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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The war on Saddam has made the U.S. less secure, say foreign-policy experts.
Jul 31, 2003 | With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and his ties to the terrorists of al-Qaida proving elusive, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows this week to push a subtle shift in the Bush administration's justification for war in Iraq. Boiled to its essence, the message was simple and had a strong emotional hook: America's security was at stake. U.S. troops, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, are fighting overseas to protect the home front.
"The battle to win the peace in Iraq now is the central battle in the war on terrorism," Wolfowitz argued on Fox News. "And what these [U.S.] troops are doing is something that's going to make our country safer." He echoed the point during a contentious, three-hour hearing Tuesday on Capitol Hill: "Getting rid of the Hussein regime for good is not only in the interest of the Iraqi people, it enhances the security of Americans."
For weeks, the administration has struggled to quiet a public and a press that have grown restive over war justifications that have evaporated like water in the desert sun. But if early signals are any indication, the latest line of defense from the White House is already in trouble. Many in the national security establishment see strong evidence that, far from improving U.S. security, the war in Iraq has caused it significant damage.
Some of the costs are obvious, and paid for in American lives. Administration war planners had predicted U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people. But 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the guerrilla war since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq. In all, 164 U.S. soldiers have died in combat in Iraq, 17 more than were killed in the 1991 Gulf War.
In a series of interviews with Salon, some of the nation's top domestic- and foreign-policy experts charged this week that the war has destabilized the Middle East even as it has distracted the U.S. from the real terrorist threat to domestic security. It has turned public opinion in the Muslim world even more sharply against the U.S. It has fired the anger of new recruits for al-Qaida and other Islamist terror groups, and may help those terrorists get access to lethal weapons of mass destruction. It has provoked Iran and North Korea into a race for nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the experts say, the cost of the war on Iraq has siphoned tens of billions of dollars away from measures needed for domestic security.
The administration "grossly exaggerated" the connection between Iraq and the global war on terrorism, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., scolded Wolfowitz Tuesday. "In my view, the overemphasis on Iraq has caused a serious erosion of our ability to go after the actual [terrorist] operatives."
Others put it in more human terms. "I saw the war with Iraq very differently than a lot of people, namely because of what happened to my husband," says Kristen Breitweiser of Sept. 11 Advocates, whose husband, Ronald, died in the World Trade Center attack. "I thought it was going to incite more terrorists, which apparently it has overseas. And to date we still haven't caught bin Laden."
For now, Bush appears to be protected by continued backing from the American public. In the aftermath of the war, most Americans say they do feel safer. When a Newsweek poll asked respondents to assess the statement "Our national security is stronger because a potential threat has been removed and enemies warned that the United States will use military force to protect its interests," 62 percent agreed. Only 28 percent disagreed.
Perhaps that suggests the Iraq war was a huge collective catharsis, helping the nation to throw off the fears of 9/11. Or perhaps, critics say, the public has been deliberately misled by the Bush administration.
"Bush did a brilliant job of bamboozling American people that Iraq was directly involved with events of 9/11," says John Mearsheimer, an acclaimed foreign policy realist at the University of Chicago who served 10 years in the military during the '60s and '70s. "There's no good evidence Saddam and Osama bin Laden were linked in any meaningful way. But there's no question most Americans don't see it that way."
"Part of American psyche after 9/11 was to strike back against people who resembled the hijackers, who speak the same language, who share a common religious faith," agreed Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "It was an easy sell for the White House to equate Iraq and 9/11."
Taken together, the various war justifications employed by the White House all go to the same point: That war would make America safer. In his nationally televised speech last October, Bush delivered the definitive rationale: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
The administration's thinking does strike a chord with some analysts. "Unequivocally yes, our national security is safer since the war with Iraq," says retired Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters. "We've taken the war to the enemy. Now they're preoccupied with their own survival, not attacking the United States. They understand America won't just lie down and take it."
But the war was justified by Bush explicitly as an effort to rid the region of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Many now assume that the weapons didn't exist. Wolfowitz last week told reporters: "I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction." And, some skeptics wonder, what if the weapons did exist?
Prior to the war, the White House argued that Saddam might hand off deadly weapons to aligned terrorist groups who might strike the United States. White House officials themselves, pressed to explain the weapons' absence, have periodically suggested that some weapons may have been moved into Syria. And it may be unlikely that Saddam would give up an ace in the hole to a group he couldn't control.
What if Saddam lost control of the weapons? "Scientists and military technicians who worked for Saddam Hussein have scattered inside Iraq and are missing, roaming free, possibly for hire," warns Joseph Cirincione, author of "Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction."
Says Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: "If there are [Iraqi] weapons of mass destruction somewhere on the black market, and it's entirely possible, then we're in danger."
