I’m off to the lowlands today for a bit of ocean and a bit of not terribly welcome contact with the real world; I might get to the inbox, I might not. The prospect gives me a certain lethargic feeling; a good sign that it may be time for a break from SI. I won’t be back around the usual relaxed zone until middle of next week anyway, so we’ll see. Hopefully I won’t meet any great disorder along the way; it’s probably not the best time to be running around the country, but so be it.
I see the war is on. By the time I get back here, the war will might even be over. It’s no big surprise to me that it’s working out that way: it was pretty clear from the start that the US administration wanted war and was going to be reluctant to accept anything less. Whether it was a good or bad idea we'll learn as it goes along. We may never know, since we have know way of knowing what would have happened otherwise. At this point all I can do is hope it ends with as little death and destruction as possible on all sides. Saddam out of power will be a good thing. I suspect, though, that the positive ramifications are much overstated, and it will not be as big a plus as some think. There are also going to be some minuses that some people aren’t thinking much about.
I still expect a fairly quick combat phase, with a whole lot of surrendering going on in the early stages. Possibly some stiff fighting in the final days, when the hard core gets cornered, though I expect that much of the hard core will simply fade away when the going gets rough, and reappear to make trouble later. That’s all impossible to predict accurately, of course, but I certainly hope it goes as easily as I expect.
I also expect a bit of a honeymoon after the fighting, when those who wanted the war can get their I-told-you-so action in. As long as Iraq is under the US military, and as long as the objectives of the operation are clear-cut and achievable (hunting down WMD, maintaining order, arresting key bad guys), I expect things to go pretty smoothly. The rough bit will come when the Iraqi opposition starts clamoring for a turnover, and when it becomes clear that the Iraqi opposition is a lot less democratically oriented than they would like us to believe now. I don’t expect the current charade of unity at the INC to last more than a few hours past Saddam’s downfall. At best, we may get another 3rd world elite pseudodemocracy, with a rotating cast of oligarchic factions using a democratic façade to maintain a front of legitimacy. If one faction becomes ascendant, we may get another strongman.
There are some suggestions that the honeymoon may be short. Certainly there will be a lot of pressure to free up US forces, so we may not be there to maintain order for long. Order may not be easy to maintain: in order to make a reasonably quick exit, we will have to retain much of the existing bureacracy, including the army; many of these people have made bitter enemies. There will be trouble between exiles returning, expecting juicy posts, and the domestic opposition, including all the Saddam bureaucrats who will suddenly claim to have been oppositionists all along. I don’t envy whoever has to sort those messes out. I suspect that there will be trouble between Turkey and the Kurds. Already there are rumors of restiveness among the Turkish Kurds, and already the Kurdish leaders – the ones we used to call “warlords”, but have now agreed to describe as democratic leaders – are making noises about trouble. It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. Another potentially troublesome situation is brewing to the south. SCIRI, nominally a part of the INC and thus counted among the good guys, is said to be recruiting and training fighters in Iran, with the full support of the Iranians. Many of these are Iraqi Shiite refugees. It will be very difficult to prevent them from returning to Iraq, or to determine who is a legitimate Shiite refugee and who is actually an Iranian. They won’t be able to cross the border armed, of course, but it will be easy for them to move back in unarmed and pick up weapons once inside Iraq.
All of this bears watching. SCIRI is anti-Saddam, but with friends like that, we might end up preferring our enemies.
The real negative spinoff from the war, of course, will not be in Iraq at all. I don’t think many Americans have really come to grips with the extent to which American prestige around the world has been battered by this process, or with the amount of respect we’ve lost. We need to realize that this is not a matter of a few elite euro leaders riding an anti-American bandwagon, or of a few 3rd world dictators throwing their weight around at the UN. There’s a real public groundswell of bad feeling about this: we have not done a good job of selling our message. Most democratic leaders that oppose the war are doing so because their people demand that they do so; the few leaders of democracies that support the war are doing so against the will of their own people. Havel came out for the war, but 2/3 of his people oppose it, and his prime minister pointedly failed to follow suit. Aznar is in his last term, so he can afford to buck the popular will, but don’t bet on a pro-American successor. Blair is in trouble, and the trouble is likely to get worse. A lot of our allies have gone out on limbs to support us against the will of their own populations, and some are likely to fall off.
That’s largely Europe, though, and who needs ‘em, right? Unfortunately, the backwash is not limited to Europe, and there are places where it’s likely to really hurt. A look at a few of the trouble zones:
North Korea is the big one, of course, and as we all know our options there are limited. As I’ve said many times, I think we need to get off our high horse and negotiate, if only to buy some time. There should be no illusions about the likelihood of reaching any effective settlement.
What we have to do while we talk to the North Koreans is to talk very seriously with the Russians and Chinese on the one hand, and the South Koreans and Japanese on the other. There’s a lot that all parties there can agree on: nobody wants a war in Korea, and nobody wants nuclear proliferation in Korea. The need is to hammer out a program that all parties can agree to follow, especially China, the only country with real leverage over the North Koreans. This won’t be easy, and the diplomatic tension we have with China and Russia over Iraq will make it a lot harder, but it needs to be done. It will be very difficult to find an effective unilateral solution on the peninsula. This is especially true if South Korea refuses to allow a US troop buildup, which is likely.
Another place where big trouble is likely is South Asia. Hindu Nationalists in India are becoming increasingly bold, partly due to the perception that the US war on Islamic terror has increased their leverage in their ongoing conflict with Indian Muslims. Hindu nationalist leaders are already openly proclaiming that every Indian Muslim is a potential Pakistani agent, and whipping up the kind of emotion that has led to many outbreaks of violence. At the same time, Islamic fundamentalism is surging in Pakistan, with strong support in the army and the secret police. Musharraf’s support for the US has put him way out on a limb with his own people: Pakistan is hardly a democracy, but every leader needs a base, and Musharraf’s is eroding fast. A pro-Islamist takeover is a real possibility, and I still think that’s a more likely source for an Islamic bomb than anything North Korea or Iran are up to. These two situations feed on each other: the more influence the Hindu nationalists get in India, the more propaganda (some of it true) about Hindu abuse of Indian Muslims spreads in Pakistan, feeding the fundamentalist flame. The more influence the fundamentalists get in Pakistan, the wilder the anti-Muslim sentiment in India gets, and that makes the radical Hindu nationalist parties stronger. There would be real trouble potential here even if there were no nukes; the nuclear presence makes the region far more dangerous.
Iran is another place where problems are likely. I don’t agree with the oft-stated opinion that a US presence in Iraq will promote the cause of the anti-Islamist opposition. It may embolden the opposition core, but it will also allow the mullah’s to take the stance of patriotic defenders of the nation against the crusaders, a stance that is greatly promoted by unfortunate rhetorical flourishes from the US. I don’t think many Iranians like the mullahs, but I don’t think they are terribly fond of the Americans either, and a threat of invasion always rallies previously neutral support behind the existing government. The real risk here, of course, is that if the Iraq operation goes smoothly, the administration will want to cruise right on and “do” Iran. That would be a huge mistake, I think. US prestige will eventually recover from Iraq, as long as the military operation goes smoothly and the political side is not a disaster. We’ve taken a bruising in the opinion world, but nobody will miss Saddam, and we have a reserve of good will and a fundamentally positive impression that will allow us to recover, if it’s just Iraq. If we go on an attack someone else, that will change. If we move on Iran – and our case for an attack there is very weak – we formally resign the leadership of the free world, and in many eyes move ourselves into the rogue state category.
There are other trouble areas as well, not acute, but with potential to grow in ways we won’t like. One of these is in SE Asia, another in N. Africa. In both cases, governments that have either been pro-US or willing to cooperate are coming under heavy fire from public opinion. Notable among these is Indonesia, where a pro-US stance is pretty much insupportable now. These states aren’t going to turn openly against us, but they are not going to be terribly cooperative either, and we need cooperation from many of them.
Many Americans have reduced our international problems to a single almost absurdly simple construction. It is all due to lack of resolve, they say, and once we show we are willing to fight, everybody will fall into line. There’s an element of truth in the formulation: lack of resolve has been a problem. It has been far from the only problem, though, and a show of resolve without due attention to diplomatic subtleties, world public opinion, and simply the use of a bit of intelligence will create as many problems as it solves. Somewhere between paralysis and bullyhood is a middle ground that we will have to try a lot harder to find.
One fortunate thing is that around the world, polls suggest that people are putting the blame for the new American attitude not on America, but on the current Administration. That may work in our favor one day: we may be able to restore the respect we’ve lost simply by doing a bit of regime change on ourselves. I just hope the options on offer next time are a step up from what we had last time. |
