What's Next?--Bush and the Post-War World
By Andrew Sullivan
Anyone wanting to get a glimpse of how and where American military supremacy and foreign policy will now be directed will not have learned much from president Bush's speech last Thursday on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. All the networks interrupted their usual coverage in a manner that suggested a news event; or at least a speech in which a new and clear direction for the future might be unveiled. But that didn't happen. Instead, the president invoked the memory of September 11 as the critical context for the battle to depose the Saddam regime; and then connected the Iraq war to Afghanistan and the broader war on terror. He congratulated Donald Rumsfeld by name, and by his rhetoric gave a sharp presidential nudge to the transformational reforms Rumsfeld has been trying to foist on a reluctant army. But apart from a tantalizing mention of a "peaceful Palestine," the rest was opaque. This was campaign rhetoric with amazing visuals, the alternative to a victory parade, and a moment to underscore the political benefits of military victory to a president who must still earn re-election from a country where domestic concerns are once again coming to the fore. In fact, the one applause line in the speech when the crowd exploded was when the president noted that the aircraft carrier was finally headed home. These were American troops, remember. Empire is anathema to them. Homecoming is everything.
But other troops, of course, remain in Iraq. And Germany. And Saudi Arabia. And South Korea. And across the globe. And the new flux in world affairs is perhaps the most significant moment of transformation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What will this president do with it? At present, we have only a handful of clues.
The first, of course, is a continuation of the war on terror. There remain years of vigilance in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a special operations force was even last week engaged in combat. Last week also saw some extraordinary news likely to sustain the global effort. In the year after military action in Afghanistan and in preparation for war in Iraq - a process that so many experts predicted would lead an upsurge in terror and thousands of new Osamas - terrorist incidents actually fell from 355 in 2001 to 199 in 2002. Under this alleged cowboy president, in other words, during what was supposed to be an explosion of Islamist rage at the West, terrorist incidents fell to a thirty-year low. That is a huge, if still-vulnerable, achievement. Bush fully intends to build on it.
At the same time, the U.S. has tipped its hand in one critical respect. The military bases in Saudi Arabia, established after the first Gulf War, will be abandoned. Alternative medium-term bases have been set up In Iraq; more secure bases have been established and vastly expanded in Qatar and other tiny oil-states in the Gulf. It's premature to speak of the U.S. disengaging from the Saudi relationship altogether, but there is little doubt that Washington has decided that the current autocracy's days are numbered and doesn't want a repeat of the Shah in Iran. Getting out now, while increasing oil production from other sources, may also be a prelude to putting more pressure on the Saudi government to stop financing Wahhabist extremism and to move the country in a more democratic direction. That's certainly the neoconservative vision.
But it was also in some ways inevitable after September 11. Americans have not forgotten where the mass murderers came from. Without large alternative sources of energy, however, it was always impossible for Washington to lean on the Saudis too hard. Iraq has changed that - and may make a truly pro-democratic Middle East policy feasible for the first time. What if Arab democratization leads to the empowerment of anti-American Islamist theocrats across the region? That's where the Iraq experiment also comes in. The president was quite adamant in his victory speech about the centrality of democracy in the Arab world and in Iraq in particular. And there is no need to be over-cynical about his words. But the democracy he means doesn't simply entail - and cannot simply entail - majority rule. It requires the establishment of the rule of law, freedom of religion, and the balancing of different ethnic and religious groups. In Iraq, that means a treacherous process of reconstruction and a delicate political balancing act between Kurds, Sunnis, Christians and Shi'ites - all backed up by American military muscle. Impossible? Not if you're an American optimist. And, after all, if I'd argued a year ago that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to the lowest levels of terrorism in three decades, you would also have called me an optimist. If you were feeling polite, that is. But I would have been right nonetheless.
To buttress their hopes, many in Washington think that Iran may also fall to democratic forces in the near future. They hope a careful construction of Iraqi democracy will galvanize this process and be strengthened by its neighbor's democratization in return. Is this too ambitious a plan? Perhaps. But what other options does the U.S. really have? For all its risks, this strategy is at least more desirable than what the U.S. recently faced in the region - hostile powers everywhere, with outreach to terrorists and programs for weapons of mass destruction. And in the long run, the gamble is that the U.S. will have more sway and more security if it casts its lot in with democratic forces, however unruly, than if it clings to autocracies that are doomed and that have spawned terrorism in any case. It's the least of two risks. But a huge change in outlook and direction.
That's not the case in Israel and the disputed territories. Here, the policy has been changed in two small but critical ways. The first is that the condition for the "road-map's" implementation has become the sidelining of Yassir Arafat in the Palestinian Authority. That was outlined by president Bush as a condition last June. It's as yet unclear whether that has truly happened. The new prime minister, Abu Mazen, condemned violence in his first day in office, but within hours of his doing so, two terrorists associated with Arafat's brigades launched more suicide murders. The second policy change was the removal of Saddam, a lesson for the Palestinian radicals who revered the despot, and simultaneously the removal of funding for their terror. (Alongside this was renewed pressure on Syria. Syria has made some positive noises, but, again, we don't know whether there has been any real change in attitude.) As for Sharon, Bush's record in the past two years must surely have led the Israeli prime minister to respect his integrity on the issue of terrorism. But again, the raid in Gaza last Thursday, killing thirteen, including children, hardly seems a good omen for Sharon's sincerity with respect to peace. Bush has publicly and privately promised to make this thankless task a priority. Both Powell and Blair confirm this. But, as yet, the president has taken no real political risks to make this work; his political base is against it; and his ultimate intentions are opaque. The question is not whether he will make a gesture in that regard. It's whether there will be any follow-through. My bet is that he will. But not if Palestinian terror makes it impossible.
Elsewhere, there has been a renewed multilateral attempt to talk North Korea back from the brink, also galvanized rather than hurt by the victory in Iraq. But perhaps the most radical change, apart from the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, is the relationship with Europe. For the first time, it's quite clear that Washington is taking European internal politics seriously. For the longest time, it was axiomatic that the U.S. supported the E.U.'s ever-closer union, and backed the emergence of a benign economic partner on the other side of the Atlantic. That axiom no longer exists. In particular, the betrayal of the alliance by France, and Chirac's attempt not simply to dissent from but to actively foil a critical American foreign policy goal, has led to an indefinite frosting of the Franco-American relationship. It may also be too early to tell, but this fracture appears far deeper and more permanent than the conflicts with Germany and Russia. Washington is too canny to intervene in European internal affairs directly, but the emerging consensus is against a unified Europe that would attempt to undermine American global hegemony, and in favor of a more a la carte diplomacy that deals with individual European countries on a case-by-case basis.
In this respect, there's no question that Britain is now the most important military and diplomatic ally; and Washington would not be at all happy to see the U.K. subsumed under a European security apparatus. Equally, there's little doubt that the U.S. will not abandon its allies in Eastern Europe to the machinations of Paris. These may seem obvious conclusions to draw from the events of the past year. But they are in fact quite significant. In the past, you just needed to utter the words "European Union" to watch a Washingtonian's eyes glaze over. But now, with the drama of Resolution 1441 still ringing in our ears, it's a completely different story. And in this new world, it is Tony Blair, if he can drop his European integrationist ambitions, who is the foreign leader with by far the most to gain.
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