The reluctant hawk: the skeptical case for regime change in Iraq.

• Author: Marshall, Joshua Micah
• Position: The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq - Book Review

THE THREATENING STORM: The Case for Invading Iraq by Ken Pollack Random House, $25.95

LATE LAST SPRING, I ASKED ONE OF Washington's more notable Iraq hawks, Danielle Pletka, her opinion of Ken Pollack. "Oh, Ken `my-mind-has-changed-so-often' Pollack?" she zinged back with satisfied ridicule. Pletka has a flair for the sound bite. But behind that barb lies a tale. From 1992 until earlier this year, Pletka was Jesse Helms's chief senior professional staff member for Near East and South Asia on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In that role, she was one of the key players using any means necessary to press a deeply reluctant Clinton administration to adopt the policy of "regime change" for Iraq. During the 1990s, Iraq cut through the surface of American political life only at those occasional moments when the Iraqis would buck some demand and the United States would lob over a few cruise missiles to knock them back into line. Behind the scenes, however, especially in the latter part of the decade, Iraq policy became, a virtually nonstop foreign policy street fight, pitting hawkish congressional staffers like Pletka and other out-of-government regime-change crusaders against administration officials like Pollack, who was National Security Council director for Persian Gulf affairs from 1999 to 2001.

Through tours at the CIA, the NSC, National Defense University, and back at the NSC again, Pollack developed a reputation as a hawk--by Clinton administration standards--and as a steady opponent of the Iraq hawks' efforts to shove American policy behind Iraqi opposition leaders who would, they claimed, overthrow Saddam through some hybrid of an insurrection and a coup. The target of Pletka's barb was an article Pollack wrote in the March/April 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs in which he announced that the United States should, after all, invade Iraq to settle the Saddam problem once and for all. To the hawks who had been crusading for "regime change" for years, Pollack was simply shifting positions to suit the changing guard in George W.'s Washington. Not a few of his former Clinton administration colleagues agreed. In truth, Pollack's change was not so stark as his critics alleged, since he still strenuously opposed the Bay-of-Pigs-style overthrow that the hawks supported. The calculus of domestic political support, moreover, had changed dramatically after September 11. But the article played a key role in making a military solution to the Iraq problem respectable within the nation's foreign policy establishment.

The Threatening Storm is Pollack's follow-up to and expansion of that article, in which he presents a thoroughgoing case for invading Iraq in the context of a detailed history of U.S.-Iraq relations stretching back some 30 years. Pollack has spent virtually his entire professional life wrestling with the problem of Iraq. (In the summer of 1990, for instance, he was a junior CIA analyst dashing off prescient, but largely disregarded, memos predicting that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait.) And he manages to use this personal knowledge without abusing it, resisting the temptation to load the book with too many anecdotes about his own exploits in the D.C.-Iraq wars or to settle too many scores, of which there are no doubt many. Running almost 400 pages, the final product could have done with a more rigorous edit. There...