The United States and its allies are currently on the edge of war in the Arabian Gulf. Indeed, from a strategic and political perspective, it could be said that the U.S. and Iraq are already at war, even though shots are not being fired and body bags are not being flown home. The use of U.S. naval ships to bar shipping into or out of Iraq through the Arabian Gulf is called "enforcement of United Nations sanctions," but this is amere term of art; it is in fact a naval blockade, traditionally an act of war. More broadly, the two countries are locked in an armed confrontation from which neither can simply walk away, but which must be settled by either fighting or negotiations, either of which will lead to victory for one side or the other, or to some ambiguous intermediate result.1 The current Congressional and public debate over the choice of offensive military action or continued reliance on sanctions and a defensive position in Saudi Arabia is not really a debate between "war" and "peace," but a debate over which is the best means of bending Iraq's Saddam Hussein to the U.S. will.
Since the U.S. is already at war in a broad strategic sense, and might soon be involved in actual combat action against Iraq, it is worth considering American options in the Arabian Gulf in the light of strategic theory. The classic exposition of this theory is Carl von Clausewitz' great work On War. The balance of this essay is a discussion of the Arabian Gulf situation in the ________
1This essay will consider the war situation in purely U.S. Iraq terms. The U.S. provides the bulk of the forces in the anti Iraq coalition, and is the only coalition member likely to commense combat action on its own. War in the region might also be initiated by Israel, acting on its own motives a "wild card" possibility we will not consider, but one which must weigh on U.S. policy makers. terms set forth by von Clausewitz.2
The concep...