Robert Kuttner considers ‘the best the hawks have to offer’ and finds they still come up short. Rafe Colburn has also written a recent admiring piece in rc3 about one of the participants in the TAP-sponsored debate which Kuttner reviews here — Kenneth Pollack, “a former CIA analyst, National Security Council staffer under Clinton and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, whose central tenet is that Iraq will acquire nuclear weapons and will not hesitate to use them, but that “the United States should not go it alone; it should have a clear plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, and the war should be about geopolitical security, not about oil.” However, I agree with Kuttner’s and others’ objection, essentially, that ‘what we are facing in Iraq will be George Bush’s war, not Ken Pollack’s war.’

US unilateralism and hegemonist aspirations, the lack of investment in ‘nation-building’ , the likely exploitaiton of Iraqi oil as the spoils of war, the danger of further radicalizing Islamic anti-Americans, and the dangerous precedent embodied in The-Only-Superpower®’s adopting a preemptive first strike policy are about as likely to be precluded by more thoughtful hawks as by opponents of the war.

But the mother of all issues here is whether Saddam Hussein really would use nuclear weapons. On this point, Pollack makes dire assumptions but doesn’t prove his case. On the contrary, he concedes in his book that in the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was deterred from using weapons of mass destruction and notes, “As long as some form of sanctions remains on Iraq, Baghdad’s ability to use any of its weapons of mass destruction as elements of Iraq’s foreign policy will be constrained. … If Saddam believes his regime is threatened, of course, all bets are off.” In other words, all this war talk makes an insane action by Baghdad more likely, not less. The American Prospect