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'Realist' Foreign-Policy Scholars Denounce Push
to Attack Iraq
By DAVID GLENN Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept 26, 2002
A military attack on Iraq would be a
profound and costly mistake, declare 33 scholars of international
relations in a statement that is to appear as an advertisement in The New
York Times. The statement argues that the Iraqi regime can be contained
through traditional mechanisms of deterrence, and charges that "war
with Iraq will jeopardize the campaign against Al Qaeda by diverting
resources and attention from that campaign and by increasing
anti-Americanism around the globe."
The statement's principal authors -- John
J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Shibley Telhami of the
University of Maryland at College Park, and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard
University -- are prominent figures in the "realist" school of
foreign-policy studies. Realists embrace what they say is a hardheaded
analysis of power, and they tend to be skeptical of the optimistic claims
made by liberal advocates of international law. "There's this
conception out there that because realists believe that force must be
used, and that war is sometimes inevitable, that therefore we support every war.
That's completely erroneous," said Mr. Telhami in an interview.
The statement argues that:
There is no evidence that the Iraqi regime is in league with Al Qaeda.
The Iraqi regime would not dare use nuclear weapons, because it
fears retaliation from the United States or Israel.
A war in Iraq could be very costly in terms of U.S. casualties and
regional instability.
Postwar Iraq would be extremely difficult to occupy and govern.
"John [Mearsheimer] and Steve [Walt]
polled people in the mainstream of international relations, and found
almost unanimous opposition to an attack on Iraq," said Mr. Telhami.
"That's when we decided to prepare a statement." The New York
Times advertisement, which cost more than $30,000, was paid for by the
signatories and by other individual contributors.
"What we tried to do here,"
said Mr. Mearsheimer in an interview, "was to restrict the list to
scholars who focus on international-security affairs, and to scholars who
believe that power matters in international politics -- that it's
sometimes necessary for the United States to go to war to defend its
national interests. This is not a group that could be identified as
left-wing or dovish."
Indeed, one of the signers,
Randall L. Schweller, an associate professor of political science at Ohio
State University, emphasized in an interview that he is a Republican.
"I don't like the idea that this [advertisement] might be used
against Bush," he said. "I'd like to be able to support the
president on this. But I think we have our hands full with Al Qaeda, and
I think there will be terrible ramifications from an Iraq war no matter
how well things go" for the military.
The statement is likely to face
fierce criticism from more-hawkish scholars of international relations.
When shown a copy of the text, Robert J. Lieber, a professor of government and
foreign service at Georgetown University, said that the statement's
authors "are very bright guys who have had a lot to say about world
affairs, but I disagree with them
strenuously about this particular question."
"There's an assumption here
about containment and deterrence which I think is fundamentally
flawed," said Mr. Lieber. "The kind of deterrence that operated
during the cold war between Moscow and Washington cannot safely be assumed
to operate in the case of Saddam. We know that Saddam has acted in ways
that are rash and self-destructive, and that are not neatly subsumed
under rational deterrence-theory types of calculations. He has attacked
four of his neighbors. He has forgone roughly $150-billion in oil revenue
[because of United Nations sanctions] simply in order to maintain his
weapons program. In 1990, after the Kuwait invasion and the U.S.
assembled a coalition, if Saddam were the sort of rational,
calculating figure that the authors [of the statement] assume, he
would have withdrawn his forces from Kuwait and left us holding the
bag."
Mr. Telhami, however, declared
that it is "nonsense" to argue that the Iraqi regime is immune
to deterrence. "It's a ruthless regime, but it isn't suicidal,"
he said. "During the gulf war, we knew Iraq had chemical weapons, and our
intelligence estimated that they could have killed as many as 10,000 U.S.
soldiers with them. Why didn't they use them?
Because they knew that it would be the end of Baghdad."
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