When an essay calling for the invasion 2002), the leading forum of America’s foreign of Iraq appears in the well modu-policy establishment, it’s hard to see what’s left lated pages of Foreign Affairs (March–April to debate. Especially when the essay is written not by a Republican hawk but by the former director of gulf affairs on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, Kenneth Pollack. Especially when the essay echoes in just about every important particular the prescription offered by Robert Kagan and William Kristol in the conservative Weekly Standard (Jan. 21, 2002). And especially when the same issue of Foreign Affairs opens with an essay by a Washington Post editorial writer calling upon the Bush administration to accept "the logic of neoimperialism."

On the assumption that the invasion of Iraq will not already have occurred when this survey appears, consider Pollack’s account of the doves’ position. They note the absence of conclusive evidence tying Iraq to the September 11 attacks. They oppose American unilateralism and favor a multilateral effort "to revive U.N. weapons inspections and re-energize containment."

Pollack essentially says that this argument is nonsense. Since the end of the Persian Gulf War, the United States has sought to contain Saddam Hussein—a "serial aggressor"—and prevent him from rebuilding Iraq’s military power. It used "a combination of economic, military, and diplomatic constraints," and the strategy worked—for a time. But not only did Saddam long ago halt UN inspections of his weapons facilities, but now even some U.S. allies routinely violate the sanctions against Iraq. And China went so far as to build a fiber-optic communications network for Saddam (the target of U.S. air strikes in January 2001). France, Russia, and China have rejected the Bush administration’s effort to implement "smart" sanctions, which would ease economic restrictions while tightening others. The doves’ strategy simply will not work.

What about relying on deterrence to control Saddam? "Too risky" is Pollack’s verdict. While the Clinton administration may have rejected the label "rogue nation," Iraq is quite rogue-like: The United States cannot assume Saddam will behave predictably.

It’s not Iraq’s sponsorship of terrorism that ought to compel U.S. action, as some hawks contend, but "the risk that a nuclear-armed Saddam might wreak havoc in his region and beyond," Pollack writes. He rejects the notion of an Afghanistan-style campaign. The attack must be quick and overpowering, in part to prevent Saddam from using his two or three dozen Scud missiles, potentially armed with chemical or biological weapons. (Kagan and Kristol point out that the chief U.S. hope of preventing such an outcome is a hammer blow so powerful that Saddam’s officers are persuaded that his regime is doomed and thus refuse to follow his orders.) Up to 300,000 U.S. troops would be needed. Such an attack would elicit loud protests from China, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others, but they could do nothing, Pollack says. The United States would then need to commit itself to rebuilding Iraq, probably with the help of the United Nations or others. But Washington would need to retain ultimate authority.

The most important question yet to be decided may be not whether or how to topple Saddam Hussein but how to define the coming campaign. Is it simply a war against terrorism, as the Bush administration has so far— despite the president’s denunciation of the "axis of evil"—chiefly suggested? Should it be part of a larger and more ambitious strategy of realpolitik in the Middle East, as Pollack and others argue? Or a step toward an American assumption of "the responsibilities of global leadership," as Kagan and Kristol urge? Or is it a phase in the larger "clash of civilizations" that Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted several years ago? At the moment, realpolitik seems to be the dominant motif, though it’s often difficult to keep the various strands separate. One of the most articulate advocates of this point of view is Bernard Lewis, the eminent historian of the Middle East. Writing in National Review (Dec. 17, 2001), he declares that virtually every regime in the Middle East, including America’s putative friends, feels deeply threatened by the United States— not so much by its power as "by the sources of that power—America’s freedom and plenty.... For America to seek friendship or even good relations with such regimes is a forlorn hope." Lewis concludes: "The range of American foreign policy options in the region is being reduced to two alternatives: Get tough or get out."

A more ambitious, even imperial, note is struck in the Weekly Standard (Jan. 18, 2002) by Reul Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His target is Iran. He argues that the United States should attack "with enormous force" if it finds clear links between Tehran and Al Qaeda, using unspecified "military actions" against Lebanon and other parts of the "Iranian world" even if it does not. The goal: to topple the mullahs (along with Saddam) and "sow the seeds for a new, safer, more liberal order in the Middle East."

Writing from the left in the Nation (Jan. 21, 2002), University of Maryland political scientist Benjamin R. Barber declares that the real enemy is global capitalism and "corrosive secular materialism. . . . The war on terrorism must be fought, but not as the war of McWorld against jihad. The only war worth winning is the struggle for democracy."

"Yesterday’s utopia," he declares, "is today’s realism."

In the New York Review of Books (Jan. 17, 2002), writer Ian Buruma and Hebrew University philosopher Avisha Margalit argue that the war is not a "clash of civilizations" but a struggle with Islamist revolutionaries whose ideology is little different from that of Western totalitarians past. Like the fascists of Italy, Germany, and Japan and like communists since Karl Marx, Osama bin Laden and his allies loathe Western culture with its diversity, freedom, rationality, and unheroic bourgeois existence. Yet it is unheroic accountants and undercover agents rather than "special macho units blasting their way into the caves of Afghanistan," the authors say, who are best suited to combating the new ideologues.

So the question remains: What kind of war?