CHAPTER 5

Three US Presidents Tangle with Iraq’s Nuclear Program

This chapter explores three consecutive episodes of US-Iraqi interaction over Iraq’s nuclear weapons program between 1989 and 2003. I argue that US preventive behavior vis-à-vis Iraq throughout this period can be explained by the threat perceptions of the United States’ 41st, 42nd, and 43rd presidents. Understanding the Gulf War requires analyzing how George H. W. Bush viewed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as a challenge to both regional and global stability as well as a threat to vital American interests. Studying Operation Desert Fox necessitates exploring how repeated Iraqi violations of the international inspections regime caused Bill Clinton, for whom the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat was salient, to attack Iraq’s weapons programs. Finally, the 2003 Iraq War rests on George W. Bush’s prepresidential focus on rogue states and WMD threats, exacerbated by the attacks on September 11, 2001. In the post-9/11 environment, he concluded that containment and deterrence no longer worked to protect US national security against weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Beliefs thus help explain how, three times in twenty years, the United States took military action against Iraq and its nuclear program under the leadership of consecutive presidents.

Methodologically this chapter is different from the previous two in that it looks at three consecutive presidents confronting the same adversary, with longer periods of time elapsing between each episode. Consequently, the analysis relaxes a key facet of the research design that attempts to isolate the role of leaders by holding the passage of time, and by extension the on-the-ground developments, constant. Relaxing this feature is less consequential here, however, as I treat the three episodes not to compare them to one another, but rather to show how Bush 41 and Clinton behaved as the leader-centric model would expect when confronting a second adversary. Moreover, what remains constant is that each of the three leaders confronted the same adversary: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Both theoretical and empirical reasons make this an important part of the research design.

First, by including chapters on both Iraq and North Korea, the analysis includes a cross-sectional component, allowing me to explore how the same leaders, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, dealt with a second instance of proliferation during their administrations. Doing so lets me explore the relative levels of importance of my two independent variables and also assess to what extent a leader’s behavior is consistent across cases. Both presidents demonstrate relative consistency regarding nuclear proliferation in the Iraq and North Korea contexts. That Bush intervened in Iraq but not in North Korea reflects his heightened threat perception regarding the former and almost total lack of concern for the latter. Clinton, conversely, carried his sensitivity to proliferation concerns over to a new context and perceived significant threat emerging from Iraqi WMD behavior, as he had in the North Korean context. In this way, past experiences influence how leaders perceive subsequent threats and assess the likelihood of success in later episodes; they then serve as data points brought to bear in later decision making.

Second, Iraq offers an important test of my model’s generalizability across empirical arenas. I argue that the Persian Gulf War is not a typical case of preventive war as a counterproliferation strategy, despite much of the literature treating it as such. The Gulf War is therefore not precisely analogous to the other cases in the manuscript.¹ Rather, the Gulf War is a more opportunistic episode, in which nuclear sites were targeted during the course of a wider military intervention with other purposes. While different, it is important nevertheless to explore this case to elucidate its differences from a standard case of preventive war as it has been defined here.

Lastly, whereas the North Korean case explored the model’s generalizability beyond the Cold War, Iraq offers an initial probe of the post-9/11 environment. Although George W. Bush’s prior beliefs about proliferation and threats successfully predict consideration of military force, September 11 played some role in getting Bush to the actual use of force. A full explanation for how shocks of this magnitude affect strategy preferences is beyond the scope of analysis here but may be an area for future research.

Empirically, note that the 2003 Iraq War is the most recently concluded case of US preventive military action against an adversarial proliferant, and as such its exploration is worthwhile prima facie. Especially considering that the United States spent years and billions of dollars in blood and treasure conducting the war, even a preliminary investigation is useful for shedding light on the lead-up to the campaign. My analysis does not debate the veracity or merits of the war’s justification; instead, I take the Bush administration at its word when it described the preventive counterproliferation logic as the public motivation for intervention.

Before proceeding, note that this case examines the three presidents differently than in previous chapters. Chapter 4 offered an extensive exploration of Bush and Clinton’s prepresidential beliefs, so they are not rehashed here. Rather, the key points are reiterated prior to the discussion of the Gulf War and Operation Desert Fox. Further, with George W. Bush as a very recent former US president, the data limitations are acute. While the George W. Bush Presidential Library opened to the public in April 2013, there is an extremely limited amount of material available for documentary research. In addition, because such a short amount of time has passed since Bush left office, only limited contemporaneous accounts are available. Nevertheless, it is important to conduct a preliminary investigation into Bush’s prepresidential beliefs and preventive war decision making with the materials currently available. Especially because the September 11 attacks occurred during the Bush 43 administration, this investigation allows for a second opportunity to assess the impact of major exogenous events on a leader’s beliefs regarding proliferation, threats, and deterrence, as the Cold War’s end did under Bush 41. In this instance, both weapons of mass destruction and rogue regimes were salient threats for Bush 43 prior to his presidency and before September 11. They grew exponentially more worrisome and required a new, preventive strategy in the aftermath of September 11.

Alternative Explanations

Recall that the basic structural alternative expects states to take preventive action to forestall changes to the relative balance of power that would occur when another state acquires nuclear weapons. Such an explanation does fairly well in the Iraq case, as it leads one to expect that the United States would be aggrieved by Iraq’s attempted nuclear development and would take military action to prevent it. Focusing on comparisons of relative strength between two states, that a strong United States might attack a relatively weak Iraq is not especially controversial, given that the United States was a superpower confronting a much weaker adversary’s nuclear attempt. In this way, structural explanations can partly describe how the US presidents used force against Iraq. However, structural logics miss important variation that occurs within the United States–Iraq dyad, as this chapter demonstrates.

A domestic-level explanation focusing on regime type, foreign policy convergence, and conflict history similarly offers some traction. The United States–Iraq dyad consists of one democracy and one autocracy. The two states have divergent foreign policy goals on a wide array of issues, including international terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only recently, however, with the Gulf War, have the two engaged in direct violence. The United States even supported Iraq against fundamentalist Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Thus, the precise expectation from this domestic-level alternative explanation regarding whether the US would be likely to use force against Iraq is unclear. Both alternatives, therefore, make additional explanation warranted.

The empirical facts of the Iraq case suggest two other relevant domestic political alternatives, which relate to the precise timing of Operation Desert Fox and the 2003 War in Iraq. A diversionary war logic might argue that Clinton’s 1998 preventive strikes were designed to distract from the Monica Lewinsky scandal that occupied the United States throughout 1998.² While plausible, the available documentary record is too weak to support this hypothesis. In addition, a logrolling argument might suggest that neoconservative elements within the Bush 43 administration were responsible for leading the country to war in Iraq.³ Here, too, contemporaneous accounts do not suggest that neoconservative elements pushed Bush and other administration individuals to war. There is also little evidence that Bush was duped by powerful individuals within the cabinet, at least not beyond what his beliefs would allow. More pointedly, if Bush had not held the nuclear beliefs I argue he did about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction (and nonstate actors after September 11), he would not have gone along with the military operation. Thus, these two additional domestic logics do not offer much traction.

Collectively, while the main structural and domestic political alternatives do comparatively better than they have in previous chapters, none is sufficiently specified or comprehensive to account for each of the cases explored in this book. None of these explanations is therefore preferable to the leader-centric argument, to which we now turn.

The United States and Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Program

As he was for most of what occurred in post-coup Iraq, Saddam Hussein was the driving force behind Iraq’s nuclear weapons project.⁴ The program began with the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1959 and ended when Hussein was removed from power by the US invasion in 2003. Iraq’s nuclear program initially required outside assistance from various actors. First, in the mid-1960s, the Soviets agreed to provide nuclear research facilities, with operations beginning in late 1967 or early 1968.⁵ Later, in August 1976, Iraq inked a deal with France for two additional reactors, which the French dubbed Osiraq, after their Osiris-class reactor design. Although Iraq’s efforts in the 1970s did not concern the Americans, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin viewed the developments as an existential concern and ordered the bombing of the Osiraq facility on June 7, 1981.⁶

US intelligence assessments conducted in the bombing’s aftermath in both 1981 and 1983 concluded that it would take Hussein years to reconstitute the program.⁷ The assessments agreed, however, that Saddam’s ambition to rebuild remained despite the costly effort required. While much of Iraq’s program went underground following the Israeli attack, the program grew in size, diversification, and sophistication.⁸ In 1986, the United States learned of a Chinese feasibility study of Iraq’s nuclear weapons capabilities at four different locations, projecting a completion deadline of 1990. In the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, the CIA assessed that Iraq considered nuclear weapons essential to deter further Iranian aggression.⁹

The Persian Gulf War and its aftermath revealed to the international community just how far Iraq had proceeded with its redeveloped nuclear weapons program. By this time, the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center housed labs, centrifuge testing, and uranium research and development, among many other components. The massive Tarmiya complex contained four hundred buildings, including weapons design and assembly facilities.¹⁰ The United States and its allies wanted to keep better tabs on regional developments, so they increased surveillance, which illuminated Iraq’s WMD development. This surveillance occurred both via increased satellite over flights and an extensive UN-led inspections campaign. The postwar legal apparatus barred Iraq from having a WMD arsenal, constructed the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to ensure Iraq’s compliance with the requirement that the country not possess the ability to produce WMD, and led to nearly a decade of weapons inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to identify and dismantle the program’s components. Through these inspections and via the testimony of various Iraqi defectors, the world learned the extent of Iraq’s progress toward nuclear weapons. This process was not easy, however, as harassment of inspectors was nearly constant, obstruction of their work happened regularly, and Hussein attempted to hide sensitive material from international observation by moving documents and materials around, inside and outside the country. Hussein’s obstruction peaked in 1998, when he brazenly ejected the inspection teams, terminating any semblance of cooperation with UNSCOM and prompting the United States to intervene militarily in Operation Desert Fox.

A 1999 US report titled “Reconstitution of Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Post Desert Fox,” claimed that while UNSCOM had successfully demolished much of Iraq’s nuclear program, Iraq still maintained the basis for reconstitution—in both scientific know-how and materials. The report estimated it would take Iraq approximately five to seven years to manufacture sufficient quantities of the necessary highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a bomb, though a crude bomb could be assembled within one year, especially if an external actor provided the necessary materials.¹¹ In October 2002, the National Intelligence Council repeated this assessment, claiming that if left unchecked Hussein would have nuclear weapons by the close of the decade.¹² Around the same time, British intelligence concurred with the US estimate, saying that Iraq continued to work on its WMD program; was attempting to purchase dual-use technologies from abroad; and, as the US had feared, had tried to acquire uranium internationally.¹³ By fall 2002, no one knew precisely how close Saddam Hussein was to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, but the fear was that once he did, he could dominate the Persian Gulf, threaten the United States, and pass the technology to terrorists bent on targeting the United States or its interests abroad. With these concerns in mind, the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, ending both Hussein’s regime and his pursuit of nuclear weapons.¹⁴

President George H. W. Bush

As described previously, George H. W. Bush paid no particular attention to nuclear weapons or nuclear proliferation during his prepresidential career. Bush was mostly confident in the deterrent strength of the US military, especially following the nuclear modernization and defense build-up presided over by Ronald Reagan and continued under Bush’s own administration. Bush 41 instead worried about threats to the international system from challenges to international peace and stability and from aggression by one state toward another. Having served in World War II fighting the Axis powers, Bush internalized a fear of falling dominos, first while combating the spread of fascism and later while witnessing the US loss in Vietnam. The lessons of these experiences and his time in China guided his later responses to the Gulf War; he said that “history taught that dictators were only stopped by resolute force … comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler.”¹⁵ These issues remained salient in the Iraq context in 1990 and 1991. Compared to North Korea, Iraq posed a much more significant challenge to Bush’s sensibilities, originally for reasons having nothing to do with nuclear proliferation. Ultimately, following a failure of deterrence, the nature of the Iraqi challenge would drive him to military intervention. Bush developed a growing concern with nuclear proliferation and the threat thereof only following the discovery of Iraq’s advancing nuclear weapons capabilities. Previously, proliferation was only of limited salience for him, and as a result the North Korean nuclear program received no consideration of preventive military action. The difference between the two cases is explained by the fact that Bush perceived Iraq as far more threatening to the United States and the world community, both as a general matter and especially if armed with nuclear weapons.

George H. W. Bush and Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Program

Iraq was a salient aspect of Bush’s foreign policy considerations. Iraq’s nuclear program, like North Korea’s, was not a very prominent issue for Bush during the prepresidential period, but it became a priority as his administration continued. Although chemical and ballistic missile proliferation entered Bush’s consciousness first, only as president and with continued revelations about Iraq’s nuclear developments did he begin to understand the nuclear component of the broader Iraqi challenge. Moreover, what focused Bush’s attention was Iraq’s hostile invasion of Kuwait, which upset the balance of power and stability in the Gulf region, exposed the progress of Iraq’s nuclear capability, and revealed the extent of Iraq’s duplicity to the international community.

Even before Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, he challenged the international community. As one Bush biographer noted, “no key American policymaker doubted he [Hussein] was a thug—but he still did not pose a threat to the balance of power in the region.”¹⁶ At the same time, President Bush did not yet connect the danger of Iraq to the challenge of nuclear proliferation. Rather, nuclear proliferation, while regrettable, seemed to him an inevitability the world community would need to come to terms with: “Nuclear weapons capabilities are proliferating, much to my regret and the regret of everybody here. And inevitably, high-tech weapons will fall into the hands of those whose hatred of America and contempt for civilized norms is well-known. We will continue to work hard to prevent this dangerous proliferation. But one thing is certain: we must be ready for its consequences. And we will be ready.”¹⁷

Bush reaffirmed his commitment to Reagan’s policy on Iraq, seeking “normal relations between the United States and Iraq that would serve our long-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East.” But he warned simultaneously that any illegal use of chemical or biological weapons would lead to economic and political sanctions. Violations of IAEA agreements in the nuclear realm would do the same.¹⁸ Thus, at least initially, Bush sought to contain and manage the challenge from Iraq in the abstract and where weapons were concerned.

US anxiety over Iraq’s illicit weapons arsenal did not begin with the invasion of Kuwait. Of major concern to US decision makers, especially prior to the Gulf War, was Hussein’s chemical and biological arsenal, both of which he had used previously on the battlefield and against his own citizens. Iraq was known as a “leader” in chemical weapons production since the Iran-Iraq War. In 1988 Hussein targeted the Iraqi Kurdish population, and in 1991 he used these weapons to quell a popular domestic uprising. These issues concerned Bush, who worried in both public and private about the dangers of the proliferation of chemical weapons.¹⁹

As time progressed, American nonproliferation concerns about Iraq expanded to include a nuclear component. The scope of Iraq’s nuclear development became clearer, as the United States learned more about the extent of the projects via the Soviet collapse.²⁰ The situation took on new meaning for President Bush and his national security team, however, when in March 1990 the United States intercepted a shipment of nuclear-related devices bound for Iraq. According to Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, this was the moment that proliferation concerns regarding Iraq took on a nuclear nature: “In addition to the strident anti-Israel rhetoric, there emerged disturbing signs that Iraq was still seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. In March, we uncovered and successfully blocked its attempt to procure—illegally—triggering devices, which could be used for nuclear weapons … Later, in July, we intercepted at dockside in New Jersey special tungsten furnaces which could be useful to their nuclear weapons program.”²¹

Bush said, “The arrest [of Iraqis involved in procurement] … raises once again the administration’s deep concern about the issue of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Nuclear proliferation, along with the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons and intermediate range missiles, continues to pose serious threats to US interests, as well as the interests of our friends in the region.”²² The intelligence community, early to recognize the challenge for what it was, warned of the dangers of Hussein’s expansionist tendencies. National Security Advisor Scowcroft said Hussein was a major threat to the vital interests of the United States dating back to President Carter’s 1980 articulation that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America. And such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”²³ Chairman Colin Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, writing after his time in office, described Iraq’s possession of the fourth-largest military power in the world and worried that “hanging like a specter over the desert was the Iraqi biological arsenal and Saddam’s feverish drive for nuclear capability.”²⁴

Thus, before the Gulf War, there was a growing sense of concern for Bush 41 and his national security team regarding Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. Recall, however, that I coded Bush in the previous chapter as a weak proliferation optimist, given his relatively limited concern for nuclear proliferation. While his concern for these matters grew throughout the 1990s as new information about Iraqi WMD emerged, his views did not change sufficiently prior to the Gulf War as to warrant a change in my coding of his general views about nuclear proliferation. What was more salient for Bush was the threat posed to the Persian Gulf region and to the United States by Iraq’s aggression and hostility. Iraq’s nuclear development was an auxiliary issue.

Here a comparison with North Korea is warranted. Whereas Bush demonstrated a relatively calm attitude toward the North Korean nuclear program, over time he grew more vocal about the dangers posed by Iraq’s nuclear program. Critically, it is not the nuclear program per se that drove the situation; rather, Bush was motivated by the rest of Iraq’s bad behavior. Iraq posed a major threat to the strategically important Persian Gulf region and to the security and interests of the United States. Especially given the risks to regional and global peace and stability, both critically important issues for Bush’s worldview, the leader-centric model would expect him to be much more threatened by the Iraqi situation. I expect that Bush’s weak but growing concern for nuclear proliferation and specific concern for a potentially undeterrable threat from Iraq were likely to have led him to consider the use of preventive military force as a counterproliferation strategy.

The Gulf War

Concern about Iraq’s petulance turned to shock for the United States and the international community on August 2, 1990, when Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait. Events caused former secretary of state James Baker to quip, “Practically overnight, we went from trying to work with Saddam to likening him to Hitler.”²⁵ US policy would take shape over the coming days and weeks, but according to Bush’s daughter, on the day of the invasion he said, “I did know for sure that aggression had to be stopped and Kuwait’s sovereignty restored,” suggesting a heightened sense of alarm and focus immediately following this radical development.²⁶

On August 3, Bush’s National Security Council met to review the CIA’s report of the situation, which argued that Iraq’s invasion posed a threat to the current world order and risked a long-run negative impact on the global economy.²⁷ The meeting ushered in a variety of administration efforts to confront Hussein. An executive order freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets in the United States went further, adding a WMD component to the traditional balance of power concerns articulated above: “Saddam had chemical and biological weapons programs and had used chemical weapons against the Iranians as well as the Kurds in his own country.… More ominous we knew he was attempting to build a nuclear weapons capability, although our intelligence estimates on the amount of progress he had made varied widely.”²⁸ Preinvasion intelligence estimates suggested Iraq would not acquire nuclear weapons for five to ten years.²⁹ Formally codifying the initial shift in policy beyond the executive order, National Security Directive 45 articulated that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait put “vital US interests at risk” and stated that the United States would defend those interests “through the use of US military force if necessary and appropriate.”³⁰ On August 5, the team traveled to Camp David to discuss military options, including augmented air power, and details such as how long it would take to put the proper number of troops on the ground to repel any Iraqi attack.³¹ Though the Gulf War would not begin for a few months, potential military responses to the invasion were under consideration almost immediately, as were additional efforts to compel Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait and back down in the face of pressure from the international community.

Offering a glimpse into their motivations and also highlighting the failure of deterrence that catalyzed the administration into action, Scowcroft and Bush later wrote: “We need not, indeed should not, become embroiled in every upheaval, but we must help develop multilateral responses to them. We can unilaterally broker disputes, but we must act … when major aggression cannot be deterred, as in the Persian Gulf.”³² Further addressing the failure of deterrence or Hussein’s apparent lack of deterrability, in a Joint Address to Congress on September 11, 1990, Bush said: “Our interest and role in the Gulf was not transitory. It predated Saddam and would outlast him. We had to deter future aggression, to assist in the self-defense of our friends, and to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”³³

As summer turned to fall, Bush clarified both publicly and privately his personal view of Hussein. Dictating to his personal diary following the invasion, Bush described Hussein as radical.³⁴ A few weeks later, referring to Hussein’s deliberate placement of hostages in harm’s way, Bush wrote privately of Hussein’s “blatant disregard of international law” and called him a “cruel and ruthless dictator.”³⁵ In a November letter to Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz al Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, Bush wrote, “I am proud that we are standing shoulder against Iraq’s evil dictator, Saddam Hussein.”³⁶ Thus, in a series of private correspondences, Bush called the Iraqi leader cruel, ruthless, and evil. This characterization is especially significant when we recall that, as discussed in chapter 4, Bush referred to Kim Il Sung of North Korea as “ridiculous,” demonstrating the divergent views President Bush had of the two leaders.

As the crisis in the Persian Gulf escalated, troops were forward deployed in the hope of coercing Saddam into compliance with the international sanctions regime. Harkening back to Bush’s original threat salience, Bush spoke to US troops and described the problem that they faced: “What we’re confronting is a classic bully.… And every day that passes brings Saddam Hussein one-step closer to realizing his goal of a nuclear weapons arsenal. And that’s another reason … our mission is marked by a real sense of urgency.… In World War II, the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor who could have been stopped early on. We’re not going to make that mistake again. We will not appease this aggressor.”³⁷ This statement signifies that the nuclear component was one, but only one, aspect of the threat from Saddam. Also relevant were the threat from aggression and the regional consequences of Saddam’s actions, prompting an analogy to World War II. Others have elsewhere argued that Bush’s military service shaped his worldview and response to threats in the international system, and this episode demonstrates consistency in his threat perception.³⁸ As Jeffrey Engel claimed, Kuwait mattered less to Bush than the principle of sovereignty and the practical effect of its loss on the region.³⁹ Inaction would allow regional dominos to fall, not necessarily because Iraq would digest them one by one, but because a strategic realignment would follow: others would look to Hussein for leadership as the United States returned to pre–World War II isolationism and avoided a leadership role.

While traveling in the region, Bush put an even finer point on the nuclear angle of the threat from Saddam, saying that “those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic program in years may be seriously underestimating the reality of that situation and the gravity of the threat.… You know, no one knows precisely when this dictator may acquire atomic weapons, or exactly who they may be aimed at down the road. But we do know this for sure: he has never possessed a weapon that he didn’t use.”⁴⁰ This statement suggests a graver threat in Bush’s mind and a link to the developing preventive logic that postponing action would be dangerous because it would introduce the possibility of confronting an undeterrable nuclear-armed adversary at some future point.

Returning to the salience of World War II in the Iraq episode, we find extensive evidence of Bush’s related comments and comments by third-party observers who make the same connection.⁴¹ While making private notes to himself for a televised national address on August 8, 1990, President Bush indicated the connection he perceived between history and the present day. In a diary entry Bush jotted prior to a speaking engagement, he wrote: “tightened up the language to strengthen the similarity I saw between the Persian Gulf and the situation in the Rhineland in the 1930s, when Hitler simply defied the Treaty of Versailles and marched in. This time I wanted no appeasement.”⁴² Writing in his memoirs, Colin Powell noted a similar connection, saying that Bush had taken to demonizing Saddam: “We are dealing with Hitler revisited,” “a tyrant unmoved by human decency.”⁴³ In an interview on January 2, 1991, Bush said that peace was possible if the coalition stood up to Saddam, as they had done to confront similar evil in the past: “It won’t happen if we compromise. When you have such a clear case of good and—good versus evil. We have such a clear moral case.… It’s that big. It’s that important. Nothing like this since World War II. Nothing of this moral importance since World War II.”⁴⁴ Privately, Bush wrote to his children on New Year’s Eve 1990 of the burden he felt in sending soldiers to war, “My mind goes back to history: How many lives might have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier on in the late 30s or earliest 40s? How many Jews might have been spared the gas chambers, or how many Polish patriots might be alive today? I look at today’s crisis as ‘good’ vs. ‘evil.’ Yes, it is that clear.”⁴⁵ Here again Bush linked the threat from Saddam to the threat facing the United States in World War II and underscored the need to avoid appeasing a dictator and meet the challenge with strength and resolve.

By October, the Pentagon’s J5 Policy and Planning Staff identified four options for the administration to explore: protect the status quo, pursue long-term containment, increase forces in the region sufficient to demonstrate a credible offensive threat, or go to war. Lieutenant General George Lee Butler, head of the J5, supported containment, given that the fourth option, war, “would be very messy.”⁴⁶ Nevertheless, support for the military option eventually took shape. The intervention would include a four-phased military approach to target the Iraqi military and drive it out of Kuwait, with three of the phases taking place by air and one on the ground. While the planning and analysis continued, the US Air Force was confident its ability to “take care of it all,” meaning the targeting necessary to ensure critical air superiority.⁴⁷ Elsewhere concern centered on the ground effort that required sizeable troop and equipment deployments and a massive logistical and supply effort to sustain.⁴⁸

The administration expected a difficult and bloody fight ahead.⁴⁹ This was the first test of the post–Cold War military environment. The campaign was also the first in which precision military equipment and the so-called first offset strategy were to be deployed by the US military. The administration expected high casualties, given that the US faced a significant battlefield foe armed with a vast but secret chemical weapons arsenal. According to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, Iraq’s military had evolved dramatically during the Iran-Iraq War, even while the war had badly strained the Iraqi economy. With a population of eighteen million and a nearly one-million-person army (then the fourth largest in the world), Iraq was a major military power and especially dangerous because it was driven by nationalistic zeal. However, Iraq did not excel offensively, and the country possessed a critical weakness in its very centralized (and therefore easily targetable) command structure.⁵⁰ A senior medical officer placed the worst-case casualty estimate at twenty thousand US soldiers, including seven thousand killed in action.⁵¹ Chairman Powell warned President Bush that this conflict would be far more difficult than previous campaigns in Panama and Libya.⁵²

Despite these potential difficulties, Bush, driven by his principles, forged ahead. The plan recognized the need to go in with overwhelming force, following the Powell Doctrine.⁵³ Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, for his part, was not going to recommend any military mission unless he was sure of its success.⁵⁴ The air campaign included plans to repeatedly strike key targets until they were destroyed. As Chairman Powell put it while trying to corral eager members of the Air Force who wanted to proceed before their colleagues in other military branches were fully supplied, “we go, we win”—meaning that if the United States was going to war, it would do so with appropriate preparations.⁵⁵ By the end of planning, one intelligence estimate expected that with the achievement of tactical surprise, 80–85 percent of Iraqi airpower could be destroyed in the first days of the campaign.⁵⁶ Collectively, these details suggest an expected high likelihood of success for the campaign, though not without associated costs.

In the end, President George H. W. Bush was driven to action by the continued salience of the lessons of World War II in the Persian Gulf policy he oversaw.⁵⁷ While the threat from nuclear proliferation did not drive Bush’s behavior, his views regarding World War II and confronting aggression are useful for demonstrating Bush’s consistency of perspective across time. The nuclear angle was added to a long list of the Bush administration’s justifications for war as the campaign approached. The same issues that were salient for Bush’s early threat perception—international stability, appeasement of dictators—later emerged as significant drivers of Bush’s policy choices for confronting Saddam Hussein. For Bush, the dangers of appeasing dictators and backing down in the face of aggression carried great risks both to the United States and to international peace and stability. Though Kuwait had limited intrinsic value to US interests, the principle of the matter and the political and economic effects of Kuwait’s loss for the broader region and international community were of much greater magnitude from President Bush’s perspective. This view is remarkable both for the consistency Bush demonstrated over time and also as a contrast to Bush’s perspective on North Korea, where no such threat salience was evident despite that country’s similar attempt to go nuclear. Bush’s perspective is also significant in that it exposes how the different values of the model’s explanatory variables led to different outcomes (no consideration in North Korea versus consideration and war in Iraq) when one president confronted two adversarial proliferants during his tenure in office and viewed the threats they posed to the United States quite differently.

It is conceivable that a change occurred in the value of the second independent variable, whether or not Iraq was deterrable generally and once armed with nuclear weapons. A meeting in Geneva on January 10, 1991, brings this possibility to the forefront. On that day, Secretary of State Baker met with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz for “a serious and extended diplomatic conversation in an effort to find a political solution to the crisis in the gulf.”⁵⁸ The message Baker conveyed was that Iraq must either abide by the UN resolutions and withdraw peacefully from Kuwait, or be expelled forcefully. When this effort failed, the administration had no choice but to continue with the intervention.⁵⁹ Before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush and his team believed containment and management to be the appropriate policies for Hussein’s Iraq, but over time the administration learned that Hussein was actually not deterrable (or compellable). The Geneva meeting placed the final nail in the coffin of hopes to avoid war. Following this meeting, and in conjunction with the changes they witnessed over time, Bush concluded that Hussein would not back down and that force would be necessary to end the occupation of Kuwait. As the evidentiary record does not directly address this possibility, it is difficult to conclude definitively that such a change in Bush’s beliefs occurred.⁶⁰ That said, it stands to reason that over time, Bush updated his beliefs incrementally until he deemed Iraq fully undeterrable, beyond his initial concerns to that effect.

When President Bush addressed the nation on January 16, 1991, announcing military action in the Persian Gulf, he enumerated a list of weapons of mass destruction being targeted during the operation: “As I report to you, air attacks are under way against military targets in Iraq. We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential. We will also destroy his chemical weapons facilities. Much of Saddam’s artillery and tanks will be destroyed.… While the world waited, Saddam sought to add to the chemical weapons arsenal he now possesses an infinitely more dangerous weapon of mass destruction—a nuclear weapon.”⁶¹ Throughout the campaign, allied forces targeted Saddam Hussein’s command, control, and communications systems; air defense and radar installations; SCUD launching sites; nuclear reactor; production and storage facilities for chemical and biological weapons; and various facilities associated with Iraq’s Republican Guard.⁶² Beyond this target list, the overarching goal of Operation Desert Storm was to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait, restore Kuwait’s sovereignty, and return to the status quo ante according to the previous international legal boundaries.⁶³ In the end, the Gulf War was an overwhelming military success, with Iraq expelled quickly from Kuwait by an international coalition united to restore international order and stability. Despite the aforementioned concerns regarding casualties, only 137 US soldiers were killed in action, with an additional 7 missing in action.

This case therefore exhibits, at least as an auxiliary mission, the use of preventive war as a counterproliferation strategy, as state-sanctioned military force was used to forestall Iraq’s nuclear program. Following Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2–4, 1990, initial American deliberations regarding the appropriate response did not focus on WMD. Instead, decision makers centered their attention on Hussein’s “naked aggression” and potential ability to control a majority of the global oil supply, and they were determined to oppose him.⁶⁴ However, as an ancillary concern, at least for some members of the Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Cheney among them, new oil money would mean the ability to acquire new weapons.⁶⁵

This focus expanded, however, shortly after the invasion, as sanctions failed to coerce the Iraqi regime to withdraw from Kuwait and revelations continued about the nuclear aspects of Hussein’s expansive WMD efforts. The intervention, initially designed to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty, became additionally focused on WMD proliferation.⁶⁶ Thus the Gulf War can be considered an episode in counterproliferation, as the coalition targeted Iraq’s WMD installations to degrade Hussein’s capabilities and prevent him from future WMD use. This effort suggests a “better now than later attitude,” with the administration aiming to avoid eventually having to fight a more sophisticated WMD-capable Iraq; however, this aim was only one of a variety of justifications for the war itself.⁶⁷ As Scowcroft wrote subsequently, “The core of our argument rested on long-held security and economic interests: preserving the balance of power in the Gulf, opposing unprovoked international aggression, and ensuring that no hostile regional power could hold hostage much of the world’s oil supply. President Bush, appalled by the evidence of Iraqi atrocities, added the Hitler, holocaust, and morality arguments.”⁶⁸ As described, preventing the spread of nuclear proliferation was not central to the intervention but was added over time to the justification for the war.

Nevertheless, this intervention was the result of President Bush’s prior beliefs and threat perception: Bush focused early on threats to international stability; saw a need to stand up to aggressive dictators with expansionist tendencies; and was concerned with Iraq’s frequent and open hostility to the United States, its neighbors, and the region. Accordingly, while I include the Persian Gulf War for analysis, I do so recognizing that it is a case different from the others explored in the book. Still, this episode highlights the utility of focusing on prior leader beliefs for predicting later intervention behavior, even if the nuclear aspects were not the main driver of US intervention policy. While admittedly complicated, this case confirms my argument that Bush did not find the threat of nuclear proliferation compelling on its own; only once it was married with the threat from Iraq and its egregious invasion of Kuwait was Bush compelled to act. Then, nuclear elements joined Bush’s focus on international stability and confronting expansion and warranted attention. This episode is additionally significant as an initial signal of the model’s generalizability beyond the narrow counterproliferation context.

The Persian Gulf War ushered in a slow change in perspective about the dangers of nuclear proliferation for many, including President Bush. As a result, the president ordered his administration to investigate new ways of thinking about this issue. One manifestation of this new attention was the negotiation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, START, which pledged to cut twenty-three thousand operational nuclear warheads down to eight thousand by 2003.⁶⁹ As Bush and Scowcroft later described, reaching the START agreement “was a momentous and exhilarating moment: we had just reached a historic agreement to reduce our arsenals by several thousand of the deadliest of our nuclear weapons.”⁷⁰ Elsewhere, there were additional signs of a growing commitment to mitigate the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the new republics of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus were born into statehood with tremendous nuclear arsenals. The loss of physical control of the weapons was of immediate concern: “While the specific danger to the United States was fairly remote, we did worry that these states could pose a host of new security, control, and proliferation problems for one another as well for themselves and those republics around them.”⁷¹ Nevertheless, any newfound interest had its limits; it did not carry over to North Korea’s nuclear program, which remained a low-level concern for the duration of the Bush administration, even after the Gulf War. This divergence suggests that although Bush did recognize a challenge from proliferation in the Persian Gulf context, the change in his perspective was limited to situations in which proliferation was aggregated with other issues—stability, aggression, and so on—that were more consequential in his mind. Absent these other challenges, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program did not constitute a significant threat from Bush’s perspective.

Confounding Considerations for the Gulf War

Despite the evidence just described, potential confounding factors are worth addressing. First, one might argue that the Bush administration possessed an excessively convivial decision-making style, leading the administration to meet all key players’ goals with the Persian Gulf invasion and a bureaucratic political logroll. The record, however, does not support this notion. In most foreign policy circumstances, it is rare that a true consensus actually develops among the key players. Elsewhere scholars have demonstrated that Bush’s presidential style was to listen to his advisers debate the issue at hand and then choose his preferred strategy. Bush proceeded in this way with the decision making on Iraq; there was no singular administration view of the best strategy forward.⁷²

Prior to the invasion, President Bush and National Security Advisor Scowcroft traveled to Bush’s home at Walker’s Point to discuss the US response to Iraq’s actions. While the two were fishing on August 23, 1990, their discussions centered on the fact that not everyone on the national security team shared the president’s view that it was time to consider using force to drive Hussein out of Kuwait. Secretary of State Baker was reluctant to contemplate the use of force, as he favored diplomacy and sanctions to complete the job. When the decision was finally made for force, Baker did not shy away; he simply would have preferred more time to let the nonmilitary means run their course. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, on the other hand, recognized that sooner or later the mission would require force; in many ways he was ahead of the military planners. Cheney’s key concern was ensuring that the operation could be successful. Until he was certain of success, he would not advocate strongly for this option.⁷³ The military itself did not try to avoid force, though Chairman Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having learned the negative lessons of Vietnam like most members of his generation, wanted to ensure that the job was done correctly and without complicating half-measures.⁷⁴ Baker and Powell were alike in preferring dealmaking to confrontation and containment to preventive action. Powell, though, did not ultimately advocate containment, recognizing that patience was not the order of the day. While neither was thrilled with the decision to intervene, once the decision was made both supported the president and his determination.⁷⁵ In the end, it was President Bush and National Security Advisor Scowcroft who led the charge for military intervention, with Bush ultimately acting as “decider-in-chief.”

Second, one might argue that the Bush administration did not see the consideration or use of preventive military force against Iraq’s nuclear program as necessary given doubts that the program would succeed. Jacques Hymans explores the degree of internal institutionalization across states to explain their proliferation efficiency and suggests that Hussein’s nuclear program would have failed even without repeated US military interventions.⁷⁶ Hymans relates that, before the Gulf War, US estimates on Iraq’s nuclear time line ranged from six months to ten years.⁷⁷ Details of the regime’s inner workings and nuclear program suggest that even this time line was generous given Iraq’s extreme inefficiency and mismanagement.⁷⁸ While descriptions of the program’s downward trajectory may be accurate, there is no evidence that the Bush administration was thinking along these lines prior to the military intervention. Instead, the evidence reveals only that early on Bush was not personally attuned to the threat from Iraqi nuclear acquisition—not that he recognized the program’s impending failure and thus chose to focus his attention elsewhere.

In any event, the record shows that President George H. W. Bush considered and used military force against the Iraqi nuclear infrastructure during the Persian Gulf War. Given Bush’s focus on Iraq as threatening to the region and to the United States, this outcome is perhaps unsurprising. Although the model predicted some likelihood of consideration, the specifics of the case take it somewhat beyond the argument’s scope, given that there was very limited prepresidential concern for the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Especially because Bush’s perception of the overall level of threat from Iraq dramatically increased only after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the nuclear-driven logic is embedded in the wider Persian Gulf context. Nevertheless, the model did correctly predict the consideration of preventive military force, which led to Operation Desert Storm and forestalled Iraq’s WMD programs, including its nuclear efforts. To reiterate, however, this was not a preventive war akin to the others analyzed here. Instead, the operation aimed to restore stability, combat aggression, and uphold international order, items of deep personal concern to President Bush. Confronting weapons of mass destruction and containing nuclear proliferation were ancillary considerations and grew in salience for President Bush only with time. Still, this episode is revealing for exposing how close Iraq came to nuclear weapons possession and for demonstrating the traction the leader-centric model offers in a different empirical context. Furthermore, this incident is significant in showing the utility of the second independent variable—a leader’s threat perception of the likelihood of deterring a specific nuclear-armed adversary—as different values produced different outcomes for George H. W. Bush vis-à-vis North Korea and Iraq.

President William J. Clinton

Recall from the previous chapter that Bill Clinton demonstrated an early concern for the challenges of nuclear proliferation, paying particular attention to the pursuit of illicit weapons by North Korea and Iraq, among others. He recognized the potential difficulties in transferring state-based deterrence models from the bipolar world to the complicated post–Cold War environment of nonstate actors and rogue states.⁷⁹ These issues were consequential both during Clinton’s presidential campaign and through his first term in the White House; they grew in magnitude during his second administration.

Prior to becoming president, Clinton had repeated opportunities to discuss Iraq, given previous events. Following congressional authorization in 1991 for Operation Desert Storm, Clinton was asked how he would have voted. His response indicated limited support for the effort, but also some hedging: “I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made.”⁸⁰ Later, formally on the 1992 presidential campaign trail, he was more forceful: “I have agreed with President Bush on a number of foreign-policy questions. I supported his efforts to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.”⁸¹

Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and challenges from terrorism continued to resonate with the new administration. First, following an April 1993 visit to Kuwait by former president Bush and former secretary of state Baker and the discovery of an assassination plot linked to the Iraqi intelligence services, Clinton ordered a military response.⁸² On July 27, 1993, twenty-three Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM) flattened Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, sending a message to Hussein that the new US administration would not tolerate such behavior.⁸³ Simultaneously, Clinton maintained an overarching containment strategy, relying on the Gulf War sanctions regime and no-fly zones to enforce the weapons inspections designed to keep Iraq without WMD capability. Speaking at the United States Military Academy in May 1993, Clinton brought the challenges of the post–Cold War environment and the dangers posed by Iraq together: “The end of the bipolar superpower cold war leaves us with unfamiliar threats, not the absence of danger.… A particularly troubling new element … is the proliferation around the globe of weapons of mass destruction and the means for their delivery … as we discovered in Iraq, surging stocks … have enabled outlaw nations to extend the threat of mass destruction a long way beyond their own borders.”⁸⁴

More formally, the administration recognized that the threat Iraq posed to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States had continued unabated since the Gulf War. In July 1994, President Clinton authorized the extension of President Bush’s national emergency declaration from August 1990, citing the “unusual and extraordinary threat” Iraq posed.⁸⁵ Over time, the dangers took a more ominous turn as Hussein’s meddling escalated. In October 1994, Saddam moved eighty thousand Iraqi troops to the Kuwaiti border and demanded the lifting of the sanctions that were squeezing his regime. In response, Clinton ordered fifty thousand US troops to Saudi Arabia to deter a repeat invasion.⁸⁶ Though the escalation was only temporary, it was a harbinger of more confrontation to come.

In light of Clinton’s proliferation pessimism, explicit concern for Iraq’s proliferation attempts, perceived threat from Iraq’s historically belligerent behavior, and focus on rogue and nonstate actor threats, the model predicts Clinton would be highly likely to consider preventive military force as a counterproliferation strategy against Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Clinton’s lack of confidence in deterrence in the post–Cold War international order strengthens this proposition.

President Clinton and Operation Desert Fox

President Clinton told Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the start of his second term that he wanted to pursue a more activist policy, perhaps embracing his role as a foreign policy president.⁸⁷ At the same time, there was widespread recognition within the administration that containment of Iraq was failing. Iraq was not simply a regional nuisance; it was a threatening country with a continuing weapons program that posed a very real danger to the national security of the United States.⁸⁸ There was acknowledgment within the administration that the threat would not dissipate without removing Hussein from power. The more conservative elements of the national security establishment, including Strobe Talbott and Paul Wolfowitz, a prominent Republican outsider, began contemplating the need to act beyond the failing sanctions. They supported the United States’ going it alone and paying the associated costs, as the costs of inaction were mounting quickly.⁸⁹

Following continued difficulties with Iraqi intransigence, obstruction, and hostility, the Clinton administration began considering the use of force in 1997. Frustrated with the intrusive weapons inspections, Hussein made repeated attempts to block access to sites of interest in the Iraqi weapons and military installations, ultimately forcing the United Nations to withdraw its team. In response, Clinton threatened decisive military action unless the inspections team was permitted to return and resume its work immediately.⁹⁰ UN Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered a deal with Hussein for the team’s return and unfettered access, thus forestalling temporarily any need to further consider a military option.⁹¹

The lull proved short-lived, as the brokered deal collapsed following continued violations of the inspections agreement. In February 1998, the escalation continued, as Clinton issued a stark warning to the international community: “If we’re serious about WMD being the biggest threat to the twenty-first century, we’ve got to be ready to use force.”⁹² To that end, Clinton, working in concert with British prime minister Tony Blair, started exploring the use of force to punish Hussein for his continued obstinacy. Blair visited Washington in February 1998. Speaking during Clinton’s weekly radio address, the two hoped for a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Hussein’s pursuit of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons but explained that force would be used, if necessary, to prevent the threat from materializing.⁹³ Later, speaking at the Pentagon, Clinton warned of the “predators of the 21st century,” threats that “will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.”⁹⁴ Clinton said of Hussein’s Iraq, “his regime threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region, and the security of all of the rest of us.”⁹⁵ Although force was ruled out for the spring, the administration continued to pursue significant action, enacting that October, the Iraq Liberation Act, making Iraqi regime change official US policy and offering $100 million to support the Iraqi opposition.⁹⁶

As if by clockwork, Hussein again violated the terms of the inspection regime the first week of November, kicking out inspectors and casting doubt on his behavior behind closed doors. The UN Security Council voted unanimously to condemn Iraq’s “flagrant violations,” and Secretary of Defense William Cohen travelled around the Middle East to get support for air strikes. Demonstrating the serious nature of the situation and the high level of consideration taking place, the president secured Britain’s willingness to participate in an intervention.⁹⁷ Speaking with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah, Clinton obtained the ability to use materials located on Saudi territory should it become necessary.⁹⁸ Clinton likewise discussed the military campaign with French president Jacques Chirac, conveying that force was on the table if Hussein failed to comply with the UNSCOM mission.⁹⁹ Though the National Security team traveled to Camp David on November 8th to discuss options, the mission was temporarily called off when Hussein capitulated and again agreed to let inspections continue. Clinton vented his frustration with the Iraqi leader and the merry-go-round with the international community: “I hate that son of a bitch.… Saddam had his people terrorized … left alone, he would only get worse.”¹⁰⁰

Time ran out on December 12, when Hussein again denied access to inspectors, and Operation Desert Fox got underway. Describing the threat from Hussein and his weapons programs to the United States, the region, and the world, Clinton said: “Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq.… Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States.… Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons.”¹⁰¹ The mission was designed to target more than one hundred locations using Tomahawk cruise missiles over a four-day campaign and coerce the regime into allowing inspections to continue unimpeded.¹⁰² As Clinton explained, the aim was primarily to degrade Iraq’s WMD capability but also to debilitate Saddam’s hold on power.¹⁰³ Recognizing that surgical strikes of this nature are by definition limited, as one can only target known aspects of a weapons program, the goal was articulated as setting the WMD program back two years. The mission was accomplished after four days of strikes.¹⁰⁴ A high likelihood of success (IV3) was seemingly expected with the mission’s narrow goals, the limited air defenses of the Iraqi state, and the significant power and military advantage of the United States. Furthermore, the mission had been designed to achieve a strategic surprise and targeted facilities known with a high degree of confidence.¹⁰⁵

The numerous private conversations that President Clinton had with leaders from around the world in fall 1998 demonstrate the high-level nature and personal concern with the mission at hand. It also suggests a high degree of consultation and cooperation between the United States and its allies abroad. Speaking to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Clinton said, “I wanted to call you to tell you that I have decided to take action against Iraq very soon. I have spoken with Prime Minister Blair, and the British will participate.” The call also described Clinton’s persistent dedication to the mission and the back-and-forth that had taken place between the world community and Hussein over the previous months: “On November 14, I called off a military strike to try one more time to find a peaceful solution. Then Iraq committed to provide full and unconditional cooperation as provided by UNSC resolutions. Since that time, Baghdad has repeatedly violated that commitment and consistently refused to provide documents and information, barred access and harassed inspectors, lied repeatedly and destroyed documents.”¹⁰⁶ On the eve of the mission, Clinton told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak of the nature of the mission and secured passage for the military campaign, saying, “I think it is important to degrade his capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and his ability to threaten his neighbors as much as possible.… I am grateful for your prompt clearance and for over-flights and Suez passage.”¹⁰⁷

These private calls demonstrate extensive executive consideration of the use of preventive military force during fall 1998. From the highest-level consultations with Clinton’s own National Security Council, to deliberations and cooperation with allies around the world, to conducting a joint military mission with British forces, there is clear evidence of executive-level consideration and the use of preventive military force by President Clinton vis-à-vis the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The mission, designed to degrade the threat from WMD to the United States, the region, and the world, also sought to demonstrate the serious level of commitment by the United States to the UNSCOM inspections regime and to nonproliferation more broadly.¹⁰⁸ As predicted by the leader-centric model, President Clinton’s serious consideration and use of preventive military force is unsurprising, given his early concern for the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and dedication to combating the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

Taking the North Korean and Iraqi cases in concert, it is fair to ask why Clinton used preventive military force in Iraq but not in North Korea, especially as the leader-centric model predicted likely consideration in both instances. Recall that there are two stages to the decision-making model advanced here. Whereas the model’s prediction of whether or not a leader is likely to consider military force relies on the leader’s nuclear beliefs, the actual ordering of a mission introduces others factors into the decision. This second stage of the process, once a leader is considering the use of preventive military force, recognizes that contextual elements and mission feasibility (IV3) influence the actual decision to intervene. In the North Korean case, the deal that would become the Agreed Framework obviated the need for Clinton to use military force. But for this negotiated outcome, both the available record and members of the president’s cabinet and larger national security team suggest that Clinton would have ordered the intervention to forestall the nuclear threat from North Korea. Nevertheless, the predictions regarding serious consideration by Clinton are borne out in both cases, adding support to the model’s utility in both the DPRK and Iraq.

President George W. Bush

This section examines George W. Bush’s prior beliefs. Because of the unavailability of most primary source materials for the period in question, conclusions are preliminary regarding the importance of George W. Bush’s prior beliefs for his later presidential behavior. Nevertheless, using contemporaneous accounts, what follows offers an initial assessment of the case history and demonstrates the applicability of the leader-centric theory to this episode. It is perhaps unsurprising that Iraq had salience for Bush 43; Iraq was a major source of hostility for the better part of two decades and an adversary for two previous presidents. That said, it was not a foregone conclusion that Bush would focus on the nuclear and WMD-related elements of the Iraqi problem. Evidence for that statement is the fact that other elites focused elsewhere—such as on Iraq’s human rights violations—or viewed the situation as less threatening to the security of the United States when the war was being debated, or did both. While cognizant of the limitations that prohibit definitive conclusions regarding the causal mechanisms in this case, it is still useful to include this last episode for exploration; it is the most recently completed case of US counterproliferation behavior and provides an initial post–September 11 test of the model’s generalizability.

Despite limited prepresidential experience in international affairs, George W. Bush’s comments on the campaign trail and early in his presidency reveal much relevant information for analysis. In particular, Bush early on identified the threat from Iraq, connecting the danger to its rogue status and its potential for WMD acquisition. Bush lacked confidence in deterrence in a post–Cold War environment and linked his early desire to build ballistic missile defenses to the threat posed to the United States from rogue states including Iraq. Given Bush’s early proliferation pessimism and lack of confidence in deterring rogue actors—including an Iraq armed with nuclear weapons and other WMD—the theory predicts that he would have been highly likely to consider preventive military force as a counterproliferation strategy against Iraq. September 11 had the effect of hardening Bush’s beliefs about these issues and made him even less confident in deterrence, especially where terrorists were concerned. For this reason, in the aftermath of September 11, President George W. Bush became even more likely to consider preventive military force.

George W. Bush’s Prepresidential Beliefs

Distancing himself from the more interventionist style of President Clinton, Bush used the presidential campaign in 1999 and 2000 to identify places around the globe warranting activism and particular international threats that demanded action. Chief among them were the dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction and the state-based threats China and Iraq. At the outset, Bush presented a rather conventional, state-centric approach to international affairs, railing against “globaloney” or the post–Cold War tendency of people to concern themselves with globalization, disease, and other transnational agenda items. Instead, Bush wanted to focus on major powers, state-centered threats to US national security, and a clear set of national interests that needed protecting.¹⁰⁹ He outlined a defensive policy, limited in decrying nation building as overextending US interests and overtaxing the military but also expansive in calling for new defense spending on weapons to meet modern-day threats, including the rise of China.¹¹⁰ To that end, in the October 2000 presidential debates, Bush explicitly linked US action to Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction and called for a ballistic missile defense capability that would protect against the Iraqi and other threats. He pledged to realign US force structure to better manage the post–Cold War environment and intended to invest in precision weapons.¹¹¹ This was an advancement of an earlier, less forceful approach advocated in 1999, when Bush insisted there could be no easing of sanctions, and instead expressed a willingness to try to negotiate to ensure that Iraq lived up to its previous agreements. However, in a debate that December, Bush said that if “in any way shape or form … [Saddam Hussein] was developing any weapons of mass destruction, I’d take him out. I’m surprised he’s still there.”¹¹²

These prepresidential remarks thus demonstrate an early concern that Iraq threatened the United States, as well as a healthy sense of proliferation pessimism. They also suggest less than total confidence in deterring the twenty-first century threats now facing the United States and a need to combat these threats through missile defense to augment US deterrent capabilities. At the same time, Bush was hostile to what he saw as the overly interventionist style of the previous administration and sought a more defensive posture to protect the United States and its interests. Writing on behalf of the Bush foreign policy team in 2000, Bush’s eventual national security advisor and secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, articulated a pro-deterrence and anti-interventionist attitude. As of yet, she said, there was no need to invade and overthrow Hussein or regimes like those of Iraq or North Korea, as they were “living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them.” Instead, “the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence—if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.”¹¹³ Taken together this somewhat mixed evidence leads me to conclude that, before he assumed presidential office, Bush was mostly confident about deterring Iraq but also believed that strengthening the US deterrent and containment capacity with advanced weapons systems was the best strategy for mitigating such threats and protecting the United States from those with nefarious designs.

Collectively, this evidence yields a preliminary assessment of Bush as a proliferation pessimist—focused on the dangers of rogue states pursuing nuclear weapons and these states’ apparent imperviousness to coercion by traditional deterrence models. Prior to assuming office, Bush was also focused on the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein: his failure to abide by previously signed agreements, repeated historical challenges to the United States and international community, and continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was among the main reasons Bush advocated for an augmented US antiballistic missile capability, suggesting that the Iraqi threat was significant for him even early on. At the same time, given his anti-interventionist attitude and confidence in deterring Hussein from attacking the United States directly, I expect Bush to have been merely likely to consider military force as a counterproliferation strategy.

President Bush and the 2003 Iraq War

Transitioning to presidential office, Bush carried his foreign policy views from the campaign trail to his administration’s early investments and activities. He maintained that the United States needed to focus on its relationships with major countries, concern itself with state-based threats, and articulate a clear sense of US interests to guide policy. He distanced himself from what he described as Clinton’s issues, including globalization, nonstate actors, and terrorism.¹¹⁴

On Iraq, however, it was initially unclear exactly where the administration was heading. Though Bush often spoke of Iraq’s rogue nature and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, the exact nature of the threat remained ambiguous.¹¹⁵ While on one hand Bush promised a tougher line on Iraq and Saddam in particular, on the other hand he and his team simultaneously opposed anything resembling nation building, which Bush had vociferously critiqued before entering office.¹¹⁶ In practice, he maintained much of the sanctions policy that Clinton initiated. Former president Clinton had this to say about his perception of Bush’s early mindset: “He wanted to point out the bad guys and lead a charge. There are not many places in the world where that kind of leadership is going to work. Including Iraq, where I know he wants to take on Saddam Hussein.”¹¹⁷ This resembles other perspectives that describe an early administration discussion of good versus evil and where both were located around the world, though they fail to specify the problem precisely.¹¹⁸ Below the level of President Bush and the principals, other administration officials met regularly to discuss Iraq. Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley convened four deputies’ committee meetings during spring and summer 2001 to discuss Iraq and how best to support the Iraqi opposition. Though many meetings and memos purportedly resulted from this interagency process, a policy proposal never made it to the president. Likewise, across the river at the Pentagon, a lot of “suppose we ever needed to have to do this” thinking took place, with Paul Wolfowitz reportedly spearheading the support for military intervention and regime change.¹¹⁹

Regarding nuclear proliferation and the dangers of WMD broadly, the Bush administration was active early, engaging in a variety of policy initiatives to combat the threat the administration perceived. In his first speech to Congress in February 2001, Bush warned of the threat from “rogue states intent on developing weapons of mass destruction” and spoke of his increasing emphasis on counterproliferation activities, including working toward ballistic missile defense, and creating a “proliferation strategy, counterproliferation and homeland defense directorate within the National Security Council.”¹²⁰ To that end, the new administration invested heavily in the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative to combat the spread of loose nuclear weapons and materials, and focused on import and export controls to tighten the flows of technologies useful in weapons production. Subsequent to the September 11 attacks, Bush joined other world leaders to establish the G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction to stop trafficking in WMD among state and nonstate actors.¹²¹

Many have suggested that the September 11 attacks caused a major change in Bush’s thinking about the world. Based on the limited information available presently, a more accurate assessment suggests that rather than changing the core nature of the threats Bush perceived, September 11 changed how proximate or imminent he sensed these threats to be. This notion of idea assimilation is supported in the scholarship, which has demonstrated with Bush in particular how preexisting beliefs can become entrenched even following external shocks.¹²² Whereas Bush’s pre-9/11 threat perception focused on state-based threats, the attack introduced nonstate actors into Bush’s lexicon, in addition to global rogue elements. Likewise, whereas deterrence and containment were viable strategies for US foreign policy previously, in a post-9/11 environment, challenges had to be dealt with preemptively, before they manifested and targeted the United States directly. As Bush said in a news conference just prior to the war in Iraq, “September the 11 changed the strategic thinking, at least, as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country. My job is to protect the American people. It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11 should say to the American people that we’re now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.”¹²³

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration was acutely aware of the dangers of additional terrorist attacks on the homeland and in particular the risk of WMD terrorism. In a national security briefing on September 14, 2001, the CIA warned of additional Al-Qaeda operatives inside the United States and their expressed desire to attack with biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. For Bush, “it was hard to imagine anything more devastating than 9/11, but a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction would qualify.”¹²⁴ In the following weeks, aides told President Bush that a CIA asset code-named Dragonfire reported that Al-Qaeda had obtained a ten-kiloton Russian weapon and had hidden it in New York. Bush also worried about weapons smuggled into Washington, DC.¹²⁵ The changed threat environment set into motion a series of new initiatives for the administration. Key among them was tasking the Federal Bureau of Investigation with preventing attacks, suggesting a newfound focus on a preventive rather than reactive policy approach.¹²⁶ Bush and his team also took the opportunity that September 11 provided to act on one of Bush’s main campaign pledges, which was to build a viable ballistic missile defense program to protect the homeland. To that end, the Bush administration announced in December its formal withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.¹²⁷ As Bush described in his memoirs, “in the post–Cold War era, the idea of shooting down incoming missiles became more attractive as worries spread about the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. The new fear was that terrorist groups could launch missiles bearing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The fear became more real after September 11.”¹²⁸ Although the first order of business would take US troops to Afghanistan to target the Taliban and Al-Qaeda directly, Bush pulled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld aside soon after September 11 to ask that he investigate military options available for targeting Iraq, should the use of force become necessary.¹²⁹ This request offers the earliest evidence of preventive consideration.

The perceived threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its pursuit of WMD became that much more severe following the terrorist attacks. According to Rice, “after 9/11, Saddam in possession of WMD in the world’s most volatile region was a terrifying prospect.”¹³⁰ Subsequent to the terrorist attacks, Bush and Rice began receiving many more intelligence assessments, as well as more raw data and incomplete analysis, in order to ensure that no one would miss a possible threat. Rice said the new environment had “a powerful effect on Bush’s state of mind and on hers. She felt like she was constantly on edge, in a state of paranoia, but rational paranoia, even old threats—and Iraq would soon be one—took on new meaning. She was worried about … the terrifying prospect of another 9/11 on her watch. Bush shared her anxieties.”¹³¹ Thus, in a post-9/11 environment, the threat from Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons became even more dangerous a prospect to President Bush, one that would require preventive action in the coming months of the administration. Simultaneously, Bush’s prior proliferation pessimism grew more severe in a post-9/11 environment. Where associated with terrorism, the nuclear threat was especially acute.

Between 1999 and 2000, Iraq was waging a low-grade war against the United States, firing more than seven hundred times against US pilots surveying the no-fly zone.¹³² At the outset of their tenure, the Bush administration focused on tightening sanctions and maintaining at least some attention on Iraq as one element of the larger nonproliferation campaign. After September 11, however, threats were reexamined, and Iraq surged to the top of the list: “There were state sponsors of terror. There were sworn enemies of America. There were hostile governments that threatened their neighbors. There were nations that violated international demands. There were dictators who repressed their people. And there were regimes that pursued WMD. Iraq combined all those threats.”¹³³

Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address outlined the new post-9/11 environment and the challenges confronting the United States. First, Bush said that the United States could defend itself only by taking on the proliferation challenge. He put Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—the “axis of evil” and their terrorist allies—on notice that the United States would “not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America [would] not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”¹³⁴ The speech went further, however, identifying the specific behaviors that were problematic: North Korea was arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction; Iran was aggressively pursuing WMD; and Iraq had plotted to develop anthrax, nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for more than a decade.¹³⁵

Bush’s next major policy speech articulated the policy designed to mitigate these threats. Addressing an audience at West Point, Bush said that deterrence meant nothing against shadowy terrorists with no land to defend, and containment was not possible against unbalanced dictators with WMD who can deliver them with missiles or give the WMD to terrorist allies.¹³⁶ This speech unveiled what would become the Bush Doctrine, spelling out the basic conditions for the use of preemptive war. Where defense, containment, and deterrence do not apply—that is, in a world of rogue states, WMD, and terrorist proxies—the US had to be forward-looking and resolute, primed for preemptive action, and ready to defend both life and liberty.¹³⁷

In September, formally codifying what President Bush had verbalized at West Point, the administration released a new national security strategy. Preemption was the new foundation of US defense strategy, and containment and deterrence were relegated to the past as outdated modes of behavior.¹³⁸ According to President Bush’s executive summary, “as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”¹³⁹ Thus, no longer could the United States wait until threats emerged internationally. Instead, challengers would be met head-on, and cut off, before the danger manifested.

At a more micro level and as time went on, Bush’s focus on Iraq intensified. In September, he told an audience at the United Nations General Assembly that Iraq was “aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons.”¹⁴⁰ He said that there was evidence that Hussein was aiding and protecting terrorists and could provide those terrorists with weapons of mass destruction without detection by the international community. Bush also warned that doing so was a brazen act of defiance against the Security Council by a leader intent on a robust weapons capability, which risked dramatically destabilizing the Middle East and posed a serious threat to all other nations.¹⁴¹ Elsewhere, Bush drew an explicit connection between Hussein and Al-Qaeda and like-minded others intent on harming the United States. Hussein in particular, Bush said, could have nuclear weapons within a year and would be in a position to pass them onto his terrorist allies.¹⁴²

On the eve of war, the condemnation of Iraq and its leadership sharply increased. Justifying the focus on Iraq, but not yet on Iran or North Korea, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld described that while there were “a number of terrorist states pursuing such weapons of mass murder today … as the president has made clear, Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people, and the stability of the world, that is distinct from others.” Rumsfeld rattled off the litany of Hussein’s offenses, which included invading neighbors, launching ballistic missiles around the region, hosting terrorist networks and sponsoring their activities, spending billions of dollars to pursue a WMD program, and repeatedly violating sixteen different United Nations resolutions.¹⁴³ As National Security Advisor Rice described in her memoirs, though some said Hussein would not risk transferring WMD to terrorists out of the fear that it could be traced back to him, his established pattern of recklessness, penchant for miscalculating the international community’s responses to his behavior, and support for terrorism together did not make it unreasonable that Hussein could supply some group with a weapon to detonate inside the United States.¹⁴⁴ Furthermore, Rice explained, Hussein had previously used WMD against his own population and against his neighbors. The WMD threat was not a theoretical one; “waiting until a threat explodes was not an option after the experience of 9/11.”¹⁴⁵ Thus, for the Bush administration, the threat from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq centered on his rogue nature, his (purported) connections to terrorists bent on targeting the United States, and his long-standing pursuit of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

A similar evolution occurred in the British context with Prime Minister Tony Blair.¹⁴⁶ Recall from earlier in this chapter that in 1998, the United Kingdom participated with Bill Clinton in Operation Desert Fox, bombing Iraqi WMD sites. At the time, Blair noted that Hussein “must be either persuaded by diplomacy or made by force to yield up his long cherished ambition to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; weapons which threaten not only his immediate neighbours in the Middle East, but pose a direct and fundamental challenge to world peace.”¹⁴⁷ Blair further remarked, according to his spokesman and Downing Street press secretary, “It was not an option to do nothing. We either got the inspectors in or we had to take action.”¹⁴⁸ Though this material is not from Blair’s pre–prime ministerial period, it is relevant evidence for his earlier thinking about the threat posed by Iraqi pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the response Blair thought necessary prior to the 2002–2003 period.

Like Bush’s threat perception, Blair’s seemed to evolve over time. By April 2002, Blair noted in a speech to the House of Commons that Hussein “is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also.”¹⁴⁹ This statement suggests an expansion of a threat that was once localized but that with nuclear weapons had extended to the region and the United Kingdom directly. By March 2003, Blair, like Bush, pointed to “dictatorships with highly repressive regimes … desperately trying to acquire … particularly nuclear weapons capability.” Further, Blair said, the possibility of terrorist groups obtaining and using such weapons of mass destruction changed the dynamic entirely.¹⁵⁰ There is similarity too, in how Bush and Blair preferred to meet the Iraqi threat. Prior to September 11, both preferred containing or deterring Saddam and his bad behavior. Should that not work, however, then their preferences diverged. For Blair, diplomatic options were to be explored first. Only once it was understood that diplomacy was failing to limit the threat from Hussein and his pursuit of nuclear weapons, then multilateral force authorized by the United Nations was acceptable. Ultimately Blair supported force, even if others in his administration or the British public generally disagreed.¹⁵¹

Conversely, George W. Bush prioritized a forceful, unilateral response to advance US interests. Hussein’s demonstrated unwillingness to be deterred or coerced by the international community meant that the threat he posed with nuclear weapons was too great for the administration to ignore in the aftermath of September 11. In the eyes of Bush and his team, what could once have been dealt with through deterrence now required proactive action, suggesting a change over time in confidence in deterrence. Verbalizing this sentiment, Rice said, “One cannot reliably judge the intentions of an adversary, but Saddam had shown a willingness to act recklessly before. We didn’t believe that we had the luxury of inaction.”¹⁵² President Bush addressed this gamble, saying that the administration had been concerned during the initial war planning that Saddam Hussein had anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, ricin, and unmanned aerial vehicles giving him more lethal means to deliver these weapons.¹⁵³ Further, experience had shown Hussein produced these weapons for their use, not just for the purpose of deterrence: “Given everything we knew, allowing Saddam to stay in power would have amounted to an enormous gamble. I would have to bet that either every major intelligence agency was wrong or that Saddam would have a change of heart. After seeing the horror of 9/11, that was not a chance I was willing to take.”¹⁵⁴

Though most of the precise decision-making documentation from this period remains classified, what is known from interviews and contemporary accounts provides useful information for understanding the process as it unfolded.¹⁵⁵ Moreover, the contemporaneous accounts confirm the president’s early request for military options (confirming the theoretical expectations of the model) and document his decision to go to war when the inspections regime failed definitively in 2003. These accounts also provide preliminary information regarding the administration’s ex ante expectations for a high likelihood of conducting a successful intervention.

From the outset, the mission was clear: change the regime, overthrow Hussein, and eliminate the associated threats—weapons of mass destruction, links to terrorism, and dangers posed to Iraq’s neighbors in the region, including especially Israel.¹⁵⁶ To achieve these goals, the defense department’s plan relied on a light-footprint invasion using far fewer troops than were necessary during the Gulf War. The plan demanded speed and advanced technology; as for postwar planning, the team expected rejoicing in the streets of Baghdad.¹⁵⁷ Internally at the Pentagon, estimates for the time necessary to achieve regime change ranged from seven to thirty days. Intelligence indicated that critical Iraqi divisions would capitulate quickly; if they did not, it would take two to three months for the fight to play out.¹⁵⁸ Although these numbers do not appear to have percolated up to the president, Bush “suspected weeks” but “was prepared for the worst.”¹⁵⁹

Nevertheless, advisers raised a variety of concerns. Secretary Powell recounted to Bush a long litany of considerations: follow-on consequences of the invasion itself, costs to international unity, the possibility of global oil price spikes, potential destabilization of Saudi Arabia and other US allies in the region, and so on. The United States would also possess responsibility for shattering a country of twenty-five million people.¹⁶⁰ Defense Secretary Rumsfeld listed his so-called “parade of horribles”—chemical or biological weapons attack, massive refugee crisis, significant Iraqi attacks drawing Israel into the war, and widespread destruction of Iraqi oil fields.¹⁶¹ General Tommy Franks estimated approximately one thousand casualties on the US side; President Bush worried about Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against his own people.¹⁶² In October 2002, Rumsfeld penned a memo to the president listing some twenty-nine possible problems that could emerge from the conflict.¹⁶³

In August 2003, Bush 41’s former national security advisor Scowcroft wrote an op-ed arguing against attack. Attacking Iraq, he said, would distract from the global war on terror, and while the United States could certainly defeat the Iraqi military and destroy the Hussein regime, it would not “be a cake-walk.” Instead, war would be very expensive and very bloody.¹⁶⁴ Internally, General Eric Shinseki, US Army chief of staff, expressed concerns both about the logistical requirements of the operation and the small troop numbers selected for the light footprint approach. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services committee, Shinseki estimated several hundred thousand troops would be necessary for the mission at hand.¹⁶⁵ This estimate was totally at odds with the fast-moving operational design, which aimed to get in and out quickly and turn the country over to the next generation of Iraqi leaders.¹⁶⁶ Concerns were expressed even further afield from the administration: Rice gave Bush an article written by a retired Russian general who had visited Baghdad and who stated that although the United States would win the war, Bush would need to carpet-bomb Baghdad. This assessment left Bush distressed that people did not appreciate that his war plan spared civilians as much as possible, avoided collateral damage, and aimed to target Iraqi leaders and their means of fighting and maintaining power.¹⁶⁷

Despite these considerations, a sense of optimism ruled the day. In a now infamous statement, CIA Director George Tenet referred to the intelligence on Iraqi WMD as a “slam dunk.”¹⁶⁸ Likewise, when asked by Meet the Press’s Tim Russert whether the American people were prepared for a long and costly battle with significant casualties, Vice President Cheney replied, “I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way.” While he was not predicting a cost-free operation, Cheney argued that that cost would be far greater if Hussein ever provided Al-Qaeda with unconventional weapons.¹⁶⁹ When Bush made his decision, he asked each of the commanders if they had everything they needed to accomplish the mission of regime change. No hesitation was expressed.¹⁷⁰ The mission would be fast and fierce.¹⁷¹ All costs and risks were weighed against the possible problems that would emerge if Hussein was allowed to stay.¹⁷²

This evidence shows a high likelihood of a successful campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power (IV3) and rid the world of the threat posed by Iraqi nuclear weapons. By New Year’s Day in 2003, Bush had made the final decision to go to war, when he told Rice that the inspections regime was not working and that Hussein was growing more confident with time, not less. Moreover, US troops were amassing in the Persian Gulf and could not be kept there forever.¹⁷³ In a private message to his father on March 19, 2003, Bush wrote, “In spite of the fact that I had decided a few months ago to use force, if need be, to liberate Iraq and rid the country of WMD, the decision was an emotional one.”¹⁷⁴

Post-hoc, we now know that the expectations that led to war rested on “fundamentally flawed and persistent assumption[s]” that the war in Iraq would be short.¹⁷⁵ Instead, a fast-moving conventional offensive quickly devolved into a stability and reconstruction mission (the dreaded nation building that the administration had come into office rejecting).

Nevertheless, that the war occurred is evidence of the actual use of force, going beyond the initial expectations of consideration. Bush’s prepresidential beliefs made him highly likely to consider the use of preventive military force. At the same time, the events of September 11 had the effect of changing Bush’s views on the precise nature of the response required to address the threats posed by the intersection of undeterrable rogue regimes and nuclear proliferation. In the post-9/11 environment, containment and deterrence were no longer viable, and as the Bush administration’s national security strategy revealed, preemption became the strategy of choice to thwart proliferation challenges. In the aftermath of this change, the use of preventive military force against Iraq became even more likely.

A Presidential Logroll?

Still, one might argue that the 2003 Iraq War was a product of preconceived notions on the part of Bush’s cabinet members, many of whom had occupied political positions inside the Bush 41 administration and had unfinished business with the Iraqi dictator. Jon Western argues that many of the hardliners in the Bush 43 administration came into office intent on removing Saddam Hussein from power because of their previous interaction.¹⁷⁶ Indeed, it would be surprising if high-level political figures like Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney (among others) did not have Iraq on the mind in 2001, given a full decade of Hussein’s bad behavior vis-à-vis the international community, the UNSCOM inspections regime, and the United States. As noted earlier, I would expect Bush to find Iraq a salient concern, given the considerable interaction between Saddam and consecutive US leaders since the 1980s. On some level, this narrative confirms my argument that people have previously held beliefs that are consequential for their later decisions, though of course my model is formally relevant only to executive decision makers. At the same time, it is hardly the case that there was uniformity inside the administration in beating the drums toward war or in believing that Hussein had a rapidly growing nuclear program. On the latter point, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate noted that “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” But the report also contained an alternative view from the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research (INR) saying that though the agency concurred on the chemical and biological weapons, there was insufficient evidence to confirm that Hussein was pursuing a nuclear program.¹⁷⁷

Furthermore, it is well known that Secretary of State Powell, among others, was opposed to military intervention for much of the crucial decision-making period and supported the effort only as his view of his position demanded, once the president had decided to intervene. Moreover, the bureaucratic logroll version suggests that some group of individuals had conspired, first, to get George W. Bush to run for the presidency; second, to appoint these anti-Iraq individuals to the highest cabinet positions; and, finally, to support the mission to invade and overthrow Iraq not because Bush perceived the threat himself but because these individuals told him that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. While at present the documentary evidence is insufficient to disprove these notions entirely, this view contradicts at least some of the secondary literature, which concludes that despite the early recognition that US policy was not working to coerce the Iraqi dictator into better behavior, Iraq was not a top priority before the September 11 attacks.¹⁷⁸ Even Vice President Cheney, who is often pointed to as the most virulent Iraq hawk in the administration, felt that targeting Iraq immediately after September 11 would be counterproductive, as it would cause the United States to lose its moral high ground after falling victim to the terrorist attacks.¹⁷⁹

More likely, perhaps, is that in the new post-9/11 international environment, the WMD frame—as opposed to human rights violations, anti-Israel behavior, or even support for international terrorism—was deemed preferable to make the case for war. This perspective squares with the portrait of Bush advanced earlier. It is possible that the WMD framing gained traction not only nationally but with the president himself, given his prior beliefs. Stated differently, had Bush not been predisposed to view nuclear proliferation as dangerous for US security, then the argument for war against Iraq might have been a much tougher sell.

As time goes on, we will continue to learn the full story of the Iraq war. Though the Bush administration’s claims have been questioned or debunked, the full truth may remain unknown until the pertinent documents are declassified. Taking the president at his own words reveals that he felt that he was acting with the best interests of the United States at heart. He wrote in his memoirs: “Seven years later, I strongly believe that removing Saddam from power was the right decision. For all the difficulties that followed, America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the heart of the Middle East.”¹⁸⁰ Additionally, Bush wrote of the change that 9/11 brought to the international community: “Before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage. Through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed.… I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists. With threats flowing into the Oval Office daily—many about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons—a WMD attack seemed like a frighteningly real possibility. The stakes were too high to trust the dictator’s word against the weight of the evidence and the consensus of the world. The lesson of 9/11 was that if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited for too long.”¹⁸¹ At minimum, President Bush believed that the threats posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and its nuclear program in particular, were sufficiently dangerous that the costs of inaction were too grave for the United States to stand idly by. And as his beliefs (and later the post-9/11 strategic environment) demanded, he acted accordingly.

This chapter has briefly explored three consecutive US presidents, three sets of beliefs concerning nuclear proliferation and the threat from Iraq itself and from an Iraq armed with nuclear weapons, and three discrete instances of US consideration and use of preventive military force against Iraq. Though data limitations and the timing of history preclude a formal comparison across the three presidents and the three episodes in the exact manner of the previous two empirical chapters, what we observe at this juncture demonstrates that prepresidential beliefs and threat perceptions are salient for a president’s later preventive war decisions once in executive office. Furthermore, in conjunction with chapter 4, this case helps to demonstrate the consistency of key beliefs held by George H. W. Bush and Clinton beyond the North Korean context.

Given Bush 41’s limited early concern for nuclear proliferation, this chapter has highlighted the increased importance of the threat posed by the proliferator and the proliferator’s deterrability or lack thereof. Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait threatened regional stability, peace, and sovereignty and compelled George H. W. Bush to act. The occupation afforded him an opportunity to target Hussein’s WMD pursuits simultaneously. For Clinton, his consistent proliferation pessimism and view of Iraq as threatening for the region and the United States, coupled with a decade of defiant and hostile Iraqi behavior, led to the US (and British) military intervention in Operation Desert Fox. Finally, this chapter suggests how major events like the September 11 attacks seem to have encouraged the hardening of George W. Bush’s beliefs and a new, more proactive strategy for the new strategic environment. Although Bush’s prepresidential pessimism and view of the dangers of Iraq caused him to consider force, September 11 appears to have catalyzed his willingness to preventively intervene.

In sum, this chapter has just begun to skim the surface of what has happened between the United States and Iraq since 2003. Scholars have much to learn about these three presidents’ views, especially those of George W. Bush, and the actions taken during each administration as the relevant archival material becomes increasingly available. For now, this chapter and chapter 4 demonstrate that the leader-centric model offers traction in the post–Cold War strategic environment. The model also seemingly provides explanatory power in the post-9/11 world in the case of Iraqi nuclear weapons and US preventive war behavior. This explanatory utility suggests that the model is generalizable across time, including in the aftermath of major shocks like the end of the Cold War and the September 11 attacks. This explanatory power also means that the model can account for variation across empirical cases within the same presidential administration. The leader-centric model can explain both why Clinton nearly intervened in North Korea and attacked Iraq, as well as why George H. W. Bush intervened only in the Gulf War.

As new nuclear proliferation challenges emerge, as the model indicates, there is useful information to glean from presidents’ preexecutive beliefs that tell us how they are likely to act once in office. Such information is critically important in helping citizens determine what type of leader they might elect when they enter the voting booth. In the next chapter, we turn to examine the extent to which the leader-centric model travels beyond the US context. Thus, the next and last empirical chapter moves beyond US foreign policy decision making and explores preventive war behavior of Israeli leaders.