Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sometimes it is not until nations understand one another's motivations that war breaks out. So it was in 1939, when Adolf Hitler finally convinced Britain and France that he meant to conquer Europe. So it was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein established beyond doubt that he wanted more than just a swatch of desert on the Kuwaiti border...
...kind of "constructive engagement" policy with a man like Saddam had to assume his behavior could be affected by U.S. sticks and carrots. It is understandable that Bush would want to bring Iraq into the community of nations, but some government experts now think Saddam never had any interest in Washington's blandishments. U.S. policy was based on the belief that he wanted to reconstruct his country after the exhausting war with Iran and would need access to the West to do so. Instead Saddam resumed an interrupted march toward domination of the Arab world and figured raiding the Kuwaiti...
...signaled to him just before the invasion -- the question raised by Perot -- may have been irrelevant. As it was, the U.S. watched the buildup of Iraqi troops on the Kuwaiti border without any strong reaction. When U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie was abruptly summoned to a meeting with Saddam in late July as he threatened war, she told him that the U.S. "took no position" on the substance of his border dispute with Kuwait but also "that we can never excuse settlement of disputes by other than peaceful means." The same cautious message was conveyed to Saddam in a letter from...
Bush's basic error was to leave his prewar Iraq policy on autopilot. The Administration had a big investment in its belief that Saddam -- whom Bush called "worse than Hitler" after the invasion -- could be cajoled into better behavior. So the U.S. pulled its diplomatic punches in a way that not only seems like appeasement in retrospect but also struck some as such at the time. If the U.S. had few tools to influence Saddam's prewar behavior, as Bush aides now acknowledge, then perhaps little would have been lost had they just written Iraq off, but Bush...
...will be a strange irony if the sociopath Saddam outlasts Bush, who attempted to sketch the outlines of a new world order in defeating him. That new world will present future Presidents with more dilemmas like prewar Iraq -- Syria and China are current examples -- where the moral costs of engaging with a thuggish regime must be weighed against the practical chances of coaxing it into the concert of nations -- and making a buck in the meantime. Bush's Iraq policy is not a perfect model for future action, but neither is it a perfect example of what to avoid...