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November
15, 2002
The
Osirak Option
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
With
U.N. inspectors headed for Baghdad and the clock running out,
those of us who are skeptical about the need to invade Iraq need
to confront one of the most cogent arguments against us.
It
is a bombed-out building near Baghdad: the Osirak nuclear reactor,
which Israeli warplanes destroyed in June 1981. At the time, there
was broad agreement among sensible people that such a pre-emptive
strike was outrageous.
Even
the Reagan administration, normally sympathetic to Israel, chose
to "condemn" the attack; France declared it "unacceptable";
Britain denounced it as "a grave breach of international
law." A New York Times editorial began: "Israel's sneak
attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an act
of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression."
In
retrospect, the condemnations were completely wrong. (Looking
back at yellowed newspaper databases, I see that one of the few
people who got it right at the time was my colleague William Safire.)
Thank
God that Menachem Begin overrode his own intelligence agency,
which worried that the attack would affect the peace process with
Egypt, and ordered the reactor destroyed. Otherwise Iraq would
have gained nuclear weapons in the 1980's, it might now have a
province called Kuwait and a chunk of Iran, and the region might
have suffered nuclear devastation.
So
pre-emption sometimes works, and even doves tend to favor cross-border
intervention to prevent genocide in the Rwandas of the world.
All
this suggests that an invasion of Iraq may be acceptable in principle.
But what does that tell us about whether we should invade Iraq
now?
Wars
should be principled, but that doesn't mean blindly following
every principle into battle. Otherwise you end up with conflicts
like my favorite, which occurred in 1739 after a British sailor
named Robert Jenkins turned up in London waving one of his ears
in his hand and declaring that it had been severed by the Spanish.
As a result, England launched the War of Jenkins' Ear.
The
lesson of Osirak is very limited that in extreme cases it is justifiable
for a country to make a pre-emptive pinpoint strike to prevent
an unpredictable enemy from gaining weapons of mass destruction
that would be used against it. That's a reasonable approach toward
Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to cooperate and if we have intelligence
about what sites are worth striking.
Indeed,
it makes sense to target Saddam's own bed if we can learn where
he's spending the night. Ari Fleischer quite properly raised the
possibility last month of assassinating Saddam; it's messy, but
much less so than an invasion would be.
Contrary
to popular belief, American law does not ban assassination, as
Kenneth Pollack notes in his superb new book on Iraq, "The
Threatening Storm." Rather the ban on assassination exists
only in Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ronald Reagan
and renewed by presidents since, and thus can easily be nullified.
In
any case, a succession of U.S. presidents appear to have attempted
to kill foreign leaders (Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya in 1986,
Mohammed Farah Aidid of Somalia in 1993, Saddam himself in 1991),
partly on the ground that they were command-and-control elements.
Likewise, at least in wartime, international law permits the targeting
of enemy rulers even if they are civilians. So the real problem
is finding Saddam to kill him.
With
weapons inspectors heading for Iraq, the next key date may be
Dec. 8, when Baghdad is due to hand over a declaration of all
its nuclear, biological and chemical activities. The U.N. resolution
makes any lapse in this declaration a "material breach,"
giving the White House its license to go to war.
Hawks
will argue for "zero tolerance," as President Bush put
it Wednesday. But one can accept that pre-emption is sometimes
necessary yet prefer to rely not on an invasion of Iraq but instead
on a less risky combination of containment, pinpoint bombing and
assassination.
After
all, if it's appropriate to carry out pre-emptive strikes on countries
that sponsor terrorism and secretly develop nuclear weapons, then
we could launch an invasion today of Pakistan.
