The Nightmare That Could Have Been

On this third anniversary of the war in Iraq, the mood in Washington is heavy with recrimination. You might think the important question in Iraq is how to move forward to success. Instead, we find ourselves endlessly rearguing the original decision to fight the war in the first place.

So OK, I'll play. Let me propose this way to think about Iraq: What would the world look like today if George W. Bush had decided against the overthrow of Saddam Hussein back in 2002 and early 2003?

Start with the most obvious: Saddam would still be in power, in control of his army, his intelligence services -- and extra billions of dollars in oil income. Oil traded in the US$17-$22 per barrel range in the first half of 2002. Today, it trades for more than US$60.

Under Saddam, Iraq was pumping between two million and 2.5 million barrels of oil per day. (About the same as it produces now.) Assuming that production rate continued, he now would be drawing an income of approximately US$150-million per day.

And probably that income would be much higher: Sanctions against Iraq were disintegrating in 2002, and by now they would certainly have collapsed altogether, freeing Saddam to sell even more.

With these funds, Saddam could return to his old game of fomenting trouble throughout the region. Unless you join U.S. Senator John Kerry in his bold assumption that the March 2003 war in Iraq somehow had prevented the United States from capturing Osama bin Laden in late 2001, the al-Qaeda leader would remain at large. With Saddam in power in Iraq, the 5,000 U.S. troops positioned in Saudi Arabia would still man their stations: al-Qaeda's top grievance against the West. Hundreds of prisoners would throng Guantanamo. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute would smolder unresolved, ditto Kashmir and Chechnya. The Muslim youth of Western Europe would still have trouble finding work, and the continent's imams would carry on inciting them to attacks like those on Madrid, London and the Jews of Paris.

In short: the problem of Islamic extremism and terrorism would rage as fiercely as ever -- and the most aggressive and reckless of all the rulers of the Middle East would be superbly positioned and lavishly financed to exploit it.

In the 1990s, Saddam directed millions in subsidies to Palestinian terrorists. And while it cannot be proven that he co-operated with al-Qaeda before 9/11, it is a matter of public record that:

- A senior Iraqi intelligence official paid three visits to bin Laden in Sudan in 1994;

- On these visits, bin Laden requested training and weapons from Iraq;

- Contacts resumed after bin Laden moved to Aghanistan in 1996 -- there was at least one high-level meeting in 1998.

If indeed Saddam kept some distance from bin Laden in the 1990s, it does not follow that he would have continued to do so.

In the 1990s, Saddam was constrained by sanctions, by inspectors on his territory, and by fear of U.S. retaliation. But all of those constraints would by now have dropped away.

The sanctions, for example, had to be reauthorized by the UN Security Council every two years. Each reauthorization had proven more excruciatingly difficult than the one before. It took months of diplomacy to prevail on the Russians to go along with the final reauthorization in November 2001 -- and that was barely two months after 9/11, at a rare moment of Russian co-operativeness. There would never have been another reauthorization in 2003. And anyway, at the rate smuggling and cheating were growing under the UN Oil for Food program, the sanctions would have become meaningless even if they were somehow to be reauthorized.

Nor would there have been inspections. Saddam drove the UN inspectors out in 1998. True, he readmitted them in 2002 -- but only after 130,000 U.S. troops arrived on his borders. Under our no-war scenario, there would have been no troops, and so no inspectors.

As for U.S. retaliation for the ejection of inspectors, that was not going to be in the cards either -- not with Americans deployed on an ever lengthening anti-terror front from South America to the South Pacific. Can you imagine what the war critics would be saying now if the United States were periodically bombing a Saddam-run Iraq? "You are only strengthening Osama bin Laden; alienating Muslim populations; why not try negotiation first? etc ..."

The alternative to war in Iraq was not a quiet, unthreatening Mesopotamia under a housebroken dictator. The alternative was a fabulously wealthy, vicious, dangerously emboldened despot ready, willing and eager to make common cause with terrorists against the Western enemy. That's not much of an alternative at all -- and why the United States and the coalition in Iraq were right to fight, and remain right to keep fighting, through this anniversary and for as long as it takes to get the job done.