Thank you for coming out.  I figured by now pretty much everyone had had their fill of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the Middle East, but I see we found a few people who still want more and I'm happy to be here to present that, I'm happier still because I'm here at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.  I want to thank Curtis [Mack] and Mary [Morris] and everyone at the Council for inviting me, and for the great work that you guys do.  I think the World Affairs Councils across the United States of America are the most important nonprofit organizations in America dealing with international affairs.  I know of no other organization anywhere that has chapters throughout America and that engage Americans on international affairs. That work has always been important because, frankly, most folks don't pay attention to international affairs.  But it is perhaps the most important time ever for the Council to be doing this hard work.  So I salute all of you for taking the time out to come here and to discuss these important issues with me.

My topic tonight is weapons of mass destruction and the future of U.S. foreign policy.  If we want to talk about the future, then we have to have some sort of understanding of the past, of what's already happened.  So it seems to me incumbent upon us to take a moment to step back and to ask ourselves, “What has just taken place?”

We've just had the first-ever war in the name of nonproliferation, and I think as we move forward, when we're dealing with North Korea or Iran or other countries, we'd better have a pretty good idea of what we've just done and learn some lessons.  So I suggest that we go back with a scorecard to evaluate why we did what we did.  Did it turn out that those reasons were right?  Did the things that were predicted to happen, both positive and negative, turn out as predicted or were they different than we had predicted?  And then I want to talk a little bit about the implications for the future and conclude with the question of what our role is as citizens, how we can have an impact on the future as we go forward.

I want to give you a sense of where I was on this and then talk objectively about it.  I was skeptical about intervention in Iraq and I thought it was a bad idea.  I thought it was a bad idea not because I didn't think we weren't going to win the war.  I thought that was obvious — we have overwhelming military and industrial might and the question wasn't “when” it was just a matter of “at what cost.”  I was concerned about what I thought were low probability but high consequence events, an event like Saddam attacking Israel with chemical or biological weapons as he did with conventional weapons in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and then Israel responding with a nuclear weapon.  I thought if that happened that cost would swamp any benefit that we were hoping to achieve.  Luckily that didn't happen.  But just to give you a sense of where I was, that's where I'm coming from on this — full disclosure.

What were the premises for military action against Iraq?  I think the first and most important rationale given was that Iraq posed a direct threat to U.S. national security and the argument was that Saddam was undeterrable.  That this was a guy who wanted weapons of mass destruction.  He was a bad guy, and if he got weapons of mass destruction, more powerful ones in the future, if he got a nuclear weapon ten or 20 years down the road, he would use it against us.  He would use it against the U.S. and it didn't matter that we had 3,500 strategic warheads or thousands of technical nuclear weapons; or more conventional weapons than God, he was going to attack us and he was going to attack us unprovoked and we had to strike him before he had that opportunity in the future.

The second rationale, and there are several here, we had to do it now before he grew stronger because if we let this go, whether it was 30 days or three years or whatever, he would grow stronger over time and the time to strike was now.

The third rationale was that Iraq would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, who in turn would attack the United States.

The fourth rationale was that we needed to do this to uphold the credibility of the U.N.  We had had these U.N. resolutions requiring his disarmament, and unless we acted the U.N. would not be seen as being credible.

Well, I think in reviewing each of those four rationales I would argue, and reasonable people can disagree, that very few of those rationales actually hold up and here are the reasons why. 

The first one – the direct threat to U.S. national security that Saddam would attack us unprovoked.  What happened?  We attacked him and I predicted, wrongly, as the CIA predicted, wrongly, and the military predicted, wrongly, that once we attacked him and put him in a position of “use them or lose them,” that when he had nothing left to lose he was going to use those chemical weapons against us.  He was going to unleash them.  It didn't happen and it raises the question, if we attacked him and he didn't use them what were the odds that he was going to attack us unprovoked?  It seems quite small. 

The answer to why didn't they use them?  Why didn't Saddam use the weapons he had? — which I believe he did have — the answer given is that he was deterred from using them because President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld said, “If you use those weapons, we will try you and we'll put you in jail.”  In short, their response was: they were deterred.  So somehow these guys were deterred from using their chem and bio weapons against us in a war because we were going to put them on trial, but they weren't deterred by our nuclear weapons and our overwhelming conventional force.  Those two things don't add up.  You can't have it both ways.  So I would say the results of the war, the fact that Saddam didn't use his weapons against us when we came after him first, raises questions about that rationale.

The second rationale was “We have to do it now before he grows stronger.”  It seems to me that the war went so well that that itself is also in doubt.  It took less time than the Persian Gulf War.  It went about as well as you can possibly imagine, and so that tells me that if it waited 30 days or waited a year it really wouldn't have mattered very much.  We had overwhelming advantages and, frankly, there's no way he could compete with a country that controls 25 percent of the world’s GDP and spends more on its military budget than the next dozen countries combined.  We are strong, far stronger, than any other country in the world.  This is the unipolar moment and there's nothing that Saddam could do in a year that was going to change that base fact. 

There's the argument that he would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and, again, that doesn't hold up very well either.  Maybe his incentive for giving them to terrorists increased as he thought he might go down, but prior to that there's no evidence.  In fact there's not a single example in modern world history of a state giving weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist.  We've had chemical weapons since World War I, nuclear weapons since 1945, bio weapons since the Middle Ages if you count catapulting diseased cows over the moat.  We've had them a long time.  We had thousands and thousands of terrorist attacks.  In the 1990s there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 terrorist attacks.  We've had thousands for every decade, and in no case was there a transfer of weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist. 

And the final rationale was that the U.S. needs to uphold the U.N. resolutions or it will lose credibility.  It's tough to make that argument when you withdraw the second resolution.  You withdraw the second resolution before the U.N. because you think you're going to lose the vote and then you go ahead with military action.  So it's hard, on the one hand, to say that the U.N. loses credibility if you withdraw just because you want to avoid a vote and go in on our own. 

I think that on those premises it turns out that not a lot of them stand up very well in retrospect.  But lest you think that I am just dumping on the administration, or giving the old slanted view, I think we also have to look at some of the other predictions.  It turns out that all of the folks who were against the war made a bunch of predictions, and none of them turned out to be true either.  I'd like to go through some of those. 

Here are some of the predicted negative outcomes that people thought would happen as a result of military action in Iraq: 

First, that Iraq's 1,500 oil wells might be set on fire.  It turns out there were more oil wells set on fire during the Persian Gulf War in Kuwait than were set on fire in the Iraq war.

Second, that we would have an increase in terrorism.  In the Persian Gulf War, terrorism against the U.S. increased 22 percent.  That's according to the State Department's document called “Patterns of Global Terrorism.”  And it was mostly ad hoc terrorism —people acting on their own.  Well, a lot of us thought that terrorism would increase during this war, and maybe it's because the war was so short, but it certainly didn't increase 22 percent.  That prediction turned out to be wrong.  There was a prediction that I made, or I at least feared, that Iraq would attack Israel.  After all, they had done it in 1991, and if they were going down there was every reason to expect they'd do it again.  That didn't take place. 

There were predictions that there would be regional political fallout — that our friends in Egypt and Jordan would be undermined politically, that there might be changes in regimes that would be adverse to U.S. interests — that didn't happen, or it hasn't happened yet in part, again, I think because the war was so brief. 

There's been an argument that [the war] would increase recruitment for terrorist groups, that bin Laden and others would take advantage of the war and take that anger and focus it into terrorist groups.  That one is tough to judge, and we don't know the answer.  That may be something that happens in the future but so far that one will have to be one left open in that we just don't know. 

There was a prediction that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction, would use its chem and bio weapons against U.S. troops or against the Kurds or against other civilians.  That didn't happen.  That [Saddam] would engage in scorched earth, that he would blow up the power plants, that he would blow up the dams and the power plants and then blame it on the U.S. and leave the country a wreck.  That didn't happen. 

And finally there was a prediction that there might be war, either between Kurds and Shiites battling for power, or between Turkey and the Kurds.  In fact, Turkey repeatedly warned that it was going to send troops across the border, and that didn't happen. So, we're sort of in a funny space here.  We're in a space where a lot of the rationales for intervention don't hold up very well but a lot of the predicted negative downsides in the military invasion didn't happen either.

So what about the predicted positive outcomes?  Well, one was victory and I think we all agreed, or every serious analyst thought, the U.S. would win this war, and in fact that predicted positive outcome did come true.  There was the prediction that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, and I think that that's been true as well.  It was a horrible, horrible regime and many did welcome the U.S. as liberators.  The surprising thing here for me, though, is how quickly some have already called for our departure.  I mean, the electricity and the water aren't even on everywhere and some folks are asking us to leave already.  So that's one that I think bears watching.  And then, of course, there were the predictions that are expected — talks about democracy in Iraq and that democracy in Iraq would spread to other countries in the Middle East.  We would have a flowering of democracy in the Middle East.  We're going to have to wait to assess [that]. 

The final prediction of positive outcome is that it would deter other proliferators.  Here, I think, it's mixed.  It's still an open question, but we have evidence in both directions.  You could argue I think persuasively, that Syria backed down in part because it couldn't afford to call the U.S. bluff.  I never thought the U.S. was going to invade Syria.  I thought that was not a credible threat, but the Syrians couldn't take the chance of being wrong.  They couldn't afford to call our bluff and lose, and so I think they ended up capitulating, at least in terms of shutting down the border and returning some [Iraqis].  My guess is that we'll see over time a return of some Iraqis back to Iraq from Syria.  So, there was an impact on Syria.

But it may be that the lesson that North Korea drew was the opposite.  Rather than saying we should give up our weapons of mass destruction or we will be attacked by the U.S., it appears that the North Koreans, at least at this point in time, have concluded the opposite — that they don't want to be Iraq.  If they are going to take on the U.S. they want to get that nuclear weapon, they don't want to be in a no man's land where they are neither at the net or playing the baseline.  [To them] the lesson of Iraq is to get a nuclear weapon as soon as possible because the U.S. is coming and at least if you have a nuclear weapon you might be able to deter them.  So I think on the positive prediction of deterring proliferation we have mixed evidence there.

On the negative outcomes, very few of them happened.  On the positive outcomes, a couple, but many remain to be seen, particularly as they relate to democracy.

What about some of the negative outcomes that were not predicted?  There were a couple of things that happened, as often happens in public policy, where you get surprised and some of the surprises are good and some of the surprises are not so good.  One of the things that happened that people didn't expect was the deep rift within NATO, the very intense, and at times personal, animosity between France and Germany on one side and the U.S. on the other.  Further along in that regard, the rift between certain Security Council members who did not back the second resolution and the United States – countries like Mexico, Chile, others who are, in the main, U.S. allies.  There is tension, unhappiness and bad blood among some of our allies over what happened, and I think you'd have to argue that there has been damage to the U.N. Security Council. 

The final negative outcome, or I should say unpredicted outcome, I think is negative.  Again, I think reasonable people can disagree, but it may be the most important one.  Over the long term, the most important effect of the Iran-Iraq war may be the changing balance of power within the U.S. government, between the Department of Defense and the Department of State.  You know, there are always tensions between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, and that's true of every administration, Republican and Democrat, since the time there have been administrations.  I think we're entering a stage here, in part because of 9/11, followed by the Afghan war, followed by the war in Iraq, where we have a very strong Secretary of Defense who is making a claim to run U.S. foreign policy, to control domains that were traditionally the purview of the Secretary of State.  I think we're seeing this play out on the Sunday talk shows and in leaks and surrogate attacks by Newt Gingrich and others and we see it play out in North Korean policy.  On the very eve of the talks with representatives from the Secretary of State, the Department of State, James Kelley in Beijing, it's leaked that the Department of Defense has a plan for regime change.  I don't think it's any coincidence that was leaked and I think it reflects a fight over who gets to call the shots in North Korea policy.  Is it going to be the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State?  I think for the long term as we look towards the future that may be the most important consequence of what's playing out right now in Iraq. 

So, what have I said so far in an attempt to be provocative?  I've said that the U.S. won the war but sort of lost the argument.  It won the war, but the rationales for the intervention actually don't hold up very well in retrospect.  But I would say so far, that the benefits of the intervention outweigh the costs.  Saddam was an ugly, murderous war criminal that deserves to be in a jail cell in The Hague for crimes against humanity.  He's gone and that's good, and so far the costs have been minimal.  So even though the reasons we went in don't appear to have held very strongly, I think you have to be honest and say that so far the benefits have outweighed the costs.  Now, I would also hasten to add that it's too early to give a final assessment on this balance sheet — but some of the things that may happen both negatively and positively aren't all counted one month after the war.  They're counted one year after the war, or five years after the war, but one month out you'd have to say that the benefits outweigh the costs.

The final thing I would say on this particular part, is that the largest consequences of the military intervention in Iraq may be unrelated to Iraq.  The impact may be greatest in other policy domains in other regions.  In particular, I think, where we'll see the impact of the intervention in Iraq is in our policy on North Korea — that's where the impact will be and that's where the consequences may be the greatest.  I say all that because I think there's a lot of public policy that's like that: when it's all said and done, a lot of the reasons why you went in will turn out to be true, but a lot of the arguments against it turn out to be false, and a lot of it ends up being much more indirect and unintended than you originally intended.

So, let me take one or two minutes to talk about the future, having talked about the past, and then let's talk about the role of the citizen.  What does this mean to you and me?  Is this something we watch on TV as by-standers?  Is there a role for us in all of this in determining our own future?  I think the answer is yes, but let me talk about the future. 

As we move forward, I think we should expect more of the same.  I think the result of the war in Iraq will be that the administration will feel vindicated.  They'll conclude that preemption works, that world public opinion is irrelevant and that governments will give in; that our allies will give in at the end of the day and go along with what we say and that if they disagree with us we'll end up being right and they will seek to get back into the fold.  I think that's what's happening now.

I think the other thing to realize about actions of this kind is that it creates bureaucratic winners and losers.  You get an outcome.  There are people who battle over what to do and then when the outcome is known some people are winners and some people are losers, and in this case I think it's hard to escape the conclusion that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is a winner; he was the strongest proponent, along with Paul Wolforwitz, of this policy, and he's got to feel vindicated.  If any of you saw his speech today you saw a man who looks and feels like he was vindicated.  I think the loser definitely was the Secretary of State and he's under siege.  So my guess is we're going to see more, not less, of preemption; more, not less, of the U.S. pressing its advantage.  It is more powerful than any country in the world and the only question is what do we do with that power?  I think the answer, so far, has been we press the advantage of power and I think we'll see more and not less of that.

In short, I think the critics have been discredited and are in a weaker position.  The advocates will be emboldened, and that will be a natural result of this policy process.  That's why we'll see a harder line in North Korea, a harder line in Iran, as we've seen a harder line in Syria in the near-term.

So, what about the role of the citizen?  Well, most people will tell you that foreign policy is for the elite.  It's settled by a group of men and women who sit around the table and decide it and the rest of us are consumers.  But I think that is not true.  I think U.S. public and foreign policies are constrained by public opinion, and I think that was evident in the run-up to the Iraq intervention, that the government felt constrained by public opinion; they felt that they had to go to Congress to get a vote by Congress; they felt that they had to go to the U.N. because the American public wanted them to go to the U.N.; they wanted the support of other countries.  So pubic opinion is important and you all are important in the direction of U.S. foreign policy. 

Now, one of the things that scares me, as someone who has spent most of his professional life working on the problem of nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, is that the quality of the debate has not been that great.  U.S. public opinion has proven itself on this issue to be incredibly malleable and the public discussion of weapons of mass destruction and proliferation has been superficial at best, both for the advocates, whether it's the preemption policy or intervention in Iraq and equally for the arguments against it, which have been equally shallow and superficial.

I'll just give you two quick examples of common myths that I think people labor under.  The first one: proliferation is inevitable.  I've heard everyone say that.  I've heard the advocates of intervention in Iraq say it, I've heard the opponents of intervention in Iraq say it.  These weapons are going to spread, there's nothing you can do about it, it gets cheaper and easier every day, we've nothing in the policy toolbox to stop it, we've got to do these things because it's inevitable and it will threaten us.  My answer to that is, “Oh, my God.” 

As a social scientist I am required by law to look at the facts, to look at the history.  When you look back at the first 50 years of the nuclear age you find the puzzle is not that there are so many nuclear weapons, it's that there are so few nuclear weapons states.  Far fewer than everyone predicted.  Since 1945 on, every prediction about the spread of nuclear weapons has been wrong.  It's been far less than everyone predicted.  I collect these predictions like some people collect baseball cards and they've all been wrong, they've all overestimated the rate at which nuclear weapons would spread.  We have been so successful in restraining the spread of nuclear weapons that I consider it probably the greatest unheralded public policies success of the 20^th century, on a par with the abolition of slavery in the 19^th century.  People in 1945 thought we'd all be blown up by now, and in the 1950s, in the 1960s, in every decade since.  We don't even have ten nuclear weapons states and, since the end of the Cold War, four countries that had or inherited nuclear weapons gave them up.  No one predicted that.  In fact, if you look at the statistics, the rate of proliferation has declined over time.  If you judge that by the number of new nuclear weapon states by decade, the peak point was the 1960s when France, China and Israel joined the nuclear weapons club.  Since then it has steadily gone downhill. 

People predicted that after the end of the Cold War we'd have a giant jump in proliferation.  It didn't happen.  In fact, we had more denuclearization than nuclear spread.  This has been a tremendous success, but no one thinks about it and no one talks about it.  Instead we all labor under this myth.  That's one example.

Another example, [of a myth] and I alluded to it earlier, is that states have a proclivity to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists as if terrorism is new and weapons of mass destruction are new.  We have had them for decades and there's not been a single instance in which this has happened.  It's certainly possible.  I think that a state pushed to the edge without many options might give it to a terrorist or you could have an Afghanistan situation where a failed state is co-opted by a terrorist group, but this is not something that happens very often. 

What we have today is a conversation about proliferation and terrorism that is disconnected from any sense of history or any sense of the facts.  I think that's dangerous and I want to put it on your shoulders.  I want to say that if the U.S. public is going to have an influence on how we go forward in the area of weapons of mass destruction and proliferation, and I think it will, then the only way that we can have a meaningful democratic influence on that policy is if people understand what's going on.  So, I really think that the charge is to you, and I would encourage you to embrace the World Affairs Council, and embrace these issues and embrace your colleagues at work and your children and your parents and others.  There has to be a more meaningful debate about these issues or we are bound to make mistakes, mistakes more costly than we have made in the past.  But right now we are not getting it done.  We're not getting it done as citizens, and if we don't get it done we will rue the day that we didn't do what we should have because the consequences will be tremendous.   

So I really think that there's a role for the public, I think a role for you.  You better than most, because you are interested and you are setting an example, but we have to do a better job than we're doing right now.  So, what does that mean?  It means, as I say, embracing this most important organization on international affairs in the United States of America, and I think we have to start building bridges.  I'm in California today and this week because I'm trying to make a connection between what happens at Harvard and what happens in Los Angeles.  What is Harvard?  Harvard is a content-producer.  You guys generate movies, we generate research, talking points, and books — most of them go unread, probably mine most of all — but we generate them.  You do a better job getting your stuff seen than we do, but most of our stuff ends up in D.C. or it ends up in a dusty shelf in a professor's office.  What I'd like to see is more of an exchange between Cambridge and Los Angeles where our work, the fruits of our labor, are more widely disseminated, where people are engaged, where people who have an interest in weapons of mass destruction, international security and foreign policy, take what we have, and we learn from you about public communications and about your concerns and that there be more engagement.  We have to start to do this, we can't keep it all in Cambridge and we can't all walk away from our obligations.  So that's why I'm here and that's why I'm so happy you invited me to speak to you. 

Let me close by saying for those of you who want to follow up with me on this topic; those of you who don't get a chance to ask questions during the question and answer period, you could write me an e-mail.  I'm at James_Walsh@Harvard.edu.  I look forward to hearing from you.