McCain said containment of Iraq wasn working. Is that right?
In his Aug. 30 speech, McCain said: “The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal. Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Is that correct? Wasn’t it the case that immediately before Bush took the country to war, Iraq was facing a fever pitch of global condemnation? Wasn’t containment in fact so successful that it forced Saddam to dismantle his war machine — which is why we never found it? See this article in Foreign Affairs, for example. Q. Speaking of the war on terror generally, McCain said: “But there is no avoiding this war. We
