276 e lusive v ictories
Baghdad that the United States had little taste for casualties and was
unprepared to pay the price for toppling his government.
For the next decade, the United States and its allies settled on a
policy of containing the Iraqi regime while trying to weaken it. Under
pressure from the United Nations, Saddam agreed to dismantle his
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons development programs and
submit to UN-directed inspections. Few believed that he had complied
fully with the mandate to eliminate the programs, referred to collec-
tively as weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Saddam saw the ambi-
guity as a means for protecting his regime: he believed that both internal
enemies and external foes, specifi cally Iran, would be less likely to move
against him if they thought he still possessed unconventional weapons.
How the United States might view his possession of WMD capability
evidently did not enter into his calculations. In addition, the United
Nations supported ongoing sanctions against the Iraqi regime designed
to prevent him from rebuilding his battered military. However, to ease
the pain that sanctions inflicted on ordinary Iraqis, a program was
established that permitted Baghdad to sell oil for food, which in turn
led to Western suspicions that Saddam had found ways to exploit the
loopholes to acquire more lethal goods. Th e United States and Great
Britain also continued to enforce a no-fl y zone over both northern and
southern Iraq with regular aerial patrols. On several occasions the Iraqis
challenged the restriction by fi ring on Allied aircraft, provoking retal-
iatory strikes. Saddam decided to test containment in another way: in
1998 he ordered out the UN weapons inspectors. Th at prompted Pres-
ident Bill Clinton to launch Operation Desert Fox, which not only
damaged Iraqi air defense capabilities but briefl y caused Iraq’s Arab
neighbors to fear Saddam’s regime might collapse.
Th at the Iraqi leader survived and occasionally stuck his fi nger in the
American eye frustrated Washington and led some to conclude that it
had been a grave mistake to allow him to remain in power after the 1991
Gulf War. Th e cost of enforcing a no-fl y zone was not trivial (about $1
billion per year), and no end was in sight. Worse, Saddam Hussein
remained an irritant in the region, a potentially destabilizing element in
a strategically vital part of the world. Neoconservatives, an ideological
faction deeply hostile to the Clinton administration’s preferred multi-
lateral approach to foreign policy, regarded Saddam as a menace to the