This research paper summarizes and discusses the principal pros and cons of the U.S.-led coalition war with Iraq which began on March 19, 2003.
1. Iraq has persistently and deviously failed to comply with United Nations' resolutions relating to its acquisition and possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and other terms of the 1991 Gulf War armistice.
The Security Council has passed 17 resolutions on these subjects, starting with Resolution 687 of 1991 and Resolution 1441 which passed 15-0 last fall. Saddam Hussein's Iraq has flouted them all. Lieber calls this "Iraq's record of systematic deception and noncompliance" (15). American Secretary of State Colin Powell recently outlined to the Council the unscrupulous methods used by Iraq to avoid compliance with 1441.
2. Iraq represents a clear and present danger to the security interests of the region, to the United States and to other nations.
According to Remick, Saddam's "territorial aggression is a matter of record, his nuclear ambitions are clear" (31). Under Saddam, Iraq has invaded Iran and Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. It used poison gas against Iran during the 1980-1987 Iran-Iraq War and against the Kurds. When Saddam's son-in-law defected to Jordan in the mid-90s, the world learned that the UN inspectors (then called UNSCOM) had failed to detect Iraq's biological and chemical program just as the IAEA in the late 1980s under Dr. Hans Blix failed to realize that Iraq had a crash program to acquire nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, a program which was still underway when UNSCOM was tossed out of the country in 1998. Iraq tried to assassinate the former American President George Bush in Kuwait in 1993.
3. Efforts to contain Iraq's WMD program through the use of sanctions, inspections and overhead aerial control of no-fly zones have generally failed.
According to Thomas & Barry further extensions of the recent UNMOVIK inspection re...