Thirteen Years: The Causes and Consequences of the War in Iraq
Alan W. Dowd
United States Government
Autumn 2003
The mission of our troops is wholly defensive,” President George
H. W. Bush intoned as elements of the 82d Airborne and US Air Force
arrived in Saudi Arabia to defend it against an Iraqi invasion.
“Hopefully, they will not be needed long.” That was 8 August
1990.
Thirteen years later, the Americans are finally withdrawing from the
land of Mecca and Medina—and the long, strange war against Saddam
Hussein is essentially over. When it began, no one thought it would last
13 years, that it would set the stage for a global conflict unlike any
in history, that it would fracture the Atlantic Alliance and mortally
wound the United Nations. But it did. As the postwar period begins,
it is largely left to the United States to face these realities and
brace for new challenges. To avoid making similar mistakes in the
aftermath of this war, the United States should be guided by these
“Three R’s”: Rebuilding, Reviewing, and Reforming.
The Beginning
As others have explained elsewhere at great length, the forces of
Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism seldom work together.
However, in a very real sense it was Saddam Hussein—once the
personified definition of Arab nationalism—that catapulted
fundamentalist al Qaeda into a terror superpower and set in motion a
series of events that led to the bloodiest day on American soil since
the Civil War.
By invading Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Saddam left the defenseless
Saudis with two options—cut a deal and surrender, or allow the
Americans to dig
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in. The Saudis chose the latter, hopeful that the American deployment
would be short and small. Of course, those hopes weren’t realized.
The initial deployment of a few hundred troops swelled to some 600,000
in preparation for Operation Desert Storm. Kuwait was liberated and
Saddam was weakened, but Washington declared a cease-fire before the
American juggernaut could destroy key units of the Republican Guard,
which were vital to Saddam’s survival. Historian Derek Leebaert
calls the war a “tactical success misread as strategic
triumph.”1
Deflecting criticisms of the war’s untidy conclusion in their
book A World Transformed, Bush and his national security advisor,
Brent Scowcroft, argued in 1998 that shutting down the ground war at the
hundred-hour mark was the right thing to do. “The United States
could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile
land,” they concluded.2 Of course, that’s effectively what
happened, at least in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and his followers.
In a sense, occupation was inevitable after the war; perhaps the
United States ended up occupying the wrong country. Since a wounded
Saddam could not be left unattended and an oil-rich Saudi Arabia could
not be left unprotected, US troops took up permanent residence in the
Saudi kingdom. The presence of foreign troops in the Muslim holy land
galvanized al Qaeda, which carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001,
which triggered America’s global war on terror, which led
inevitably back to Iraq, which is where America finds itself today. When
viewed from this side of history, the events between 1990 and 2003 look
like something out of a Greek tragedy—each decision fateful, each
step leading inexorably to the very thing we hoped to prevent.
This is not to say that the first Bush Administration is to blame for
the tragedy. The elder Bush crafted a historic diplomatic and military
campaign, hewed to the UN mandate, and took a calculated risk that
Saddam would fall. He wasn’t the first President to make such a
calculation, but like Kim, Castro, and others, Saddam survived. To
finish him off, Washington waged what came to be known as
“low-grade war.” It consisted of sanctions, CIA operations,
and weekly or even daily air attacks on targets of opportunity such as
radar posts, SAM sites, and other facilities on the extreme periphery of
Saddam Hussein’s power.
Capitalizing on Washington’s preoccupation with Iraq, al Qaeda
and its partners launched a global guerilla war against the United
States in 1993. Perfecting asymmetrical warfare, they hit America in
unexpected places and used unexpected tactics—a van full of
explosives parked under the World Trade Center, foreign-trained gangs in
Mogadishu, a truck bomb outside the Khobar
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Towers, simultaneous bombings outside lightly guarded embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, a bomb-laden rubber boat alongside USS Cole,
and of course, civilian airliners as guided missiles in Manhattan and
Washington. Only then did Washington muster a real response to the
enemy, smashing al Qaeda’s spawning grounds in Afghanistan and
ousting the medieval Taliban regime.
More connective tissue between the Gulf War’s loose ends and the
attacks of 9/11 was exposed on the road to Kabul: Saudi Arabia was
funneling money to the Taliban—$100 million in 1997 alone and
millions more in daily oil shipments, as former CIA officer Robert Baer
explained in a revealing Atlantic Monthly piece. In fact, Baer
found that the Saudis “transferred $500 million to al Qaeda
over the past decade.”3 The reason? It was a simple matter of insurance.
By shoveling cash and petroleum to al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts,
Riyadh struck a tacit deal with bin Laden: We’ll keep the money
flowing as long as you keep your jihad away from the king. Rather than
attacking the kingdom, al Qaeda attacked the kingdom’s defender,
which leads us back to the rationale for America’s deployments in
Saudi Arabia—Saddam Hussein.
The Bush Doctrine’s principle of preemption was tailor-made for
Baathist Iraq—a country with growing ties to terror, an underground
unconventional weapons program, and the means and motives to mete out
revenge on the United States. “As a matter of common sense and
self-defense,” President George W. Bush explained in a 2002
national security document, “America will act against such emerging
threats before they are fully formed.”4 The strengths and weaknesses of this
doctrine could be the subject of a book (and no doubt will be the
subject of many). The purpose of this article is not to dissect the Bush
Doctrine.5 Suffice it to say that the Bush Doctrine is idealistic, bold,
even risky. However, when analysts conclude that it is too idealistic,
too bold, or too risky to work, one can’t help but compare it to
the doctrine of nuance, realism, and stability that guided prior
administrations and died a violent death on 11 September 2001.
Rebuilding: Patience is a Virtue
As US troops have learned in the months since the statues fell in
Baghdad, rebuilding Iraq is no easy task—but neither is it beyond
the realm of possibility. As long as the American people stay patient
and focused, the American military can succeed in its important postwar
mission. To doubt this is to dismiss what MacArthur and Marshall
achieved in Japan and Western Europe after World War II. Yet the
skeptics are quick to point out that 21st-century America is a different
country than that of the 1940s. After all, Presidents are more
skittish—and the American people more squeamish—today than
they were after World War II. For evidence, look no further than the
rapid withdrawal of US forces from Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia and
Haiti in the 1990s, when rebuilding or peacekeeping missions turned
messy. As RAND international security analyst James Dobbins observed in
a Washington Post interview, “We’ve done these things
quickly and we’ve done them well, but we’ve never done them
quickly and well.”6
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However, the attacks of 9/11 have altered the way America and its
leaders view open-ended military missions. Moreover, contrary to the
critics, the United States is not out of practice when it comes to
rebuilding failed states. The ongoing nation-building operations in
Afghanistan and the Balkans illustrate that America still has the
capacity to be patient.
From Bosnia to Baghdad
In 1991, Slobodan Milosevic’s henchmen began a campaign of
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia. By 1995, their war of attrition
and siege had erased 250,000 people and displaced another two million.
The lopsided war haunted two Presidents and divided their
administrations. Under the elder Bush, it was Secretary of State
Lawrence Eagleburger who worried “about the shadow of
Vietnam,” as historian David Halberstam writes in War in a Time
of Peace. Early in the Clinton presidency, it was Secretary of State
Warren Christopher who labeled Bosnia, “the problem from
hell.” Defense Secretary William Perry warned of the possibility of
a guerilla war in Southeast Europe. And after the nation-building
debacle in Mogadishu, official Washington had little faith in
America’s capacity to do any good in the ethnic wars and general
chaos that roiled the post-Cold War period.7
When the White House finally shook off the doom-saying and launched
robust air strikes against Serbian paramilitaries in 1995 (in
conjunction with Bosnian and Croat ground operations), the war came to
an abrupt end. Yet the White House was extremely anxious about public
support for a long-term peacekeeping operation, so anxious that the
President promised to have the troops out within a year. That was in
December 1995. The troops are still there, of course, and the peace is
still holding. In fact, the armistice has now held longer than the war
itself lasted.
A similar formula has worked in Kosovo. Less than five years ago,
Milosevic’s terror squads were rampaging through the tiny Albanian
enclave of Serbia, purging 850,000 ethnic Albanians and killing
thousands more. Defying the odds, a US-led NATO force evicted Milosevic
and returned all 850,000 refugees to Kosovo—the only case in modern
history where a systematic removal of ethnic groups has been reversed.
Today, Milosevic is pacing in a jail cell, awaiting his sentence for
a decade of war crimes; the Kosovars are home; Serbia is a democracy;
the Balkans are more stable than they have been since Tito; and, not
coincidentally, there are some 7,000 US troops keeping the peace. They
arrived in 1999, and it doesn’t appear that they will be leaving
anytime soon.
A New Country
Some have criticized America’s postwar Afghan operation as
halfhearted. Some even claim that Washington has abandoned Kabul. While
there’s much left to do, America has hardly abandoned Afghanistan.
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In 2002 alone, the United States poured $620 million into
Afghanistan. By the end of this year, Washington plans to invest another
$820 million there. Much of the Pentagon’s Afghanistan outlays have
been devoted to provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), military units
which work with civilian organizations to rebuild key infrastructure
beyond Kabul.8 According to the Congressional Research Service,
“The objective of the PRTs is to provide safe havens
for international aid workers to help with reconstruction and to
extend the writ of the Kabul government throughout Afghanistan.”
PRTs are already at work in Gardez, Bamiyan, and Konduz; another five to
seven will be launched in other cites in the months ahead.9
There are just under 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan; they are joined
by roughly the same number of allied troops, most of them from NATO
countries. In addition to their PRT work, they are training
Afghanistan’s new army, hunting al Qaeda, and protecting the
nascent Afghan government. US forces literally saved Afghan leader Hamid
Karzai’s life during an assassination attempt in September 2002.
Still, the work is far from over. Karzai warns that the police and
army remain weak. Lawlessness still reigns beyond major urban areas. Not
coincidentally, there has been an upsurge in Taliban activity. Many
countries have failed to make good on their pledges, most notably
Germany (which has 71 percent of its pledge unpaid), France (72
percent), and Japan (73 percent).10
Even though the postwar peace is not perfect, however, the operation
is a success: First and foremost, al Qaeda no longer has a base of
operations. The Taliban is no longer in power. Almost two million Afghan
refugees have come home. And as one of those returning refugees put it,
“Life is good here. . . . This is a new country.”11
The Yardstick of Yesterday
That former refugee understands something that the pessimists in
America do not: The measure of success in the Balkans and Afghanistan is
not Jeffersonian democracy or postwar Germany or Japan—and
it’s certainly not perfection. It’s simply yesterday. For him
and millions of others, yesterday in Afghanistan was so brutal, so
horrific that they fled. But today, the country is new. For America,
yesterday in Afghanistan was so deformed that it spawned mass murder in
Manhattan. But today, the Afghan government is friendly, and the Afghan
countryside is being purged of al Qaeda.
And so it is with Iraq. The measure of US success or failure is a
simple comparison between today and the situation before Saddam Hussein
fell: Are the American people more secure with Saddam Hussein in power
or deposed; are the Iraqi people freer and better off under
Saddam’s heel or under interim allied stewardship; and is the
region closer to stability or chaos now that Saddam is gone? We must
revisit these questions often to gauge our progress. If the answer is
no, then the mission is failing; but if the answer is yes, then it is
succeeding.
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By that yardstick, America’s rebuilding mission is succeeding,
some weeks faster than others, in some cities better than others. Much
of it began even before the collapse of Saddam’s regime. Just days
after entering Iraq, the allies were repairing water-pumping stations
and unloading tons of food and other supplies. Less than a week after
the liberation of Baghdad, US forces hosted a job fair in the Iraqi
capital. And by day seven of life after Saddam, joint US-Iraqi teams
were patrolling the streets of major Iraqi cities.
The lifting of UN sanctions in May opened the gates to a steady flow
of aid and dollars, especially petrodollars. The wealth generated by
Iraq’s oil wells is critical to the rebuilding process. Because of
Saddam’s cynical manipulation of sanctions, Baathist Iraq pumped
only about two million barrels of oil per day. That number is sure to
rise with the help of foreign investment. Indeed, before Saddam plunged
Iraq into a quarter-century of war, Iraq was producing 3.5 million
barrels per day.
Postwar Iraq needs every bit of the wealth generated by its oil. The
rebuilding effort could cost $20 billion per year. Iraq’s modern
infrastructure never recovered from the 1990-1991 war. A New York
Times investigation found that not even Baghdad had a steady,
dependable supply of electricity after the US-led liberation of Kuwait.
Water purifying plants, essential in the desert nations of the modern
Middle East, fell into disrepair. Saddam allowed hospitals to import
less than a tenth of the supplies they imported prior to
1990.12 All of this privation had more to do with
Saddam’s spite than with international sanctions. The UN allowed
Baghdad to trade oil for food and medicine, and Saddam had plenty of
wealth and annual income to rebuild postwar Iraq’s electrical and
water-filtration plants. Yet he shunted much of the food to the
military, hid Iraq’s wealth in foreign banks and underground
vaults, and used black-market oil profits to build 48 new
palaces.13
However, restoring water, oil, and electricity service is only part
of the rebuilding mission. Under the umbrella of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, Iraq’s political, religious, and ethnic
groups are meeting regularly to create a post-Baathist government. They
already agree on the fundamentals—a federal system, representative
democracy, a secular state. But as one delegate sighed at a post-Saddam
planning conference, “We are not ready to handle this
yet.”14
To understand why, consider how deformed Iraqi society is after a
quarter-century of Saddam Hussein: Hundreds of thousands of children
were orphaned by Saddam’s wars. Tens of thousands were orphaned by
death squads, which carried out an internal genocide. Saddam became
their father and god, his eyes watching them everywhere: “With our
souls and our blood,” they pledged each morning at school, “we
sacrifice for Saddam. We will sacrifice ourselves for you, O
Saddam.”15
Children who refused to join Saddam’s youth paramilitary gangs were
locked up by the hundreds in jails. It was the US military that set them
free.
The deformities are not just figurative. After the Gulf War rout,
many Iraqi men lost their zeal for military service. In one episode of
retribution, Saddam ordered his secret police and surgeons to remove the
ears of all deserters. For three
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days in 1994, surgeons worked around the clock slicing off
ears.16 Other examples of mass-torture are too brutal to
discuss here.
Simply put, it should come as no surprise that pockets of Iraq are
violent or unstable or enraged. A quarter-century of anger is being
released by an oppressed people. At the same time, the remnants of
Saddam’s regime are doing the only thing they know: terrorizing and
killing. Keeping this in perspective seems more difficult for American
journalists than Iraqi citizens. As an Iraqi cab driver told The
New York Times, “It may be a little chaotic, but it’s
our chaos.”17
It will take time, money, and patience to
transform this disfigured country, to stabilize Ramadi, Fallujah, and
Iraq’s other hotspots, to smother the Baathist leftovers and their
imported jihadis. The American people must be prepared to maintain a
presence in Iraq for at least as long as the troops have been
in Bosnia and perhaps as long as they were in Saudi Arabia. And
they must be prepared for what lies ahead in these years of rebuilding:
guerilla attacks, suicide bombings, Mogadishu-style shootouts,
assassination attempts against post-Saddam government officials, foreign
interference. As Lieutenant General David McKiernan warned during a
flurry of US counter-guerilla operations in June, “Iraq will be a
combat zone for some time.”18
Even so, by the yardstick of yesterday, Iraq is slowly getting
better. And it appears that the vast majority of the Iraqi people,
beleaguered though they may be, would rather live in a combat zone for a
while than in a torture chamber forever.
Reviewing Stand
It will also take allies to repair Iraq, which brings us to a second
critical ingredient for postwar success—reviewing and reevaluating
America’s role in international institutions.
Soon after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the world came together to
isolate Saddam Hussein. The Soviet Union and the United States stood
together. Arab states stood up against a fellow Arab regime. Seemingly
the entire world agreed that Iraq’s invasion and annexation of
Kuwait should be reversed. In a word, the United Nations was, well,
united. Thirteen years later, the opposite is true.
As it was throughout the Cold War, the United Nations is again
divided. But unlike before, the divisions aren’t a function of
superpower standoff. In fact, they are the byproduct of tensions within
the transatlantic community.
Last November, the UN Security Council unanimously agreed that Iraq
had failed to provide accurate and full disclosure of its nuclear,
chemical, and biological programs, had repeatedly obstructed access to
weapon sites, and was in material breach of UN disarmament demands. But
resolving only to be unresolved, as Churchill once said, the Security
Council refused to explicitly authorize the military action to bring
Iraq into compliance. Worried that Washington would use the UN “to
legitimize the unilateral and preemptive use of force,” French
President Jacques Chirac blocked any such language.19
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So for five months, UN inspectors haplessly asked Iraq to account for
its known caches of “special weapons,” which included 10,000
liters of anthrax, 80 tons of mustard gas, thousands of mustard bombs,
and uncounted amounts of sarin and VX nerve agent. Baghdad never came
clean. (Thankfully and mysteriously, it never used its WMD arsenal,
either. The fact that these stocks have not yet been found in the
war’s aftermath may be troubling, but it does not prove that they
were imagined.) In mid-March 2003, when Britain and the United States
called the question and returned to the UN for authorization, France and
Germany organized an opposition against their erstwhile allies, and the
rest of the Security Council shrugged.
As British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned at the time, the
consequences could range from “paralysis of the UN” to “a
world in which there are rival poles of power—the US and its allies
in one corner; France, Germany, and Russia in the other.” In
Blair’s view, the prewar behavior of Paris and Berlin will trigger
“the biggest impulse to [American] unilateralism there could ever
be.”20 And his prediction appears to be
accurate: A year ago, Washington was excoriated for contemplating
military action against Iraq without seeking UN approval. Yet when
Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN for that approval, he was
excoriated for daring to ask. It seems unlikely that this Administration
will go through such a charade again, at least not on a matter of grave
importance. As President Bush soberly explained before the bombs began
to fall on Baghdad, “When it comes to our security, we don’t
need anybody’s permission.” That does not bode well for the UN
or proponents of multilateralism, most of whom seem to reside in France
and Germany.
Of course, this transatlantic disconnect is nothing new. As Alexis de
Tocqueville observed more than 170 years ago, “An American leaves
his country with a heart swollen with pride; on arriving in Europe he at
once finds out that we are not so engrossed by the United States and the
great people which inhabits them as he had supposed, and this begins to
annoy him.”21
Europeans began to appreciate their cousins across the Atlantic in
the 20th century, although they continued to perceive Americans as
proud, if not arrogant. Still, they recognized that US power was a force
for good during the World Wars and a source of stability and security
during the Cold War. What is different today is that Western
Europe’s largest countries believe that US power is a
destabilizing, destructive force.
What triggered this transformation? In his landmark essay on the
subject in Policy Review, Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace concluded that it’s a simple matter of
power and weakness. “When the United States was weak, it practiced
the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the
United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do,”
according to Kagan. “When the European great powers were strong,
they believed in strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world
through the eyes of weaker powers.”22
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Still others, from US senators to academics, argue that the French
and Germans were simply using Iraq to send the Bush Administration a
message. Citing everything from the Kyoto Treaty and landmines to the
International Criminal Court and the lack of cooperation in Afghanistan,
they rationalize the Franco-German blocking maneuver as a natural, even
appropriate, reaction to the Bush Administration’s independent
bent. Upon closer examination, it seems that both their timing and their
aim were off the mark.
Simply put, America’s independent streak wasn’t born when
the Bush Administration came into office. After all, Kyoto was
pronounced dead on arrival by the US Senate in the 1990s. In 1998, the
United States (governed not by George W. Bush, but by Bill Clinton) was
one of just seven countries to oppose the ICC. Clinton reversed himself
at the eleventh hour of his presidency, but the US Senate wouldn’t
budge. The fact that Bush ended the charade was just a reflection of the
will of Congress.
In 1997, it was President Clinton who opposed the Landmine Treaty by
arguing, rightly, “There is a line that I simply cannot cross, and
that line is the safety and security of our men and women in
uniform.”23 Unlike their French and German counterparts,
American troops stand guard in places like the 38th Parallel, where
landmines are a matter of life and death.
If Paris used the Iraq crisis to express its frustration with
American arrogance, one can’t help but recall the prewar behavior
of the French. It was Chirac who threatened the East Europeans for
daring to side with Bush rather than him on Iraq. “These countries
are very rude and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves
too quickly with the Americans,” he snarled. “Their situation
is very delicate. If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining
the [European Union], they couldn’t have chosen a better
way.”24 If nothing else, Chirac’s tirade makes it
clear that America doesn’t have a monopoly on arrogance.
Finally, if the French and German governments waited until March 2003
to express their hurt feelings for being included in Afghanistan after
Kabul had fallen, one has to look no further than Kosovo to understand
why. A study by The Economist conducted during the Kosovo War
revealed that only ten percent of NATO’s European combat aircraft
were capable of precision bombing.25 As Lieutenant General Michael Short,
USAF, who helped plan the Kosovo air campaign, bluntly concluded,
“We’ve got an A Team and a B Team now.”26
However, the important thing to remember is at least we have a team.
It may be handicapped by infighting and a poor division of labor, but
NATO is still a team—and it is an important tool of US power.
President Bush and his advisors must keep that in mind as they remove
the postwar wreckage. As Churchill counseled, “in victory,
magnanimity.”
If Germany and France don’t always behave like friends, the
challenge is to make sure they don’t behave like enemies. With that
objective in mind, Bush is following Churchill’s counsel. “We
welcome and we need the help, advice, and wisdom of friends and
allies,” Bush said during his postwar trip to Europe. Even
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so, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to offer a rejoinder to
Chirac’s prewar pressuring of Eastern Europe: “You have not
come all this way, through occupations and tyranny and brave
uprisings,” he explained during a speech in Poland, “only to
be told that you must now choose between Europe and
America.”27
The Bush Administration has proven it can carry and wield a big
stick; now it must learn to speak softly, especially across the
Atlantic. As Kagan observes, “The world’s sole superpower
doesn’t need to hold grudges.”28 Instead, Washington
should emphasize the positive, downplay the negative, and perhaps avoid
situations and venues where differences can force a test of
wills—all of which means US coalition-building will increasingly be
conducted outside the UN Security Council and other places where the
French hold sway. The Americans are quick learners in this regard:
Recall their deft use of NATO’s Defense Planning Committee (DPC) to
approve the deployment of AWACS aircraft, Patriot missiles, and
anti-chemical weapons gear to Turkey. Paris had blocked the request in
NATO’s North Atlantic Council, but since the French do not
participate in NATO’s military committees, the Alliance was able to
answer Turkey’s call for help without tearing itself apart.
Shifting the decision to the DPC enabled the US-led majority to assist
Turkey, while not forcing France to compromise its position.
NATO has never been a rubber stamp, but unlike the UN it is a
readymade structure where Washington can round up a posse. These
alliances within the alliance automatically transform any US operation
from a unilateral action into a combined endeavor, giving Washington
diplomatic cover and the sort of logistical cooperation that is often
critical to speed, surprise, and success in the battlespace.
After 9/11, NATO nations were among the first to rally around
Washington. Likewise, before the Iraq War, Washington relied on decades
of cooperation, interoperability, and training with key NATO partners to
prepare the battlefield. While Germany, France, Belgium, and Turkey
equivocated, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, and the Czech Republic
fought on the diplomatic front. (Recall the Azores Summit on the very
eve of war.) Poland and Britain did that and much more, sending
thousands of troops to fight alongside the Americans and Australians.
During the war, Turkey opened its airspace and overland routes to US
forces.
When the guns fell silent, the German government offered to repair
key Iraqi infrastructure and even the French agreed that NATO should
play a role in postwar Iraq. Built around a NATO core, troops and
technical experts from 39 nations are now helping to rehabilitate Iraq.
Britain is overseeing a zone in southern Iraq. Poland is heading up
peacekeeping duties in northern Iraq. Italy is sending 3,000
peacekeepers and policemen, the Netherlands 1,100, Denmark 400. Other
peacekeeping troops are coming from future NATO members Romania,
Bulgaria, and Estonia, and NATO aspirants Ukraine, Albania, and Muslim
Azerbaijan.
Likewise, President Bush has turned to NATO to form the core of his
Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which will give Washington and
its allies the diplomatic and military means needed to intercept weapons
of mass destruc-
55/56
tion and their precursors while in transit. The United States,
Poland, Spain, other key NATO allies, and Australia are already refining
the specifics of the landmark PSI. “Over time,”
according to Bush, “we will extend this partnership as broadly as
possible to keep the world’s most destructive weapons away from our
shores and out of the hands of our common enemies.”29
The Reformation
Baathist Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan were two such enemies, but many
others live and breed in a troubled swath of earth that stretches from
Pakistan’s lawless mountains to Libya’s terrorist-infested
deserts. Waging and winning a war on terror means that the regimes in
this arc of crisis must be reformed. However, there are different tools
of reform. Simply put, just as regimes come in many forms, so too do the
tools of regime change.
Regardless of one’s view on the justification or rationale for
the Pentagon’s post-9/11 campaign of campaigns, the use of military
force has been effective. Operations against al Qaeda have netted
hundreds of prisoners, killed uncounted operatives, and remarkably
foiled any follow-on attacks against the US homeland. The Taliban regime
is gone, as is Saddam Hussein’s regime; both were cooperating to
varying degrees with the architects of the global guerilla war against
America.
In the Philippines, teams of US troops are conducting what the
diplomats call “counterterrorism training missions” with the
Philippine army. But if it’s training, it’s on-the-job
training. As in Afghanistan, the US-backed force has smashed and
scattered the enemy. Likewise, in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and
other former Soviet republics, US troops are training local forces to
clean out al Qaeda and its kindred movements, while constructing
“lily pad” bases that will extend America’s reach.
From their perch in Djibouti, US intelligence agents and military
taskforces are conducting operations in and around Yemen (recall the
Predator strike on al Qaeda commanders in November 2002), monitoring
terrorist activity in the lawless lands of eastern Africa, and
intercepting suspicious ships transiting the vital waterways around the
Horn of Africa (recall the US-Spanish operation that tracked and briefly
impounded a Yemen-bound North Korean vessel, serving as the PSI’s
template).
But there is more happening than military campaigns and mini-wars. In
Pakistan, for instance, Washington’s coercive diplomacy has
converted President Pervez Musharraf from the Taliban’s only friend
into a dependable ally in the war on terror. That was a lot to ask of
the government that created the Taliban, but Musharraf’s choice was
simple: He could agree to Washington’s demands and reap the
financial and political benefits, or he could reject them and reap the
whirlwind. He chose wisely. Today, US forces roam freely along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, conducting search and destroy missions on
both sides of the border—sometimes deep inside Pakistani territory,
and sometimes with the
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assistance of Pakistani troops—while Pakistani peacekeepers
prepare to join the stabilization effort in Iraq.
Washington is putting just as much pressure on Syria. We now know
that Syria provided safe haven to Saddam’s henchmen and quite
possibly to his weapons of mass destruction. The Syrians sent military
supplies and volunteers to fight for Saddam’s dying regime.
Damascus could send far more and far worse in the months ahead. Syria
controls Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which is a training ground for
Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And according to US Undersecretary of State
for Arms Control John Bolton, Syria has stockpiled VX nerve agent and
sarin gas.30
“They should review their actions and their behavior, not only
with respect to who gets haven in Syria and weapons of mass destruction,
but especially the support of terrorist activity,” Secretary Powell
said of Syria’s rulers after the liberation of Iraq.31 Still other warning shots came from the White
House and Pentagon, and Damascus is showing the first signs of
reforming: During a recent meeting with Syrian leader Bashar Assad in
Damascus, US Representative Darrell Issa reported that Assad “will
not harbor any war criminals and will expel any that are
here.”32 Even so, the terror camps are still open. Moreover, firefights
have broken out between US forces and Syrian border guards as the
Americans scour western Iraq for Baathist guerillas and Saddam’s
inner circle. Like Pakistan’s Musharraf in 2001, Assad must either
change his behavior or face the end of his regime. In neighboring Iraq,
he has a sobering example of what the latter would look like.
Coercive diplomacy is also bearing fruit with the Palestinians and
Israelis. For the first time since the collapse of the 1998 Wye River
agreements, both sides seem to be compromising and the spasmodic
violence is ebbing, if not ending. A new Palestinian Prime
Minister—who probably wouldn’t have been chosen were it not
for Bush’s decision in 2002 to call on the Palestinian people
“to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by
terror”33—is guaranteeing what Arafat said was beyond
his power, an end to terror attacks. And after agreeing to Palestinian
statehood, Israel’s hawkish government is dismantling the
settlements that so inflame Palestinian anger.
Washington is playing hardball with Saudi Arabia as well, as
evidenced by the abrupt withdrawal of US forces from the kingdom. Even
so, unlike Pakistan, Riyadh cannot to be cajoled with cash. And its oil
reserves guarantee that it won’t be pushed around by blustery
words.
Saudi Arabia accounts for the largest percentage of US oil imports
from the Persian Gulf, but fully 75 percent of America’s oil
imports come from somewhere other than the Gulf, which means the United
States can adjust. However, 36 percent of Western Europe’s and 76
percent of Japan’s oil imports originate in the Gulf—and the
Saudis are the prime source.34 “If Saudi Arabia’s contribution to the
world’s oil supply were cut off,” according to Baer,
“crude petroleum could quite realistically rise from around $40 a
barrel today to as much as $150 a barrel.”35Hence, even if the
United States were to forgo Saudi oil, global depend-
57/58
ence on Riyadh
would not change. That presents a long-term problem for America’s
interdependent and interconnected economy.
Saudi Arabia may not be America’s enemy, but given its actions
and inaction over the last 13 years, it is certainly not America’s
friend. At best, Riyadh and Washington are independent actors brought
together by self-interest and the invisible, if inexorable, hand of the
market. At worst, one is a pusher and the other is an addict. Either
way, the withdrawal of US forces from the kingdom serves America’s
interests in the Gulf—and so does the stationing of troops and
bases on Saudi Arabia’s borders.
On the other side of Iraq—and the other end of the Islamic
spectrum— sits Shiite Iran, which a recent State Department report
called “the most active state sponsor of terrorism” on
earth.36 Tehran provides Hezbollah and a host of others
with funding, training, and weapons. Contrary to the critics, Hezbollah
isn’t just “Israel’s problem.” In fact, a full year
before the attacks on Manhattan and Washington, the FBI arrested 23
members and supporters of Hezbollah in suburban North Carolina, of all
places. Prior to 9/11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any
other terrorist group.37
Inside Iran, the mullahs are racing to build a nuclear bomb. A year
ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld concluded, ominously, “The nexus
between weapons of mass destruction and terrorist states that have those
weapons—and that have relationships with terrorist networks—is
a particularly dangerous circumstance for the world.”38 We may soon see just how dangerous. After all,
Tehran’s newest partner in the terror trade is al Qaeda. According
to Rumsfeld, “There’s no question but that there have
been—and are today—senior al Qaeda leaders in Iran. And
they’re busy.”39 Intelligence officials believe al Qaeda
operatives inside Iran planned the May 2003 attacks against US targets
in Saudi Arabia. Their methods and practices may be different, but their
goals and enemies are the same.
Even so, there are signs that elements inside Iran’s two-headed
government are trying to expunge al Qaeda. Of course, still other
elements are working to destabilize Iraq and hence derail the postwar
peace. Hashemi Rafsanjani, who previously held the post of President and
is now chairman of the country’s so-called “Expediency
Board,” recently concluded that “the US presence in the Middle
East is worse than Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction.”40 And he’s right. For those elements that
preach jihad and teach terror inside Iran, the deployment of US troops
in neighboring Iraq poses nothing short of an existential threat, which
is why they are working so hard to undermine the postwar rebuilding
process.
During the war, Tehran slipped thousands of members of its Badr
Brigade across the border. Together with Iranian agents, these guerilla
fighters hope to transplant Iran’s Islamic revolution into Iraq.
Telltale signs of their handiwork were on display in the springtime
demonstrations that erupted “spontaneously” throughout
southern Iraq. What major media outlets and Middle East experts failed
to mention (or grasp), as Lawrence Kaplan observed in The New
Republic, was that the “anti-American demonstrations in Najaf
and Baghdad were orches-
58/59
trated by the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq, an organization that seeks exactly what its title
suggests.” In fact, the evidence was literally written all over the
demonstrators. “Many of the placards the protestors waved were
written in Farsi, not Arabic,” Kaplan explained.41 Iraqis—including Shiite Iraqis—are Arabs and speak
Arabic. Iranians are Persian and speak Farsi. Similar evidence of
Iranian involvement was found in Karbala and elsewhere.
Of course, two can play this game. In late May, The Washington
Post reported that the Bush Administration had begun exploring ways
to support a popular uprising that would bring down the Iranian
government.42 By June, Tehran was blaming the United States
for a wave of pro-democracy protests and strikes across the country.
Given the deep divisions in Iran’s government, growing resentment
among the Iranian people, and the track record of the Bush
Administration, the smart money would be with Washington when it comes
to replacing governments. According to Rumsfeld, “A vocal minority
clamoring to transform Iraq in Iran’s image will not be permitted
to do so.”43 Indeed, the mullahs could end up controlling a mayor’s
office in Najaf and losing everything in Iran.
Tomorrow
In all of this—from the carrots and sticks in Pakistan and
Syria, to the ongoing hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan, to the proxy war
with Iran, to the transformation of Iraq, to the chess game with Saudi
Arabia—we catch a glimpse of the next phase in the war on terror.
Blending the surprise and lethality of traditional warfare with the
tension and stalemate of the Cold War, what lies ahead is something
altogether different—a colder, harsher strain of conflict.
The United States is well suited for this “colder war.”
Since 12 September 2001, America has been on guard, alternately showing
restraint and resolve, the clenched fist of war and the open hand of
friendship. Nor is this the first time the American people have called
on their political and military leaders to be ambidextrous: Recall the
long test of wills with Moscow which began with a humanitarian airlift
into a divided Berlin, spawned a war in Korea that still hasn’t
ended, cracked open the door to doomsday in Cuba, taught us hard lessons
in Southeast Asia, and ended with celebrations in a united Berlin.
It took longer than 13 years for us to arrive at the crossroads
embodied by postwar Iraq, and it may take longer than 13 years to move
beyond it. “It is,” as Churchill intoned in 1946, “a
solemn moment for the American democracy. For with primacy in power is
also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the
future.”44
NOTES
1. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound (Boston: Little,
Brown, 2002), p. 609.
2. George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed
(New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 489.
3. Robert Baer, “The Fall of the House of Saud,”
Atlantic Monthly, May 2003.
4. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United
States of America (Washington: The White House, 20 September 2002).
59/60
5. For a more detailed analysis of the Bush Doctrine, see Alan Dowd,
“In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” The World & I,
January 2003.
6. Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen, “Officials Argue for Fast US
Exit from Iraq,” The Washington Post, 21 April 2003.
7. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace (New York:
Scribner, 2001), pp. 136, 230, 330.
8. Rhoda Margesson and Johanna Bockman, “Reconstruction
Assistance in Afghanistan: Goals, Priorities and Issues for
Congress,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 26
February 2003.
9. Kenneth Katzman, “Afghanistan: Current Issue is US
Policy,” Congressional Research Service Long Report for Congress,
31 March 2003.
10. Margesson and Bockman, pp.13, 30.
11. John Simpson, “Afghans Look to Future,” BBC News, 12
November 2002.
12. Ian Fisher,
“From Power Grid to Schools, Rebuilding a Broken Nation,”
The New York Times, 20 April 2003.
13. Chris Suellentrop, “Are 1 Million Children Dying in
Iraq?” Slate, 9 October 2001.
14. “Iraqi Delegates to Meet to Select Interim Government,”
The Washington Post, 28 April 2003.
15. David Ottaway, “In Bid to Shape Postwar Iraq, US Goes by the
Schoolbook,” The New York Times, 6 April 2003.
16. Melina Liu, Rod Norland, and Evan Thomas, “The Saddam
Files,” Newsweek, 21 April 2003.
17. Fisher.
18. Jim Miklaszewski and Keith Miller, “US Troops Kill 27 Iraqi
Attackers,” MSNBC.com, 13 June 2003.
19. Quoted in “Blair’s War,” PBS Frontline,
www.pbs.org.
20. Tony Blair address to House of Commons, 18 March 2003.
21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 462.
22. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy
Review, June/July 2002.
23. William J. Clinton, “Remarks by the President on Land
Mines,” 17 September 1997, The White House, Washington, D.C.,
http://www.fas.org/asmp/resources/govern/withdrawal91797.html.
24. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Fury as Chirac Threatens New EU
States,” London Telegraph, 18 February 2003.
25. “Armies and Arms,” The Economist, 24 April 1999,
pp. 11-12.
26. Quoted in John Tirpak, “Short’s View of the Air
Campaign,” Air Force Magazine, September 1999.
27. Bush address, Krakow, 31 May 2003, see CNN, “Bush: ‘No
U.S.-Europe Conflict,’”
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/05/31/bush.europe1100/.
28. Robert Kagan, “Resisting Superpowerful Temptations,”
The Washington Post, 9 April 2003.
29. Bush address, Krakow.
30. See Tim Johnson, “After Iraq, Bush to Halt Iran Nuke
Program,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, 31 March 2003; US State
Department, annual report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” May
2002, http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2002/.
31. Kathy A. Gambrell, “White House Urges Syria to
Cooperate,” Washington Times, 14 April 2003.
32. Mike Allen and Daniel William, “President Praises Efforts by
Syria,” The Washington Post, 21 April 2003.
33. George W. Bush, remarks, 24 June 2002, see CNN.com, “Bush:
Palestinians Need New Leaders,”
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/06/24/bush.mideast/.
34. US Energy Information Administration, “Persian Gulf Oil and
Gas Exports Fact Sheet,” March 2002,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/pgulf.html.
35. Ibid.; Baer, p. 54.
36. US State Department, Office of the Coordinator for
Counterterrorism,” Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism,” 30
April 2001, http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/2441.htm.
37. Louis Freeh, statement to committees of the US Senate, 10 May
2001.
38. Donald Rumsfeld, testimony before the US Senate Armed Services
Committee, 5 February 2002,
http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2002/s20020205-secdef.html.
39. Donald Rumsfeld, press conference, 21 May 2003, “Rumsfeld
Repeats Accusation that Iran Harbors Al Qaeda Leaders,”
http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/summit/text2003/0521iran.htm.
40. Eli Lake, “US Says Iran Plans to Infiltrate 5 Iraqi
Cities,” Washington Times, 3 April 2003.
41. Lawrence Kaplan, “Clerical Error,” The New
Republic, 2 May 2003.
42. Glenn Kessler, “U.S. Eyes Pressing Uprising in Iran,”
The Washington Post, 25 May 2003, p. A01,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35772-2003May24.
43. CNN.com, “Rumsfeld: U.S. Feels ‘Commitment’ to
Iraq, Afghanistan,” 27 April 2003,
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/26/sprj.irq.rumsfeld/.
44. Winston Churchill, speech, “The Sinews of Peace,”
Westminster College, Fulton, Mo., 5 March 1946,
http://history1900s.about.com/library/weekly/aa082400a.htm.
Alan W. Dowd is
a research fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Hudson
Institute’s headquarters in Indianapolis. The author of more than
200 articles, Dowd’s work has appeared in such publications as
Policy Review, The World & I, The Washington
Times,
The Jerusalem Post, National Review Online, American
Legion Magazine, and other national publications.
The Future of Iraq | Justifications and Ramifications of the War | The War and the Wider World | A Violent Month | Government Documents | Maps
