There’s going to be a phase two in the war against terrorism. If there is no phase two, there can be no victory. The war against terrorism is not the war against al-Qaeda or the Taliban, worthy though they may be. They’re only one of the sources of terror in the United States. You cannot end this war and lay any claim to victory if the other sources of terror are left intact.

So there must be a phase two, and there will be lots of debate and room for disagreement over exactly how to go about phase two. I have my own ideas about that and have not been hesitant to express them. At the top of the list for phase two is Iraq, and there are several reasons for that. I’ll offer a couple.

One is that we know that Saddam hates the United States. He says so on every occasion. In that particular Middle Eastern way, there’s even something of a blood feud between Saddam Hussein and the Bush family. We know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction: We know he has anthrax; we know he has nerve agents; we believe he has other biological weapons. And he has used chemical weapons/nerve agents against civilians, and killed many tens of thousands, including 5,000 in a single village in his own country.

So he has motive and he has means, and the question is whether he will have an opportunity to do grievous damage to this country.

Those who believe he will not have contented themselves until now with the view that he would not be so foolish as to attack the United States directly with instruments of mass destruction because we would retaliate with such ferocity that he would be deterred.

You even hear the story told of how former Secretary of State Baker warned Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, that if the Iraqis used chemical weapons in Desert Storm, we would respond with nuclear weapons. I don’t know if that story is true, but the general idea was that Saddam would be deterred by the threat of retaliation.

But we now know as we observe anthrax arriving in the letter box that it is possible to deliver weapons of mass destruction, even though in this case not on a mass scale, anonymously. And if you can deliver an envelope with anthrax spores anonymously, you can deliver a larger quantity of anthrax spores anonymously. Without wishing to alarm anyone, I think it is reasonably well known that a 5-pound bag of anthrax spores released over an urban area would potentially kill many thousands of people.

So the question in my mind is this: Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best, do we wait and hope he doesn’t do what we know he is capable of, which is distributing weapons of mass destruction to anonymous terrorists, or do we take some preemptive action?

In 1981, the Israelis faced a similar question. The Iraqis were about to complete the construction of a French nuclear reactor at Osirak. The Israelis decided that the risk of waiting was just too great and so they destroyed that reactor in a breathtakingly effective bombing mission. I was working for Ronald Reagan at the time and it’s just a footnote to history but the State Department of course got out the obligatory condemnation of Israel’s unilateral action; the president thought it was a terrific piece of bombing.

For those who are not sufficiently concerned about the possibility of the anonymous delivery of biological weapons from Saddam’s arsenal of those weapons, he is busily at work on a nuclear weapon. One of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam defected to the United States in 1996, a man named Khidhir Hamza. He has written a book that I recommend called Saddam’s Bombmaker. I met with him in Washington. Until I started taking him around, the most-senior person Hamza had met with was a GS-15 at the State Department. We’ve now gotten him in to see some pretty senior officials.

Hamza described the reaction to the bombing of the Osirak reactor as follows: We knew then that we should never again put so much of our program in a single location where it would be vulnerable, so we began to build uranium enrichment facilities, many facilities, and we built 400 of them and they’re all over the country. Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them. They don’t turn out much but every day they turn out a little bit of nuclear material.

So it’s simply a matter of time before Saddam acquires nuclear weapons.

Those who think Iraq should not be next may want to think about Syria or Iran or Sudan or Yemen or Somalia or North Korea or Lebanon or the Palestinian Authority. These are all institutions, governments for the most part, that permit acts of terror to take place, that sponsor terrorists, that give them refuge, give them sanctuary and, very often, much more help than that.

When I recite this list, people typically say, “Well, are we going to go to war against a dozen countries?” And I think the answer to that is that, if we do it right with respect to one or two, we’ve got a reasonable chance of persuading the others that they should get out of the business of supporting terrorism.

After we’ve destroyed the last remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and I’m confident we will, and we then go on to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein, and we certainly could if we chose to do so, I think we would have an impressive case to make to the Syrians, the Somalis and others.

We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: “You’re next. You’re next unless you stop the practice of supporting terrorism.” Given the fact that, until now, there has been no cost attached to supporting terror, I think there’s a reasonable prospect that, looking at the costs on the one side--that is, that those regimes will be brought to an end--and the benefits on the other, they will decide to get out of the terrorist business. It seems to me a reasonable gamble in any event.

Let me just say before concluding this that when you propose Iraq as the next phase in the war against terrorism, many people have in mind the enormousness of the effort it took to remove Saddam from Kuwait. They think, ‘Can we do that again?’

I think it would be an entirely different proposition this time. Saddam is despised in his own country, as anyone who rules the way he has would be. He is hated in the north by the Kurds, in the south by the Shi’a, in the west even by many Sunnis--and organizing a resistance to Saddam would not be difficult.

Now a lot of people look at the Iraqi opposition today, some of it in exile, some of it in the north and the south, and they say it’s weak, it’s divided, it’s fragmented, and that’s certainly true, although it’s not nearly as fragmented as is sometimes said.

But what is essential here is not to look at the opposition to Saddam as it is today, without any external support, without any realistic hope of removing that awful regime, but to look at what could be created, what could be organized, what could be made cohesive with the power and authority of the United States, especially the power and authority of the United States fresh from a successful campaign to destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan.

So my plea to my colleagues in government is to start the planning now for the removal of Saddam Hussein, work with the Iraqi opposition now so we won’t be in the situation we were in when we went into Afghanistan, where we had no one on the ground, because we could put Iraqi opposition on the ground tomorrow in Iraq. 

Richard Perle is a resident fellow at AEI.