Heather Wilson's article will, no doubt, win her few friends among her former colleagues in the Bush administration or among their successors. In fact, in the proliferation area, remarkably enough, these have proven to be one and the same--the thorough-going purge of Bush appointees that swept the Pentagon left a number of holdovers in the State Department and National Security Council. In any event, Wilson is probably right to say that neither the administration did very much to stop proliferation, with one major exception. The war against Iraq, launched in part to head off Iraq's bid for regional hegemony, turned into an assault on her nuclear potential. Had the Bush administration flinched from that conflict, or had it pursued its anti-Iraq policy less vigorously after the war, the world might well have witnessed the use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East before the end of the decade. Furthermore, by explicitly making the Iraqi nuclear program a target of attack, Bush legitimized the American use of armed force for this aim. In these respects, then, he deserves rather more credit than she gives him.
