Iraqi debacle: At least the illusions are gone--International Herald Tribune: "It now appears that the U.S. effort to remake Iraq as a viable and peaceful democratic state is likely to end in failure. If indeed that happens, it will be tragic for those in Iraq who long for peace, order and liberty.
For the United States, it will involve a certain amount of humiliation. But it is to be hoped that it will also involve the destruction of three dangerous illusions which have warped U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 era.
The first of these illusions is the belief that pre-emptive strikes are required to deal with rogue states in the new era. After Sept. 11, it was confidently predicted, containment no longer worked against the Saddam Hussein's of the world.
But one year after regime change, it's clear that the Iraqi threat could have been contained as indeed it had been contained since the 1991 Gulf War. For Saddam, far from being an ideological fanatic, was a cynical calculator whose overriding concern was to hold onto power and to exercise it ruthlessly over the unfortunate people of Iraq.
True, containment can't work against terrorists who can run and hide, but rogue states are different; they have a return address. And it should have been clear that Saddam knew if he smuggled weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda or used banned weapons against U.S. interests, his regime would have met massive retaliation from Washington. Of course, we now know he didn't even possess those weapons.
Yet for preventive war advocates, containment is a discredited policy; in the case of Iraq, it meant, as The Weekly Standard's neoconservative editors warned, coddling a suicidal tyrant. Never mind that containment (sanctions, naval blockade, no-fly zone) kept that suicidal tyrant in his box for over a decade. And never mind that although containment lacked the political sex appeal of 'liberation,' it at least recognized the dangers of unintended consequences that a liberated Iraq has now delivered."


- posted by geoff @ #