By Martin Walker,
UPI Chief International Correspondent
WASHINGTON, (UPI) -- Is it time to declare victory and go home? Most of the European allies and the U.N. security council would be highly relieved if the Bush administration recognized it has already won a triumphant success with its Iraqi policy.
The inspectors are back in Iraq, with none of the constraints under which they used to work. Saddam Hussein's palaces are open to their probing Geiger counters and chemical sniffers. The inspectors race across Iraq in modern helicopters that are too fast for Saddam's Soviet-built antiques to keep up. The underground research centers carved from the rock beneath schools and hospitals are being visited. Iraq's scientists and their families are being offered free passage out if they tell all.
Saddam is back in his box. His nuclear and chemical warfare research projects are constrained if not curtailed. The sanctions remain in place. His foes in the Iraqi exile community are to yank his mustache in public by holding a conference next week on Iraqi territory in Kurdistan. His land sprawls wide open to the inspectors and now hosts his enemies; this proud dictator has been humiliated before his own people and the Arab world.
Desperate to cling to power in the face of a 15-0 verdict from the United Nations and his own peoples' open contempt, Saddam has even been reduced to inviting some moderate members of the opposition to return home.
He has given them guarantees of free passage in order to take part in a public debate on constitutional reform.
For America's reluctant allies, and for many American doves, the question asks itself. Why risk war and bloodshed and massive destabilization of the Middle East in order to force regime change when the regime is itself visibly changing? Why not accept that Saddam is back under control, all the more so when a real nuclear-armed lunatic appears to be loose over in North Korea? A lunatic, moreover, who has 37,000 American troops and the friendly, democratic city of Seoul, South Korea, held hostage under his guns.
The arguments for declaring victory and coming home are going to get a strong boost from an unexpected quarter -- one of the most hawkish brains in American intellectual life. John J. Mearsheimer is professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he runs the Program in International Security Policy, and the outstanding figure of America's "realist" school of foreign policy. His new book "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" (awarded this week Georgetown University's first-ever Book Prize) has been widely hailed as the clearest and toughest-minded statement in years of the view that "A great power gotta do what a great power gotta do."
Mearsheimer advocates pre-emptive economic action against China to stop it growing too strong. He foresees wars for regional supremacy in Europe and Asia, and recommends that the United States hold back until it can intervene decisively, and enrich itself in the process. Neither liberal nor squeamish in his approach to issues of power, he is nonetheless in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine arguing that Saddam is not reckless, and can be deterred. He gives the anti-war movement something they badly need -- a credible argument from a respected and non-pacifist figure.
"Both logic and historical evidence suggest a policy of vigilant containment would work, both now and in the event Iraq acquires a nuclear arsenal," Mearsheimer agues in his FP essay "An Unnecessary War."
"The United States and its regional allies are far stronger than Iraq. And because it does not take a genius to figure out what would happen if Iraq tried to use WMD to blackmail its neighbors, expand its territory, or attack another state directly. It only takes a leader who wants to stay alive and who wants to remain in power. Throughout his lengthy and brutal career, Saddam Hussein has repeatedly shown that these two goals are absolutely paramount. That is why deterrence and containment would work."
The essay, co-authored with professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, goes on to admit: "Containment may not be enough to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons someday. Only the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq could guarantee that. Yet the United States can contain a nuclear Iraq, just as it contained the Soviet Union. None of the nightmare scenarios invoked by preventive-war advocates are likely to happen."
Mearsheimer, a former enlisted man in the U.S. Army before becoming an Air Force officer, has real-world credentials that few of his fellow academics can boast. That makes him all the more useful as the anti-war movement mobilizes for its big demonstration in Washington this coming weekend. The Bush administration has learned to ignore the peaceniks, and has learned how to marginalize those who say North Korea is more dangerous. It has yet to figure out how to out-argue a tough-minded realist like Mearsheimer who says the war is neither wicked nor foolish nor dangerous -- simply unnecessary.