Dark victory

Postulating a monolithic enemy may have been necessary to sell the American public on war with Iraq, but it blurred key distinctions, including differing vulnerabilities to U.S. force among rogue states, terrorist organizations, and failed states that hosted such organizations. It encouraged the conclusions that war with Iraq was simply a geographical extension of the war on terrorism and that Saddam's removal would weaken the al-Qaeda threat to the United States and its interests overseas. But there was never any evidence of al-Qaeda dependency on Saddam Hussein, and there remains no evidence that Saddam's fall has adversely affected al-Qaeda's future. As if to advertise this fact, al-Qaeda launched deadly attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco just six weeks after the conclusion of the war against Iraq. Al-Qaeda has been damaged by U.S. and allied counterterrorist operations conducted directly against the organization, but these operations are not to be confused with the war that brought down Saddam Hussein.

If anything, post-Saddam Iraq offers al-Qaeda a marvelous new opportunity to mobilize a jihad against the United States in the middle of an unstable Arab heartland. Yet another Western military humiliation of an Arab state cannot but help al-Qaeda recruitment. U.S. occupation forces certainly provide a new target set for al-Qaeda and other terrorist suicide bombers, and armed Iraqi resistance beyond the occasional terrorist attack could emerge if the United States botches Iraq's economic and political reconstruction.

A major consequence of conflating Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda has been to saddle the United States with large and open-ended war and occupation costs at a time when America's homeland security remains substantially underfunded. Dollars that could be going to improve security around U.S. nuclear power plants and major seaports are instead being sent to Iraq to restore electrical power and pay demobilized Iraqi soldiers to keep them from rioting. And the costs continue to grow. By the fall of 2003 the administration had spent $80 billion and planned to spend another $80 billion on the war and postwar Iraq -- with no end in sight and every dime of it borrowed money. The combined total of $160 billion exceeds by more than $60 billion the estimated $98.4 billion shortfall in federal funding of emergency response agencies in the United States over the next five years. That estimate is the product of an independent task force study sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and completed in the summer of 2003. The study, entitled "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared," concluded that almost two years after 9/11, "the United States remains dangerously ill prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil" because of, among other things, acute shortages of radios among firefighters, WMD protective gear for police departments, basic equipment and expertise in public health laboratories, and hazardous materials detection equipment in most cities. And first responders represent just one of many such underfunded components of homeland security. War with Iraq has degraded homeland security.

(6) The U.S. attack on Iraq was a preventive war; as such, it was indistinguishable from aggression, alien to traditional values of American statecraft, and injurious to long-term U.S. security interests.

The U.S. war on Iraq alienated most U.S. friends and allies because it was palpably a preventive war that violated the central norm of relations among states: Thou shalt not commit aggression. That the Bush administration believed and claimed that it was acting in self-defense did not obscure the reality that Iraq posed no direct or immediate threat to the United States. Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, and Great Britain all went to war in 1914 in the name of self-defense. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 in part because they were convinced, as was the Bush administration with respect to Iraq, that time was working against them, that the longer they waited the less favorable the military balance would become. This is not to argue that there was no case for attacking Iraq in 2003. As on the eve of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Saddam was a brutal dictator who was in willful noncompliance with a host of UN resolutions. And there was never any question that he sought WMD, especially nuclear weapons.

But the United States did not go to war in 2003 on behalf of the Iraqi people and the United Nations. Nor was any potential Iraqi WMD threat realizable in the presence of an unfettered UN inspection regime and threatened U.S. preemption. The United States went to war instead on behalf of a new use-of-force doctrine whose proclamation in 2002 and implementation against Iraq in 2003 may have undermined U.S. security in the long term. In addition to saddling the United States with a costly and open-ended political and military entanglement in Iraq, the Bush doctrine and war on Iraq work to encourage enemies to acquire WMD and to deplete resources that might otherwise be allocated to homeland defense against terrorist attack. The doctrine and its war have also weakened the United Nations, divided Europe, damaged NATO (perhaps mortally), and compromised the legitimacy of American power abroad.

To be sure, the United Nations as a collective security organization never lived up to original American expectations for it, and the Security Council's permanent membership is markedly unrepresentative of the actual distribution of state power in the world. But the Bush administration asked the United Nations to do something it was, by virtue of the unanimity rule for Security Council permanent members, incapable of doing: authorize a preventive war against a member state. On only two previous occasions had the United Nations authorized the use of force, and those were in response to flagrant territorial aggression. The administration moreover displayed contempt for the United Nations by suggesting that it was nothing but another discredited League of Nations and making clear that it would proceed against Iraq regardless of what the United Nations did. For the most powerful UN member to behave in such a fashion was to invite the diplomatic debacle that subsequently befell the Bush administration at the United Nations and to further weaken that organization as an instrument of collective security. By alienating three of the other four permanent members of the Security Council over the issue of war with Iraq, the United States forfeited any claim to international legitimacy and diminished prospects that it could ever again, as it had in 1950 and 1990, lead the United Nations into authorizing the use of force against genuine aggressors.

With respect to Europe and NATO, the United States deliberately sought to split the European Union and the Atlantic alliance over the issue of war with Iraq in order to isolate unexpectedly strong French and German opposition, and it did so by mobilizing support in former Communist Europe among states already in or seeking membership in the EU, and especially NATO, and eager to curry U.S. favor. In so doing, the United States, in the view of Henry Kissinger, "produced the gravest crisis in the Atlantic Alliance since its creation five decades ago." Charles Kupchan believes that NATO "now lies in the rubble of Baghdad," a judgment that, if true, would not be unwelcome to an administration that tends to regard formal alliances in general as encumbrances on U.S. freedom of military action and NATO in particular as a strategic pygmy that can bring little to the military table in the war on terrorism and wars against rogue states. The key criterion for judging the worth of allies is loyalty to America's cause as defined by a White House given to postulating a world divided between good and evil and intolerant of those who might have a different view.

To be sure, NATO's future has been an open question since the end of the Cold War, and the combination of the Soviet Union's demise and Europe's continuing integration inevitably diminished the strategic importance of the trans-Atlantic relationship for both the United States and Europe. Neither side of the Atlantic is any longer militarily dependent on the other for its security. Nor is NATO, especially a continually expanded NATO, a useful engine of collective military action outside NATO territory; Operation Allied Force in Kosovo underscored the limits of the alliance's military effectiveness beyond NATO territory.

But was it necessary for the leader of the Atlantic alliance to go out of its way to divide the alliance between those who, for a variety of motives, supported the administration policy on Iraq ("new Europe") and those who, also for a variety of motives, did not ("old Europe")? Should the administration's decision for preventive war against Iraq have been employed as a loyalty test for the other eighteen members of the alliance? And should the United States continue to exclude from participation in Iraq's reconstruction those members of NATO that refused to believe that Iraq posed a credible threat to the United States and U.S. interests in the Gulf? If the existing trend in trans-Atlantic relations continues, especially "if pre-Iraq war diplomacy becomes the pattern," contends Kissinger, "[t]he international system will be fundamentally altered. Europe will be split into two groups defined by their attitude toward cooperation with America. NATO will change its character and become a vehicle for those continuing to affirm the transatlantic relationship. The United Nations, traditionally a mechanism by which the democracies vindicated their convictions against the danger of aggression, will instead turn into a forum in which allies implement theories of how to bring about a counterweight to the hyperpower United States." Surely, such a divided West, Europe, and NATO cannot be in America's long-term interest, especially in a world of rising Islamist violence against Western civilization and everything it stands for.

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