Hungary and the costs of containment

The BBC report of President Bush's trip to Hungary, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Uprising, draws a good parallel:

The symbolic value of a people rising up against a dictatorial regime is close to [President Bush's] heart, says the BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest.

When Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, many eastern Europeans remembered the destruction of the statue of Joseph Stalin in Budapest in 1956.

But Hungarians underline that they opposed the Soviet power alone, and their appeals for help from the outside world went unheeded, our correspondent adds.

Critics of the Iraq War often claim that military action was unnecessary because the US and UK were effectively containing Saddam Hussein's regime, much as Western military power and the Atlantic alliance had contained Soviet Communism during the Cold War. (This is a mainstay of the argument of mainstream politicians such as Menzies Campbell and the late Robin Cook. Obviously the position of the Leninists and Islamists of the Stop the War Coalition, who are not anti-war at all but pro-war and on the other side, is different.) The argument allegedly gains weight from the absence of WMD in post-Saddam Iraq.

In my view, this is a misreading of the stability of containment of Saddam during the 1990s. In reality, containment required far more concerted action if it was to succeed, and that action was itself unlikely. I wrote in The Guardian on the third anniversary of the war, making this point:

Many argue that the absence of WMD shows that western policy had been working. It was in reality unravelling fast, and few opponents of war treated the problem seriously. Saddam allowed intrusive inspections only because of the threat of force. Containment of his regime would have meant continuous military deployment in neighbouring states and the no-fly zones; intensified economic sanctions; inspections coercive enough to withstand Saddam's intimidation and fraud; and the support of France and Russia. Even with personalities of greater competence than Hans Blix and higher morals than Jacques Chirac, that commitment would have been inconceivable. Of the permanent members of the security council, only the US and UK could have been relied on.

But there's a further point. Anti-war critics not only overstate the effectiveness of containment, they also understate its costs. If you want to pursue the analogy with the Cold War, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 illustrates how high those costs can be. The West had no counter to the Soviets' subjugation of Hungary, because to have opposed it by any non-diplomatic means would have risked war with the Soviet Union. Direct war with the Soviets might easily and rapidly have become nuclear.

Containment of the Soviet Union in the nuclear age was the only reputable option open to us. A consistent policy of 'rollback' would have risked everything; a policy of accommodation with the Soviets, such as that urged by former Vice-President Henry Wallace in the 1948 US Presidential election, would, for reasons I won't spell out in this post, not have been a reputable course at all. But to recall containment as a desirable policy, as some politicians with short memories do, is an affront to history. It had immense costs - to the captive nations of Eastern Europe, and indeed to our own self-respect, for we were severely constrained in the aid we could give to those peoples. (It's worth recalling, incidentally, that the British and American labour movements have a worthy historical record in supporting democratic political parties and free trade unions against Soviet expansionism.)

Containment of Saddam Hussein was not the only course open to us. There was a plausible argument after the first Gulf War that containment might have worked, but it was predicated on the notion that Saddam's regime was vulnerable to internal revolt. And of course it wasn't: a regime of total terror was able to slaughter scores of thousands of Kurds and Shi'ah in a single month (March 1991) in order to maintain its power. Continuing with containment entailed great human suffering, and also great risks. Whereas the Soviet Union had been a totalitarian and expansionist power (witness its aggression by proxy in initiating the Korean War), it was susceptible nonetheless to traditional deterrence. Saddam, by contrast, launched three wars in 17 years, each of which might easily have resulted in the overthrow of his regime. We weren't bound to containment of Saddam, and containment was an inherently risky and unstable system. But more than that, and as the Hungarian precedent reminds us, containment was a morally corrupting arrangement; we were right to put a stop to it when we did, and can only regret not having done so sooner.