2 - The Fallout from Victory: Containment and Its Critics, 1991–1992

Summary

This chapter shows how the United States and its allies established a containment regime on Iraq after the Gulf War in the hope of using sanctions to compel Saddam to cooperate with UN weapons inspections. This chapter argues that despite the military victory in the Gulf War, a political narrative emerged in 1991 that Bush had missed several opportunities to overthrow Saddam and abandoned rebels who rose up against the Iraqi government, making the Gulf War a flawed victory. As Saddam obstructed inspections and challenged containment over the next two years, Democrats and neoconservatives developed the argument that containment could not address the Iraqi threat because it did not target the Iraqi regime, the source of its misbehavior, for removal. Containment thus became the US policy toward Iraq in an atmosphere of disappointment and recrimination that created a political bias against restrained approaches to Iraq and in favor of the more immediate pursuit of regime change.