and al Qaeda were in a state of war as the former was a secular Arab nation and the later proponed theocracy. Secondly, if Iraq wanted to secretively transfer a nuke to a terrorist organization, it would be difficult to imagine that the weapon would not be ultimately traced back to Saddam.

“If the United States is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq, Americans should understand that a compelling strategic rationale is absent. This war would be one the Bush administration chose to fight but did not have to fight. Even if such a war goes well and has positive long-range consequences, it will still have been unnecessary. And if it goes badly—whether in the form of high U.S. casualties, significant civilian deaths, a heightened risk of terrorism, or increased hatred of the United States in the Arab and Islamic world—then its architects will have even more to answer for” (9).