Part 2 of Powers
2.
"Nation-building," once derided by President Bush, is now openly embraced. His envoy to the new Afghan government and to the Iraqi exile leaders who hope for a role in postwar Baghdad is Zalmay Khalilzad, a well-connected defense intellectual and expert on the Middle East, and a member of the National Security Council. Afghan-born but American-educated, Khalilzad was a charter member of a closely knit group in the first Bush administration, including Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, that played an important role in the 1991 Gulf War and has continued to press for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein ever since. Little known to the general public but watched carefully by area experts, Khalilzad has a wide writ on the NSC. He is a member of the inner circle preparing for war, and his defense of American policy in public forums often makes explicit what the President himself only implies.
At the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last October, Khalilzad repeated the President's determination "to disarm Iraq one way or another." War might still be avoided, he conceded, but added that "we are of the view that disarming Iraq is extremely unlikely without regime change" and "liberation is the way to do it." In that event, he said, "our objective for the long term in Iraq would be to establish a broad-based representative and democratic government...." About the details, despite many questions from the audience, Khalilzad was vague, but he insisted that the old Bush suspicion of the tar-baby perils of nation-building was history. The United States was not going to back away. "We will...stay for as long as necessary to do the job," he said. "This will be a major strate-gic commitment, and we will see it through...."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The all-important question of who would run Iraq after the shooting stops was left vague until February 11, when spokesmen for the Departments of State and Defense told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it would be the United States, not some provisional government set up by Iraqi exiles, which would take charge in Baghdad. Dismantling Iraqi weapons programs ("a huge undertaking"), securing Iraq's border with Iran, holding the country together, rebuilding the economy, rooting out members of the Baath Party tainted by ties with the regime of Saddam Hussein, writing a new constitution, and restoring oil production to help pay for reconstruction will all be carried out under the authority of the Pentagon's Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), established by the President on January 20. ORHA's director, retired Army Lieutenant General Jay M. Garner, will report to the President through General Tommy Franks of the Central Command and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, an arrangement which makes it clear that postwar Iraq will be under American military occupation until the President decides the time is ripe to return the country to Iraqi control. This is not a minor point; every Arab government has now been put on notice that the Americans are coming to stay.
As described by the two administration officials who had done the preliminary work of postwar planning, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Marc Grossman, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas J. Feith, the reconstruction of Iraq will be the single biggest effort at "nation-building" undertaken by the United States since 1945, a plan of breathtaking scope to change the political landscape of the Middle East. With the senators Feith limited himself to the challenges facing occupation authorities on Day One, but he recently gave a richer description of what the administration has in mind to The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann, reported in the issue of February 17 and 24. A genuinely democratic government in Baghdad, Feith said, might encourage other countries in the Middle East to follow suit, with potentially far-reaching consequences. He told Lemann:
Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states. They need a base of operations...and one of the principal reasons that we are focussed on Iraq...is because we are focussed on this connection between three things: terrorist organizations, state sponsors, and weapons of mass destruction.... [In Afghanistan] you had a regime that was ousted because of its support for terrorist operations against the United States. If the Iraq regime gets ousted...I think that the combination of those two actions will influence the thinking of other states about how advisable it is for them to continue to provide safe harbor or other types of support to terrorist organizations.
But how much money this ambitious effort would cost, how many troops would be required to hold Iraq together while the program was put into effect, and above all how long the job would take were questions the undersecretaries did not want to pin down for the senators. Feith promised only that the United States would stay "as long as required" and leave "as soon as possible." But Feith's colleague Marc Grossman, repeatedly pressed by the senators to fill in the blanks, at last conceded that the many tasks facing ORHA were going to take time— two years or more before control of the country could be surrendered entirely to a new Iraqi government.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those two years tell us a lot we need to know. Arab governments reluctantly going along with American plans all want a transition that is short and sweet; King Abdullah's Jordan hopes for a week of war followed by American withdrawal in three months.
Two years could as easily be ten; it means the Americans won't leave until good and ready, after they've done all they intend to do. "Disarming" Iraq, the first job on the American agenda, demands the freedom to go anywhere, speak to anyone, remove or detain any official, suspend payment of any contract, and inspect, copy, or carry off any file. The administration will want to show the world that its fears were not paranoiac, and it will want to know who helped Saddam Hussein pursue weapons of mass destruction, and might do the same for another aspirant.
The paper trail left by decades of effort to build weapons of mass destruction will not be the only target of American cleanup teams. "A key element of US strategy in the global war on terrorism," Feith told the senators, "is exploiting the information about terrorist networks that the coalition acquires through our military and law enforcement actions." He is referring to the "information" collected by Iraqi intelligence services; in other words, the files. The biggest intelligence bonanzas come at the end of wars, when the very people who compiled the files hand over the keys and explain where everything is. Police states are notorious for the obsessive keeping of files, and dictators with dreams of world power want to know everything about everybody. Saddam Hussein's secret police have been collecting information on political movements, terrorist groups, arms dealers, rich bankers and businessmen, and rival leaders since he came to power in 1968. This trove of secret information about the dark underside of Arab and Islamic politics will not be an incidental benefit of an American military occupation lasting two years or more, but will be one of the first targets of occupation forces.
Controlling Iraq will require a major military presence and support structure —that is, a base. The New York Times has recently reported that the government of Saudi Arabia soon intends to ask American forces to leave the kingdom, but what Riyadh takes away a defeated Baghdad can be expected to give—something like the base at Guan- tánamo, for example, leased from Cuba at the end of the Spanish-American War. A permanent base would make it clear to other governments in the neighborhood—Iran's in particular—that American demands for an end to WMD programs or support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas were backed by military muscle next door, planted for the long haul.
3.
A look at a map will suggest what we might expect after the American defeat and occupation of Iraq. Across a 730-mile border to the east is Iran, with twice as many people, three times the territory, and a twenty-five-year history of conflict with Washington. President Bush placed Iran in the "axis of evil" a year ago, and his administration has vigorously protested its support of terrorist organizations and its effort to build atomic weapons—a program much bigger and closer to success than Iraq's. The United States has no diplomatic relations with Iran, but the two sides have secretly discussed the coming war. Iran promises to stand aside of the fighting and to cooperate in the handling of refugees, but there mutual understanding comes to an end.
Over the last decade the United States has pushed hard to stop sales of military hardware and technology to Iran by Russia, China, and North Korea. In the 1990s it twice managed to buy up fissionable material in former republics of the Soviet Union to keep it out of Iranian hands, but despite such efforts the CIA estimates that Iran may be able to build a bomb by the end of the decade. It is Iran's desire for a bomb, combined with its support for Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, that puts it on the President's list of problem nations. How the Islamic world might respond to American occupation of Iraq, followed by a renewed crisis over American demands of Iran, can be found in Dilip Hiro's War Without End, a history, first published a dozen years ago and now extensively revised, of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its growing use of terrorism—the one a response to Western secular culture, and the other to rage and humiliation over repeated defeats by American and Israeli armies.
Hiro was born in India but has long resided in London, where he has written more than twenty books about the Middle East and South Asia over the last thirty years. In another recent book, Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm, Hiro provides a history of the unfolding American conflict with Iraq until the moment last fall when the Security Council of the United Nations passed a new resolution calling for renewed inspections. War Without End describes the broader social, political, and religious context of the struggle that is likely to follow the defeat and occupation of Iraq. Hiro piles up in careful detail a history of developments as they unfolded, and thereby gradually builds a portrait of time, people, places, and the logic of events. He begins with the Sunni–Shiite split at the heart of Islam, describes the rise of modern Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan, and concludes with a long account of the way Islamic anger shifted its focus onto the United States, and of the initially puzzled and faltering American response.
Hiro believes that Islamic terrorism was born at the moment when Egypt's Anwar Sadat abandoned the common Arab position of support for the Palestinians and made a separate peace with Israel. "A quarter century after the treaty," he writes, "peace between the two neighbors remained cold and had not trickled down even to the level of academics and intellectuals." It is the continuing American refusal, whether in Pakistan, Cairo, or Gaza, to recognize the connection between politics and terror, between grievance and the violence it provokes, Hiro believes, that sets the United States "on an inexorable course of war without end."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The question now is whether an American war to achieve its ambitious goals in Iraq will be only the first in a series of wars. As always the best indicator is what officials actually say. Over the last year Iran has been infrequently mentioned by administration officials, but always in terms of hostility and suspicion. In a speech to the American-Iranian Council last March Zalmay Khalilzad charged Iran with continued support of terrorist groups like Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and especially Hezbollah, which had been caught red-handed using Iranian funds to finance a shipload of arms to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. "Hard-line, unaccountable elements of the Iranian regime facilitated the movement of al-Qaeda terrorists escaping from Afghanistan," he said:
Iran is also aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, and the missiles to deliver them.... Considering Iranian militant support to terrorist organizations, what check is there that Iran would not transfer even some of its WMD technology to terrorists?
In August, speaking to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Khalilzad repeated these charges in even stronger terms. He reminded his listeners that "there are still unresolved issues" about Iran's responsibility for Americans killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers, a military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and he said the regime's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its "continuing support for terrorists is a threatening mix." This is the specter that haunts Washington—terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union Address President Bush called it "the gravest danger facing America and the world," and he again singled out Iran as a "a government that represses its people, pursues weapons of mass destruction and supports terror."
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 11, the CIA's chief, George Tenet, said, "We see disturbing signs that Al Qaeda has established a presence in both Iran and Iraq.... Iran remains a serious concern because of its across-the-board pursuit of WMD and Missile capabilities," because Iran is developing ballistic missiles which might reach the US mainland by 2015, and because of "Iran's support for terrorism"—all charges of the kind made against Iraq as justification for war. Argument over these contentious issues will soon take place while American and Iranian armies face each other across hundreds of miles of border in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The American plan to stay for at least two years would bring us up to March 2005, a few months after the next presidential election. We might expect the inevitable tensions over American demands to be rising toward crisis just about then.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is most remarkable about this unfolding crisis is the degree to which it has been driven by theory—general ideas about things that might or could happen. The United States and Britain never found any connection between Iraq and the attacks of September 11, and recent claims that Baghdad may be conspiring with terrorists in al-Qaeda are tenuous and weakly supported by evidence. Three months of UN inspections have found no proof of ongoing Iraqi programs to create biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, and it is obvious that the United States, despite its conviction that Saddam Hussein must have something underway, is unable to tell inspectors where to look next. And yet, instead of supporting continuing and expanded inspections to resolve these uncertainties, the Bush administration is planning war to end even the possibility of terror weapons in al-Qaeda's hands, and it is planning to remove by force at least one and possibly two legal governments in order to end state support of terrorist organizations, and it is hoping to transform the political landscape of the Middle East by introducing democracy of a kind friendly to the West. The goals themselves are of an accepted and familiar kind; it is the willingness to go to war to achieve them that is unusual.
The theory has many authors, but one of them, we are told by Dana Priest in The Mission, appears to be Donald Rumsfeld. He arrived at the Pentagon with plans to build an anti-ballistic missile system (still very much in the works) and to transform the military—get rid of the old-think about big armies with thundering tread, and replace it with new-think about high-tech weaponry, information warfare, speed, agility. But he wasn't simply planning to buy new stuff; he wanted a new way to think about America in the world after the cold war, when American military power was supreme.
To help Rumsfeld along in his thinking, Priest writes, his office sponsored a study of the histories of great empires —a word Washington officials were beginning to use. These stories all have sad endings but it wasn't the fall of empires that engaged Rumsfeld; it was how empires kept themselves in power. The language of this study is abstract in the extreme and filled with current military jargon. "Symmetric" and "asymmetric" are key words. To me a passage from the study helps to explain the mood in the White House that places its hope in war:
Military doctrine and forces are created in the image of the economies that spawn them; military forces, although multi-purpose by nature, are formed around a core of threats that they are designed to defeat; asymmetric confrontations have historically generated decision outcomes, whereas symmetric confrontations tend to be exhaustive.
An example of an exhaustive symmetric confrontation would be the First World War, where vast but nearly equal armies fought until one collapsed. Examples of asymmetric confrontations would be the British army against the Zulus in South Africa, or the American army against the Sioux Indians in the Dakotas. A "decision outcome" means that something is settled once and for all, which is what Rumsfeld and his commander in chief, George Bush, hope to do with the threat that terrorists will be provided with weapons of mass destruction by rogue states. The overwhelming military power of the United States is what makes a contest with weak armies like Iraq's asymmetric, and what allows a decision outcome. But a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein won't by itself provide a "decision outcome" in the present case, because there are two rogue states with programs to build nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The theory says that both have to go, and if President Bush can be taken at his word, he thinks the same thing. To me the implication seems clear: Iraq first, Iran next. |
