The Iraq Problem Will Remain with US

Iraq, by any static or dynamic measure a medium power, has sought hegemonic status in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, where the twentieth century's greatest powers have repeatedly asserted their superior claims to hegemony: most notably the United States, Russia (before and after the October 1917 revolution), and Great Britain. A weaker nation seeking such dominance in an environment already crowded with competing great-power claimants finds itself part of what can be called "the Iraq problem" in global politics, a dangerous game not only for ambitious lesser states seeking their place in the sun but for those giants determined to maintain the status quo against these upstarts. The pace of ambitious nouveaux riches in world affairs will likely quicken with expanding acquisitions of weapons of mass destruction. This makes the contemporary case of Iraq versus the United States so urgently important to understand as both precedent and warning: the court of adjudication in this instance has been war, but hopefully peaceful solutions to the Iraq problem will be discovered to head off even more disastrous consequences for international stability in the future.

I

Iraq's rise to notoriety in the Middle East and beyond has been meteoric, very much a product of its war with Iran in the 1980s. In horrific warfare against the Iranian Revolution, supported by the United States and its Arab allies in the gulf, Saddam Hussein not only sought to realize his territorial claims in the war he initiated but boldly used chemical weapons without reprimand from the Americans. Although the Iran-Iraq War ended on an indeterminate note, by 1990 the Iraqi leader had taken an apparent lack of U.S. concern about his irredentism as license to seize Kuwait in a bold preemptive move. Yet, along with the British, the United States had adamantly opposed past Iraqi claims to Kuwait. In concert with a broad coalition of nations, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm in January 1991 to oust Saddam from Kuwait. Only two months later, a cease-fire agreement with Iraq made at Safwan formally ended hostilities and Iraq's occupation of its neighbor in the gulf.

What followed during the next dozen years was a prolonged controversy between Iraq and the United Nations over Saddam's attempt to capitalize on his possession and past use of weapons of mass destruction in order to maintain and even advance Iraqi hegemonic ambitions in the gulf despite his defeat in Kuwait. Such was his dark reputation that he engendered fear in others even when he denied that he still had such weapons. It is this period of the rise and fall of arms control inspections, under international auspices, that most dramatically demonstrates the future consequences of the Iraq problem for international stability. The end of Saddam's domestic regime in Iraq will not terminate his dangerous legacy to the international arms- control regime: medium-size powers using weapons of mass destruction, as threats and even in practice, to boost hegemonic ambitions in regions of the world already under the hegemonic sway of great powers.

The most definitive treatment by an insider of this story of arms control frustration in Iraq can be found in Richard Butler's The Great Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security (Public Affairs Books, 2000/2001). This prescient book, written by the Australian head of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq from 1997 to 1998, addresses the enormous obstacles to effective multilateral arms control posed by Saddam's hegemonic ambitions and his development of weapons of mass destruction in order to make himself a power to reckon with in the international system even after he had been soundly defeated by the allied coalition in 1991. There is no need to retrace Butler's narrative here, except to make note that to understand the impasse in the Security Council in late 2002 and early 2003, as well as the course...