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Deter and contain: it worked against Joseph Stalin, so why not against Saddam Hussein?

Article Excerpt
THE SIMPLEST QUESTION THAT SUPPORTERS OF going to war with Iraq cannot answer is why would Saddam Hussein be less likely to use his weapons of mass destruction if we attack than if we contain him. This debate, essentially within the Republican Party, closely mirrors the struggle over the proposed rollback of communism that raged in the GOP in the late 1940s and early 1950s--until President Dwight Eisenhower settled it. As we currently debate whether some form of containment can work, it is worth reviewing the lessons of that history.

Those who advocated preventive war against the Soviet Union advanced the same arguments being made today: Time is not on our side. We must act before Joseph Stalin gets nuclear weapons. He is a ruthless leader who is not rational and cannot be deterred. If we let Russia get nuclear weapons, she will use them to blackmail her neighbors and we will not be able to intervene for fear of provoking a nuclear exchange.

When Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, he set in motion a process within the executive branch that permitted a full and unfettered debate between the options of preventive war and containment. When it was over, the advocates of containment had prevailed. They argued that war was dangerous and costly, and that the outcome could not be predicted with any precision. They argued that under the United Nations Charter, preventive action could not be justified unless an act was imminent, and that no such case could be made against the USSR. They suggested that Stalin, above all, wanted to survive, and that he was cautious and not reckless with his own scalp.

And so the United States set to work to make containment succeed. There were some dangerous moments to be sure, including the Cuban missile crisis and the various Berlin crises, but we succeeded. It took less time than many feared and more than some hoped, but, in the end, the Soviet Union collapsed before any nuclear weapons were used.

What reason is there to believe that an active containment effort would not succeed against Saddam Hussein, who...