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The logic of not invading Samuel Brittan: Financial Times 25/10/02 The classical liberals of 19th-century England, whose spiritual heirs are now mostly to be found in the US, were divided on international affairs. One strand, associated with Lord Palmerston, advocated - rather selectively - intervention to help nations struggling to be free. The other strand, associated with Richard Cobden of anti-Corn Law fame, argued that such interventions were usually misguided and counterproductive, and that the first duty of states was to promote the peace, freedom and welfare of their own citizens. My own sympathies are with the Cobdenites. But that does not mean we can neglect physical threats to ourselves and our own societies. If the UK had stood aside from the first world war, the worst that could have happened would have been rule by the German Kaiser or his appointee rather than Lloyd George. Militant Islamist movements such as al-Qaeda, on the other hand, threaten the lives and civilised existence of western citizens. Moreover, the events of September 11 made the US sensitive to other previously neglected threats like Iraq. David Hendrickson argued in the Financial Times (October 14) that if Saddam Hussein is bad but not mad, he could be deterred from threatening the west; but if threatened himself, he would have nothing to lose from launching every weapon at his command. Since then an authoritative analysis of the Saddam threat has been published in the US by Kenneth Pollack, who was long director for Gulf Affairs at the US National Security Council. Although subtitled The Case for Invading Iraq, the book* has had the opposite effect of making me sceptical about that case. Mr Pollack believes Mr Hussein is not inherently irrational but takes many risks and calculates badly. His case for invasion is that other strategies have failed - partly because many US allies have proved "perfidious, feckless, or outright duplicitous". He is nothing if not candid on the preconditions for a successful Iraq war. He is careful not to link Mr Hussein with al-Qaeda - neither side wants to have much to do with the other. Nevertheless, the US would first have to break the back of al-Qaeda at least to the point "where we do not have monthly government warnings of possible terrorist attacks". Moreover, Washington would have to line up the support of the Gulf states, Egypt and Turkey just to make the operation happen. To gain their support would require the US for good measure to "take a more active role in mollifying Israeli-Palestinian violence". (suggestions on a postcard, please). Even then, if war plans did not go according to plan, "we might suffer several thousand American military personnel killed" as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. After victory the US would have to remain in Iraq for years to come. What I did not find in Mr Pollack's book was any clear statement of the threat that Mr Hussein posed to the west. He believes his goal is hegemony over the Arab world. The one wider threat is the oil weapon. Yet it is a conceit of foreign ministries to believe that countries need physical control over key supplies; Middle Eastern states need to sell oil even more than the west needs to buy it. Of course, the possibility of a short-term embargo needs to be factored into our calculations. US oil imports from the Middle East account for some 14 per cent of US oil consumption. Net European dependence is similar. If the free world cannot cut consumption by these amounts in an emergency it hardly deserves to be saved. An investment in augmented strategic oil stocks and in an energy policy to reduce gas-guzzling would be a small price to pay for avoiding the potentially devastating fallout from an Iraq war. I still have some hesitations about becoming a peacenik on Iraq. I have to allow for decisions being taken by people with different attitudes to my own. What I fear most is that if a Saddam-type regime does come to dominate the Middle East, many of the same establishment officials who are now most opposed to an Iraq war would then be banging the drum for military action. Mr Pollack makes a telling comparison with the European appeasers of the 1930s, who had to fight a more terrible war as a result of not stopping Hitler earlier. Meanwhile, the US should avoid what James Rubin, the former State Department spokesman, called "gratuitous unilateralism", and try to build an international coalition to enforce Iraq disarmament, but not place too high hopes on it. As Mr Pollack says, the main alternative to a pre-emptive attack is deterrence. This involves accepting the probability that Mr Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons - between 2004 and 2008, he believes - as well as chemical and biological ones, and that western policy will concentrate on deterring him from using them as it deterred the former Soviet Union. We shall then have to leave it to time, his own people and his neighbours to enforce a regime change. * The Threatening Storm, Random House, $25
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