Here are the last two pages in the conclusion of Ken Pollacks book, The Threatening Storm, a book in which he debates the various options for dealing with Saddam, and decides that war is the only option that will succeed.
" At the beginning of this book, I raised the analogous situation confronting Britain and France as they faced Germany in 1938. Despite the fact that the balance of power lay in their favor, London and Paris decided against war in 1938 because of the potential cost of a war at that time, even one they expected to be victorious. Those costs seemed so high that they concluded that there had to be another way and so opted for appeasement. In addition, many people in Britain and France were certain that HItler would be satisfied with the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland and would change his ways after that. Imagine going to those same decision makers in 1945, after the graves of tens of millions had been dug, hundreds of cities had burned to the ground, and the smoke from London, Rotterdam, Dresden, and Berlin had started to clear. Imagine asking them then if, knowing what they did in 1945, they might have felt differently about the costs of going to war on their terms in 1938 rather than allowing Hitler to start the war on his terms in 1939.
We face a similar choice with Iraq today. No one can say for certain that we will have to fight a war with a nuclear-armed Saddam, but based on all of his history and all of the evidence we have about his thinking, it seems very likely. If we go to war today on our terms, we can be as confident in victory as it is possible to be in an undertaking as inherently uncertain as warfare. On the other hand, we can wait till tomorrow and risk the death of millions and the ruin of the global economy in the hope that Saddam will defy the evidence and the odds and become a man of peace.
It is wrong to claim that Saddam Hussein is irrational. However, it is equally wrong to believe that because he coldly and rationally calculates the odds, he gets those calculations correct. For more than thirty years, Saddam's pattern has been to coldly miscalculate the odds, with disastrous results for Iraq and its neighbors. Where the lives and livelihoods of so many are at stake, it would be reckless and irresponsible to gamble with the future by betting on Saddam's sudden conversion to prudence and restraint.
What's more, it is also important to consider the two futures of the Middle East and the world. The status quo means more of the same: more crises with Iraq, someday with the added incendiary of nuclear weapons; more disputes with our Gulf allies over our policies, our military presence, and everything else under the sun; more Arab-Israeli crises; more instability; more stagnation; more autocracy, anti-Americanism, and terrorism. The Middle East has bred nothing but trouble for decades. A U.S. invasion of Iraq probably wouldn't suddenly transform the entire region any more than Saddam's acquisition of nuclear weapons is likely to transform his decision making. However, it would present an opportunity to rebuild Iraq-to create a stable, prosperous, inclusive new Arab state that could serve as a model for the region. It would give us an opportunity to turn Iraq from a malignant growth helping to poison the Middle East into an engine for change for the entire region. It would allow us to harness the human and material resources of what is probably the most richly endowed of all of the Arab states and try to make it a force that could help start to bring the Arab world out of the miasma into which it has sunk.
We are at an important moment in the history of the United States. We know that we face a grave problem with Saddam Hussein, and we have good evidence that it is going to be a much bigger problem in the future than it is today. We can ignore the problem and hope it will just go away, or we can take the steps needed to solve it. Those steps will not be easy, and we should not downplay them. But they also will not be excessively onerous, and we should not exaggerate them-we will not have to mount World War II and the Marshall Plan again. The question that we need to ask ourselves today is, ten years from now, when we look back on this moment which choice will we most regret not having made?
We faced an identical moment in 1941. We like to tell ourselves that the reason we fought World War II in Europe was because Hitler declared war on us. Nonsense. We went looking for that fight, and we welcomed it when it came. If we had not felt threatened by Hitler long before Pearl Harbor, there would have been no aid to Britain and Russia, no Lend-Lease, no Churchhill-Roosevelt converstations, no staff discussions, no destroyers-for bases deals. And had we not been open supporters of Germany's adversaries, there is little reason to think Hitler would have declared war on us when he did. Instead, we could have remained in isolation and embraced a policy of deterrence against Hitler, just as we are being urged to do against Saddam. After all, the threat we felt from Hitler was also not immediate- it was the vague notion that if Germany possessed all of the wealth of continental Europe, it would inevitably pose some kind of threat to the United States. We knew that joining the war against Germany would not be easy, but we believed that the costs were worth bearing because the alternative was to fight a much worse war in the future. Fighting Germany in World War II was one of the best things this country ever did. It did cost us a great deal, but it saved us from having to fight that much worse war, and it allowed us to remake the world.
Saddam Hussein is not Adolf Hitler, mostly because Iraq is not as powerful as Germany was. And defeating Saddam Hussein will not require the same sacrifices as defeating Hitler did. But the threat that Saddam presents to the United States and to the world is just as real, and the one we have today is no less pressing than those we faced in 1941. Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended the provision of aid to Great Britain against Nazi Germany under the Lend-Lease Act by arguing that if your neighbor's house were on fire and you had a hose, wouldn't you lend it to him-if only to put the fire out before your house caught too? Today another house is burning, and we are the only ones strong enough to douse the blaze. An invasion of Iraq may not be cost-free, but it is unlikely to be horrific and it is the only sensible course of action left to us. We would do well to remember John Stuart Mill's remark that "war is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things." In our case, the ugliest of things would be to hide our heads in the sand while Saddam Hussein acquires the capability to kill millions of people and hold the economy of the world in the palm of his cruel hand."
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