War was not only option

Now that US troops have left Iraq, Americans are taking stock of the staggering price of this nine-year war of choice, in blood (nearly 4,500 Americans dead, 33,000 wounded), in fractured relations worldwide and in monetary terms (nearly $1 trillion (Dh3.67 trillion) in direct spending; several times that when counting the fivefold increase in oil prices, the long-term cost of caring for veterans and wounded, and the replacement of weapons and equipment — a total that may top the cost of Second World War).

An additional casualty is the loss of a mechanism for enforcing nonproliferation agreements, though how this might have changed the course of subsequent events — in Iran, for example — cannot be known. The public may also never know exactly why or when the Bush administration made its tragically misguided decision to go to war. Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill has said that unseating Saddam Hussain dominated a meeting with President George W. Bush 10 days after Bush's inauguration — eight months before the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Among the many reasons posited — avenging an Iraqi attack on Bush's father, getting the US hands on Middle East oil, extending democracy across the region — only the charge that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) came close to selling the American people on war. It's now clear that national intelligence services were hideously wrong and that administration officials, including the president, employed a degree of exaggeration and misuse of raw intelligence that amounted to duplicity in trying to make a convincing case.

What's less well-known, however, is that at the same time, UN inspectors were getting the story right. Their assessments of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programmes in the months leading up to the war were remarkably close to what was later found. Yet by insisting on invading before these inspections had time to succeed, the US aborted what could have been a striking international success. From 1991 to 1998, a force known as Unscom and the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered and eliminated most, and possibly all, of Iraq's WMDs-related facilities, including a massive programme to enrich uranium for weapons.

Threat to peace

What might have happened had the US sought WMD disarmament and not regime change? Inspections do not consist of running from place to place, hoping to find something hidden.

Together with physical inspections, they can produce solid answers. The process would have taken roughly a year in Iraq. After destroying what was found, open-ended monitoring would have been put in place. Based on that success, a permanent inspections capability — under discussion after Unscom — might have been established in New York or Geneva. Such an outcome would have made clear that it was not just the US or a handful of major powers that cares about stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Rather, this widely supported international effort, carried through to final disarmament, would have reflected that the nearly 200 nations that have signed WMDs treaties view illegal weapons programmes as an intolerable threat to international peace.

A painful conclusion is inescapable: Had the Bush administration pursued an international commitment to keep weapons of mass destruction out of Saddam's hands, such an agreement could have worked. From it, a WMDs enforcement mechanism could have been built for use not only in Iraq but also in North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

The deep split between nuclear haves and have-nots, inflamed by the war, would have been greatly eased. The long-term cooperation needed to keep WMDs out of terrorists' hands would have been strengthened, rather than undermined. The horrible precedent of a unilateral right to attack in ‘preventive self-defence' would not have been asserted, and multilateral intervention to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons would not be widely opposed, as it is today, as a disguised intent on the part of a few to force regime change. That is the short list.

— Washington Post

Jessica T. Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.