That’s Not What Would Have Happened
Bret Stephens gets counterfactual on Iraq:
Here’s a partial list: Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel. He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.
Obviously, had we simply done nothing and let the sanctions regime peter out, Stephens view of Iraq’ would be pretty accurate. But that’s a horrible way to do counterfactuals. Instead, we should assume what would have happened had be we presumed a different Iraq policy, not one that was magically designed to always terminate in war.
Inspections are a great example. The Bush administration saw the inspectors as a threat; after all, they kept on not finding the weapons. So, had we continued the inspections, we would have eventually figured out that Iraq possessed no serious WMD capacity. This, of course, sounds ridiculous in the context of 2002-2003. Since the entire media and intelligence apparatus just assumed that Hussein had weapons, the inspectors were always going to find them eventually, and if they didn’t, it was because Saddam was hiding them.
Had the approach been different – ie, not pre-determined to go to war – we probably would have concluded that Iraq’s weapons capacity was ambiguous, and certainly not a huge threat. As far as the sanctions regime goes, it seems like we could have thought up something. And since Saddam wasn’t really that big a risk of proliferating weapons, would such a strict sanctions policy that had the effect of killing lots of Iraqi babies had been such a good idea?
