4 - Saddam Must Go: Entrenching the Regime Change Consensus, 1997–2000

Summary

This chapter examines containment in crisis during Clinton's second term, in which Iraq repeatedly obstructed UN inspectors, ultimately leading to their permanent exit from Iraq and US retaliatory airstrikes in Operation Desert Fox. The United States in this period became increasingly isolated on Iraq policy as France, Russia, and China refused to support military action and called for the lifting of sanctions. Containment's domestic critics exploited these crisis by building a political coalition to discredit containment and shift US policy toward regime change through the strategy of rollback. This coalition succeeded in passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which symbolized the entrenchment of the regime change consensus in US politics, leaving defenders of containment isolated in the political sphere. Clinton, however, made little effort to enforce this law and continued to treat containment as the de facto policy.