Review The Threatening Storm, The United States and Iraq: the crisis, the strategy, and the prospects after Saddam

Pollack, Kenneth, The Threatening Storm, The United States and Iraq: the crisis, the strategy, and the prospects after Saddam, New York: Random House, 2002

 

The Iraq War is blamed upon the Republicans but that ignores the fact that there were many Democrats who were also for regime change as well. Kenneth Pollak a former CIA analyst and member of the National Security Council was in that camp. He wrote The Threatening Storm, The United States and Iraq: the crisis, the strategy, and the prospects after Saddam arguing that Saddam Hussein was the greatest foreign threat to the United States and an invasion was the only solution.

 

Pollack’s main argument was that the containment policy created by the first President Bush and followed by his successor President Clinton was failing. Containment was based upon United Nations inspectors destroying Iraq’s WMD, sanctions keeping the country weak and two no fly zones that were supposed to keep the country penned in. The author believed the first two had fallen apart by the start of the 2000s. In 1998 Iraq had kicked out the inspectors and Iraqi defectors claimed that Iraq had restarted its WMD programs especially its nuclear program which Pollack was most concerned about. He believed that Iraq would be nearly unstoppable if it ever got a nuclear device. Baghdad was also smuggling oil and manipulating trade which the U.N. had allowed in the late 90s under the Oil For Food program. With Iraq back at work on its banned weapons and bringing in billions again mixed in with what Pollack wrote was Saddam’s propensity to make bad decisions Iraq was becoming a growing issue which the United States could not ignore.

 

The Threatening Storm then lays out Pollack’s policy prescription which was an invasion and a long term occupation of Iraq to rebuild the country and help create a pluralistic political system. Pollack said the U.S. could give up on containment and rely upon deterrence to stop Iraq but didn’t think that would work since Saddam always took huge risks and was detached from the world. A covert campaign to unseat him wasn’t an alternative because the internal opposition had been destroyed in the 1990s. That meant regime change was the only solution. Afterward he believed that the U.S. should plan for a long term stay in the country to carry out truth and reconciliation over Baathist rule, rebuild the economy which had been badly damaged by sanctions, and create a democracy which Pollack believed was a universal belief and would therefore be embraced by Iraqis. He didn’t think this would cost much because Iraq was oil rich and if the U.S. created a coalition for war other countries along with the U.N. would also contribute money. This would provide the chance to reshape the Middle East. A deadly dictator would be removed, a democracy would be created in the heart of the region and the image of the U.S. would change from an imperialistic exploiter to a benevolent power that helped Arabs.

 

Pollack’s writing represents the consensus amongst the U.S. political establishment by the 2000s that containment was failing and the only solution was war, but this was based upon a series of false assumptions. Pollack like U.S. intelligence and others thought Iraq had gone back to producing WMD as soon as U.N. inspectors left and might get a nuclear bomb sooner rather than later. This was based upon their bias that Saddam as a dictator would never give up his weapons and supported by Iraqi defectors who turned out to have lied about what they knew. In fact, Iraq had destroyed its WMD due to the United Nations. Pollack said that Iraq was earning billions from oil smuggling and kickbacks but his figures were a bit exaggerated and more importantly he didn’t understand how the sanctions actually worked. He claimed Baghdad had plenty of money and could’ve easily taken care of its population but didn’t due to the vanity of Saddam. The U.N. said that Iraq could still import humanitarian needs which Pollack took at face value, but in fact they were blocked by the U.S. and U.K. All kinds of goods big and small from pencils to cloth for school uniforms were not allowed into Iraq. Together that meant Iraq was not working on a nuclear bomb as the author feared and the economy and population were far worse off than he believed.

 

Finally, the book was off on how the occupation of Iraq would play out. Pollack had no idea how degraded the country’s oil industry and infrastructure had become. It would take far more money than he planned and Iraq would not provide much of it as he hoped. The U.S. also didn’t build an adequate coalition and initially rejected U.N. assistance so it was stuck with reconstructing Iraq largely on its own. This turned out to be the largest post-World War II rebuilding effort the U.S. had ever attempted and it largely failed due to lack of planning and huge amounts of waste. Democracy was embraced but to create majority rule for parties that did not believe in its values such as protection for minorities, a free press or free speech, and most importantly had no desire to serve the public. Pollack was aligned with people like Secretary of State Colin Powell who wished the Bush administration would’ve taken another path to war including bringing in more allies and spending more time planning for post-Saddam Iraq. At the same time this was a debate about how to achieve war not whether it was right or wrong.

 

Reading The Threatening Storm provides many of the main arguments that both Republicans and Democrats believed in about regime change in Iraq by the 2000s. They thought containment was failing and that if the United States wanted to remove the threat of Saddam overthrowing his government with an invasion was the only alternative. Many believed Iraq was a growing threat that had to be addressed either because of WMD like Pollack wrote about or due to the regime’s connections with terrorists which the author didn’t believe in but the Bush administration pushed. The book shows that there was a consensus amongst both American political parties about Iraq which led to the 2003 invasion. They might’ve disagreed over some of the tactics like whether to have a short or long occupation of Iraq but there was no debate about the necessity for war.

 

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