THE LOGIC OF CONTAINMENT

This weekend was full of foreboding. How could it not be? I was lucky enough to be at a wonderful wedding, but even there, the talk was of whether this was another 1914. Were we about to cross a Rubicon that could escalate beyond our control? Could the president carry a divided country through the difficult military terrain ahead? Was a catastrophe in a major American city an inevitability? Would war against Iraq hasten it? But these questions, however worthy, are unanswerable. What is answerable to some degree is whether we have a real alternative to war. Not even Dominique de Villepin believes the current inspections regime can go on for ever. But we know something now that we didn’t know even a month ago. We know that even with the threat of imminent war, backed by 250,000 troops and a president who clearly threatens conflict with credibility, the inspections are not achieving meaningful disarmament. Saddam is that cool. Moreover, he is still upping the ante. He’s angling for lifting of sanctions. He’s dismissing concerns about weapons that are clearly illicit. He’s not even disarming at any serious pace the token missiles he has agreed to destroy. So even with maximum pressure, he’s playing for time. To be sure, we don’t have absolute maximum pressure. We have a divided security council, massive peace demos and papers like the New York Times already bailing on a united front. But even so, the pressure on the dictator must surely be intense. This much is certain: even if we could keep 250,000 troops in the region indefinitely, no future containment regime will ever be as effective as it is now, which is to say it isn’t effective at all. (Philip Bobbitt makes a related point in the New York Times today.) So our practical choice is either war very shortly or the long-term toleration of a free Saddam, able to buy weapons, buoyed by having stared down the U.N. once again. In other words, I think we’ve essentially tested the limits of international pressure on Saddam Hussein; and the results cannot guarantee security at any credible level for any reasonable length of time. What more do we need to know?