All too complicated for less than a minister to interpret
A minister would be the last person I’d ask to interpret such things. What would a minister know of international politics?
I don’t have clue as to whether the various other Arab Nations in the regions will "like" us better or worse for the outcome of the conflict.
Whether people in the Arab nations like us or not is really pretty much irrelevant. Most of them didn’t like us before, and they like us even less now. That was never in doubt. The real question is whether or not they wil fear us, and whether whatever fear we inspire will influence their policies in a way that benefits us. We have been assuming that they will fear us so much that they will not openly oppose us, but there is little beyond wishful thinking to support this assumption.
Perhaps the Iranian leaders will not like it, but their oppressed citizens might enjoy the results.
I doubt it. Our presence in Iraq will very likely be to the advantage of the mullahs, who will be able to play the nationalist card and rally their people against what they will claim is an imminent invasion. Someday we will get it through our heads that even people who detest their leaders are very likely to resist a foreign army marching on their nation. An outside threat almost always rallies public support behind the government in power. We cannot assume that because many Iranians don’t like the mullahs, they want us to invade Iran. It’s also a big jump to look at large demonstrations in university towns and conclude that “the Iranians” want us to get rid of their government. The impetus for reform is coming mainly from the towns and the educated Iranians, and Iran has a very large population that doesn’t fit that mold. The mullahs do have a very real support base, and our presence in Iraq will push neutrals toward their camp. Even those Iranians that are desperate to see their government removed will be watching the footage of the war, and weighing costs vs. benefits. War imposes enormous human and material costs on the host nation, and at the end of it they’d have a bunch of meddling Americans in charge. They have a quite reasonable chance of challenging their government from the inside, and if they succeed they will achieve the same goal at far less cost. Even the most anti-regime Iranians have little good reason to support an invasion.
We are making a move toward what appears to be a bright white light, leading us out from under a heavy dark cloud of Terrorism that drifted over the continent and shafted us with a mighty bolt of lightning on 9-11-01.
What white light? We will win the war, but it’s useless to pretend that there will be any large or immediate payoff. There is not going to be any dramatic positive change in our strategic posture or position in the world. We’ll be rid of Saddam, but he wasn’t that big a threat in the first place. The heavy dark cloud of terrorism will be as present as it ever was, and may be even more of a threat.
We didn’t fight this war just to get rid of Saddam. The other agenda, and in many ways it was more important than removing Saddam, was to reverse the perception that America was unwilling to wage war. We wanted a display of resolve, and we got one. We wanted to beat up on somebody to prove that we had the will to do it, and Saddam was the obvious target. We have yet to see whether this display will achieve its intended consequence. We are assuming that once resolve is demonstrated, our antagonists will be too scared to attack us or to openly act against our policies. These assumptions may not turn out to be correct, and we may come up against an unintended negative consequence: instead of intimidating our antagonists, we may have simply provided them with a unifying point of opposition, and allowed them to increase their influence in many areas.
Lets look for a moment at net gains from the war vs. net losses. The first gain is that we will be rid of Saddam. Chalk that up as a positive, but not an enormous one: one less vicious dictator in the world is a good thing, but it hardly constitutes a major strategic victory in the ongoing fight against terrorism and Islamic radicalism. It could be said to give us a forward base in the Middle East, an advantage of sorts, but it also constitutes a major force protection problem: occupying forces are highly vulnerable to terrorist attack. We have demonstrated resolve, but it remains to be seen how effectively this will intimidate other potential antagonists. We have not struck a decisive blow against terrorism.
On the negative side, we’ll spend a very large amount of money, forcing the administration to choose between scrapping tax cuts or running a monumental deficit. We’ve taken on a huge job in Iraq: establishing order will be extremely difficult, and establishing a working government much more so. We can’t trust the existing bureaucracy, and we can’t trust the exiles either: they have their own agendas, and once we’ve disposed of Saddam for them, those agendas will be coming to the forefront. There will inevitably be competition for positions and influence between the exiles and Iraqis inside Iraq. The Kurds are on our side, but they have no influence outside Kurdistan. They can also be a source of trouble: it’s not clear what their long-term goals are, or how much support we want to give there. We can’t trust the organized Shiite groups at all: they didn’t like Saddam, but they are not going to be on our side either. We’ve given Islamist radicals throughout the region an obvious target for “martyrdom operations”: they will no longer have to face the logistic challenges of mounting operations inside the US to strike at us. We won’t only have to contend with potential terrorists inside Iraq: the borders are pourous, and keeping non-Iraqi radicals out will be a huge job, especially since we can’t trust any Iraqi agency to control access. There are thousands of Shiite Iraqis in exile in Iran. They will want to return, and we have no way of knowing who is really an Iraqi, or who is a potential terrorist. We have to expect and prepare for suicide bombings and intifadeh-style opposition on the overt side, and every conceivable kind of political maneuvering and manipulation behind the scenes.
The occupation government will have a monumental intelligence problem. The problem will be not a deficit of information, but a surplus: there will be enormous quantities of information floating around, and very little of it will be reliable. Sorting the good from the bad will be a huge chore, and an essential one: it’s impossible to make good decisions without good information. How many people do we have that we can trust to do this effectively?
I don’t envy whoever ends up in charge out there. They won’t be able to trust anybody, including the bosses back home. Chucking it to the UN wouldn’t be a half bad idea, if they’ll take it. At least we’d have somebody to blame for the mess.
Outside Iraq, it does not seem that our operation in Iraq has terrified or intimidated the Islamists. We set out to inspire fear, and we’ve we’ve probably done that. We’ve also succeeded in inspiring rage, and it remains to be seen whether the fear will cancel out the rage. We have given our enemies both motivation and a rallying point. We’ve also given them an accessible target. Our presence in Iraq is probably a greater net gain for them than it is for us. They’ve made huge political gains in many countries. We’ve rallied anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world. Pro-American governments in Turkey, Indonesia, and Jordan are being forced by popular sentiment to move to a neutral or even anti-American stance. More important, pro-American or even neutral factors in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have been placed in a very shaky position, and a move toward outright Islamism is entirely possible in one or more of these.
We’ve gotten used to the ides of framing the challenge in terms of lousy governments using demagoguery to whip up anti-American sentiment. That view is no longer legitimate in many cases: a lot of governments that would like to have better relations with us are being forced away from us by their own people. In many cases, our problem is less one of radical governments inciting their people, it’s one of increasingly radicalized populations pressing their governments to take a more aggressively anti-American stance.
The war will be a win for us, but also for Osama & Co., who are very well placed to take advantage of the anti-US feeling that we are generating. Saddam will make a perfect martyr for the Islamists: they never really liked him anyway, and his coming fall has already given them a propaganda bonanza. If they lose Iraq, but gain an Islamist government is Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Pakistan, they will be net winners by a huge margin.
Of course we’ve also done enormous damage to our relations with countries outside the Arab world. This is already hurting us badly in Korea, where our perceived contempt for the opinions of others over Iraq is a major obstacle to getting cooperation that we desperately need to resolve that situation. We have few allies left: even in England, popular sentiment is not on our side, and we cannot rely on cooperation from that quarter. We may regret this before long.
I hope this is excessive pessimism, and that reality will turn out to be less difficult. It may not be this rough, but I certainly don’t see us moving toward any white lights.
The easy part is almost over. It’s the easy part because war is something we understand, and something we’re good at. We have entire institutions devoted exclusively to making war. We have the best-trained military apparatus in the world, supported by the greatest array of military technology the planet has ever seen. When it comes to nation-building, especially in an environment with this kind of complexity and hostility potential, we are babes in the woods. |
