Bush's Real Casus Belli

By Michael T. Klare, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted January 27, 2003.

The United States is about to go to war with Iraq. As of this writing, there are 60,000 U.S. troops already deployed in the area around Iraq, and another 75,000 or so are on their way to the combat zone. Weapons inspectors have found a dozen warheads, designed to carry chemical weapons. Even before this discovery, senior U.S. officials were insisting that Saddam was not cooperating with the United Nations and had to be removed by force. Hence, there does not seem to be any way to stop this war, unless Saddam Hussein is overthrown by members of the Iraqi military or is persuaded to abdicate his position and flee the country.

It is impossible at this point to foresee the outcome of this war. Under the most optimistic scenarios -- the ones advanced by proponents of the war -- Iraqi forces will put up only token resistance and American forces will quickly capture Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein from office (by killing him or placing him under arrest). Those who favor a war with Iraq tend to believe that Iraqi resistance will be light and that the rest of the optimistic scenario will fall into place. But no one can guarantee that any of this will come to pass, and there are many experts who believe that the likelihood of things going awry are very great. For example, the CIA has indicated that Iraq is most likely to use its WMD in the event that Iraq is attacked and defeat appears likely. In weighing the relative merits of going to war with Iraq, therefore, one should reckon on the worst possible outcome, not the best. One must ask: are the purported benefits of war so great as to outweigh all of the possible negative repercussions?

And this leads to the most fundamental question of all: WHY are we going to war? What is really motivating President Bush and his senior advisers to incur these enormous risks?

In their public pronouncements, President Bush and his associates have advanced three reasons for going to war with Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein: (1) to eliminate Saddam's WMD arsenals; (2) to diminish the threat of international terrorism; and (3) to promote democracy in Iraq and the surrounding areas.

These are, indeed, powerful motives for going to war. But are they genuine? Is this what is really driving the rush to war? To answer this, we need to examine each motive in turn. In doing so, moreover, it is necessary to keep in mind that the United States cannot do everything. If we commit hundreds of thousands of American troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to the conquest, occupation, and reconstruction of Iraq, we cannot easily do the same in other countries -- we simply don't have the resources to invade and occupy every country that poses a hypothetical threat to the United States or is deserving of regime change. So a decision to attack Iraq means a decision to refrain from other actions that might also be important for U.S. security or the good of the world.

Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction

The reason most often given by the administration for going to war with Iraq is to reduce the risk of a WMD attack on the United States. To be sure, a significant WMD attack on the United States would be a terrible disaster, and it is appropriate for the President of the United States to take effective and vigorous action to prevent this from happening. If this is, in fact, Bush's primary concern, then one would imagine that he would pay the greatest attention to the greatest threat of WMD usage against the United States, and deploy available U.S. resources -- troops, dollars, and diplomacy -- accordingly. But is this what Bush is actually doing? The answer is no. Anyone who takes the trouble to examine the global WMD proliferation threat closely and to gauge the relative likelihood of various WMD scenarios would have to conclude that the greatest threat of WMD usage against the United States at the present time comes from North Korea and Pakistan, not Iraq.

North Korea and Pakistan pose a greater WMD threat to the United States than Iraq for several reasons. First of all, they both possess much bigger WMD arsenals. Pakistan is known to possess several dozen nuclear warheads along with missiles and planes capable of delivering them hundreds of miles away; it is also suspected of having developed chemical weapons. North Korea is thought to possess sufficient plutonium to produce one to two nuclear devices along with the capacity to manufacture several more; it also has a large chemical weapons stockpile and a formidable array of ballistic missiles. Iraq, by contrast, possesses no nuclear weapons today and is thought to be several years away from producing one, even under the best of circumstances. Iraq may possess some chemical and biological weapons and a dozen or so Scud-type missiles that were hidden at the end of the 1991 Gulf war, but it is not known whether any of these items are still in working order and available for military use. Equally important is the question of intention: how likely are these countries to actually use their WMD munitions? Nobody can answer this with any degree of certainty, of course. But there are a few things that can be said.

To begin with, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has publicly stated that he was prepared to employ nuclear weapons against India last year when New Delhi massed its forces on Pakistan's border and threatened to attack unless Pakistan curbed the activities of Islamic militants in Kashmir. This does not mean that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons against the United States, but it does indicate a readiness to employ such weapons as an instrument of war; it is also easy to imagine a scenario in which someone else comes to power who is far more anti-American than Musharraf.

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