Iraq - Autopilot.(Pres Bush's policy toward Iraq is reminiscent of former presidents Bush and Clinton)(Brief Article)

The pictures on the news provoked a wave of nostalgia: Colin Powell, George H. W. Bush, and Norman Schwarzkopf in Kuwait, commemorating the tenth anniversary of our liberation of that country from Saddam Hussein. In an age of terrorism and insurgency, it is an increasingly rare thing for one country barefacedly to invade and conquer another. Iraq did it to Kuwait in the summer of 1990; in the winter of 1991 we threw them out.

Now Powell and Schwarzkopf are civilians; George H. W. Bush's son is president, employing Powell as secretary of state. Of the major players, only Saddam Hussein is still where he was.

The first Iraq-related act of the second Bush administration-a bombing of Iraqi sites that was designed, President Bush said, to get Saddam's attention-was an extension of Clinton-era policies, which were themselves an extension of the policies left over from Bush I. Our present Iraq strategy-a "no fly" zone with an embargo-was not intended to be an end in itself. It was meant to weaken and topple the Iraqi regime with a modest nudge, instead of a brutal push. In the chaos following the Gulf War, modest nudges looked as if they might do the trick. But with every passing year, it became clearer that Saddam would endure, and the policy came to be an end in itself. Its ineffectiveness slowly but surely degrades our prestige, even as the busywork of continuously patrolling Iraqi air space (one of those pointless missions that Republicans talked about during the election) degrades our readiness. But the policy stays in place because it is easier to maintain than to change, and because policymakers hope that the eventual collapse of the policy will happen on someone else's watch.

Colin Powell, ...