The weak and the strong: Explaining the 2003 war in Iraq

Over three years have past since President George W. Bush issued a "new" national security strategy proclaiming that the U.S. would henceforth consider rogue state's acquisition of nuclear weapons so intolerable that it would be willing to risk preventive war in order to stop them. Although the U.S. had seriously considered waging preventive war on a number of past occasions for the same reasons, it had never actually done so until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Why was this the case? In short, it is clear that an administration's decision to wage preventive war against "rogue proliferators" is strongly tied to the ability of the target state to retaliate against a U.S. onslaught; in the cases that the U.S. decided not wage war, it had been effectively deterred.