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.

This chapter shows how the Bush administration and other Iraq hawks promulgated a successful case against containment after 9/11 based on the idea that containment and deterrence could not address the “nexus” threat of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist groups, and rogue states. It then examines what I call the “Powell–Blair” approach to Iraq, which defined the political/policy establishment's thinking on Iraq in this period. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, most of the foreign policy elite, and many Democratic politicians criticized how Bush was pursuing regime change but nonetheless endorsed the basic tenets of the regime change consensus. They made a tactical and procedural argument for pursuing regime change “the right way” but did not think that containment was a viable alternative. Thus, after the Bush administration made a cursory effort at supporting inspections in Iraq in the winter of 2002–2003, the majority of this establishment supported the invasion.