Dark victory

Why Bush's war in Iraq has damaged America's standing in the world and made us less safe.

By Jeffrey Record

Apr 29, 2004 | No one who despises tyranny can regret the destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom swept away more than thirty years of neo-Stalinist brutality and oppression. Whether or not Saddam Hussein posed a security threat to the United States in the spring of 2003, he had been a mortal threat to Iraqis ever since coming to power in 1968 and an open transgressor of numerous United Nations resolutions since 1990. Saddam Hussein ran one of the few totalitarian regimes to survive the collapse of Soviet Communism, which formed the last major totalitarian state threat to Western values and interests.

Nor can any student of military history ignore the extraordinary performance of U.S. forces in bringing down Saddam's regime. Allies and adversaries alike could not fail to be awed by the combination, on the one hand, of the Bush administration's unshakable determination to proceed against Iraq despite the loss of the Turkish "front" and to press on to Baghdad in the face of unexpected rear-area Iraqi resistance, and, on the other, of the remarkable operational and tactical flexibility displayed by masterfully coordinated ground, air, and naval forces. And who could not admire the courage, skill, and firmness of purpose with which U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines went about their professional business? Operation Iraqi Freedom, coming on the heels of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, underscored America's unchallengeable conventional military supremacy.

But the Bush administration did not attack Iraq in 2003 for the purposes of liberating its people and demonstrating America's mastery of modern warfare. It went to war to remove what it asserted was a direct and imminent threat to U.S. security and to remake Iraq as a precursor to the Middle East's political transformation. It did so, moreover, over the objections of most of its friends and allies.

The larger questions, of course, concern the wisdom of the war and its likely political consequences. Some of those consequences are already apparent; others remain speculative. Wars are not only waged for political objectives; they can also have unintended political consequences. Moreover, since the removal of the Berlin Wall the United States has encountered considerable difficulty in converting its military victories into enduring political successes. In 1991 it reversed Iraqi aggression against Kuwait but failed to remove the source of that aggression -- a failure that necessitated, at least in the post-9/11 judgment of the George W. Bush White House and its neoconservative advisers, a second war against Iraq. In 1995 the United States, after much hesitation and with the assistance of Croatian ground forces, managed to halt Bosnian Serb genocide in Bosnia but only at the price of a peace enforced by a continuing NATO military presence. In 1999 the United States went to war against Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but did so in a manner that encouraged its acceleration; as in Bosnia, a residual force presence was necessary to enforce peace. In neither Bosnia nor Kosovo did the United States display a significant commitment to effective political reconstruction.

The same was true in Afghanistan. Though the Bush administration removed the Taliban regime in 2001, it was not prepared to invest the resources necessary to prevent Afghanistan's descent into that country's pre-Taliban warlordism. As of the fall of 2003, the "government" of Hamid Karzai controlled little territory outside Kabul; a brigade-sized U.S. Army force remained in Afghanistan, where it was conducting operations against a resurgent al-Qaeda presence in eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistani territory bordering Afghanistan. The central government in Kabul lacked adequate security forces, infrastructure, and foreign assistance; the absence of government forces or an outside occupation force in the countryside effectively ceded most of Afghanistan to local warlords and the continuing strategic intrigue of Iran and Pakistan; massive heroin production resumed.

The lack of a determined U.S. political follow-through in Afghanistan was, in the judgment of Frederick W. Kagan, "emblematic of a larger failure to recognize that the shape and nature of a military operation establishes for good or ill the preconditions for the peace to follow. It is possible, as we saw both in Afghanistan and in our earlier campaign against Iraq in 1991, to design military operations that are brilliantly successful from a strictly operational point of view but that do not achieve and may actually hamper the achievement of larger political goals."

The U.S. war against Iraq in 2003 was not only unnecessary but also damaging to long-term U.S. political interests in the world. It was unnecessary because Iraq posed no measure of danger to the United States justifying war. It was damaging because the preventive, unilateralist nature of the war alienated key friends and allies and weakened international institutions that have long served U.S. security interests and because of the evident lack of preparedness of the United States to deal with the predictable consequences of its forcible removal of Saddam Hussein.

Seven other conclusions can be drawn from the war against Iraq.

(1) The Bush doctrine correctly identifies a grave and unprecedented threat to the United States -- indeed, to the West as a whole: fanatical nonstate organizations seeking to acquire destructive capacity heretofore monopolized by states and not deterrable by traditional threats of punishment, denial, or destruction.

Globalization has accelerated the role of nonstate actors in the international system, and the proliferation of WMD and their means of delivery portends a grim marriage of "radicalism and technology." The attacks of September 11 were a warning of things to come. Even if al-Qaeda did not employ WMD, there is little doubt it would have done so had the terrorist organization had access to such weapons. Moreover, against al-Qaeda or any other nondeterrable terrorist enemy that has already attacked the United States, a war of extermination, including preemptive and preventive military action, is morally justified and strategically imperative.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan was both. The Taliban regime was an ally of al-Qaeda that provided the terrorist organization a safe haven to plan, train, and direct operations against American and other Western targets. The regime refused demands that the Taliban turn over the perpetrators of 9/11, and when the Taliban refused, the United States acted. The connection between Operation Enduring Freedom and 9/11 was clear and accounted for the legitimacy it commanded among so many countries that would later oppose the U.S. attack on Iraq.

(2) Rogue states seek weapons of mass destruction for purposes that include deterrence, and so far have not employed such weapons in circumstances likely to invite unacceptable counteraction.

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