Containing Saddam

by the UN to block the domestic development of weapons of mass destruction. The third element was the establishment of “no-fly” zones in the northern and southern parts of the country so that Iraq’s air power could not be used against its own people. The containment system was, as we now know, highly effective. At least, it was effective in one sense: it prevented both weapons development and mass murder and so made the war of 2003 unnecessary. But in another sense it was a failure: it did not prevent the war.

The primary reason for the failure was, obviously, the ideologically driven policy of the Bush administration, which from the beginning favored regime change and war over containment. But there is another reason, less obvious, which needs to be stressed: the states that opposed the war on the grounds that containment was working were not themselves making it work. They were not participants in, or even supporters of, the containment system. [my emphasis – MH] The containment of Saddam’s Iraq began as a multilateral enterprise, but in the end it was the Americans who were doing almost all the work. Had there been many states, or even just a few more states, enforcing the embargo, insisting on inspections, and flying planes over northern and southern Iraq, the unilateral abrogation of the containment system by the U.S. government would not have been possible (or, at least, it would not have been as easy as it was). Had containment been an international project, American power might also have been contained within it.

There is a simple lesson here about the meaning of collective security. If measures short of war are to work against evil or dangerous regimes, they have to be the common work of a group of nations. They require multilateral commitment. Collective security must be a collective project. It won’t be successful if the costs of security are assigned to one state while all the others pursue business as usual. The state bearing the costs can’t be counted on to bear them indefinitely. Adventurous politicians will be tempted by the idea of a quick and radical alternative to containment. And regime change is the obvious alternative.