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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The failure to find WMD or any substantive link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida has forced the administration to fall back on a more complex defense against its critics: that toppling Saddam would help drain the Middle East swamp that has been a breeding ground for fierce anti-U.S. sentiment in the region.
Iraq, in that analysis, was the second phase of swamp-draining; toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan was the first. And Bush and his allies can claim some tentative success. The effort to overthrow both repressive governments may win friends and allies for the U.S. for generations to come, especially if each country can build toward greater security and freedom.
Peters, author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in the Changing World," sees progress in the region just in the past few months. "To look at it objectively right now, indicators are overwhelmingly positive," he says. For example, he says, both Syria and Iran have throttled back their state-sponsored terrorism.
Many Iraq war hawks felt that the war could also hasten a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. That would deprive militants in the region of one of their main complaints, they reasoned, and thereby reduce their hostility to the U.S. Thus far, experts are split on whether that aim has been achieved. On one hand, peace talks under the rubric of the Bush-backed "road map" continue; suicide bombings have all but stopped, and this week Israel released hundreds of jailed Palestinian militants in a sign of good faith. Yet at the same time, the Israeli government, over the objections of the Bush administration as well as the Palestinian Authority, continues building a massive security wall to run through portions of the Palestinian West Bank.
But for every gain achieved in the few months since Saddam's government fell, there have been significant costs and reverses, analysts say.
"The United States is not safer, because we went after the wrong target," argues Peña at the Cato Institute. "Since 9/11, it ought to be pretty clear that we're at war with the al-Qaida terrorist network, not rogue states who share common animosity towards the United States ... Iraq sapped tremendous attention and resources and has given al-Qaida time to recuperate and rejuvenate."
"We're less safe because we have made enemies out of people who were not previously our enemy, and we stirred up the anti-American sentiment," former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson told Salon.
In 1991, Wilson served President George H.W. Bush as the No. 2 U.S. diplomat in Baghdad on the eve of the first Gulf War. Last year, the CIA sent Wilson on a fact-finding trip to Niger to determine if there was any truth to the allegation that Iraq was trying to buy uranium oxide -- which can be converted into fuel for nuclear weapons -- from the African country. Wilson found no such evidence and earlier this month wrote a New York Times Op-Ed piece critical of the administration, saying he had told the CIA long before the president's January 2003 State of the Union speech that the reports about Saddam's business in Niger were suspect.
"We'd probably make a lot more progress in the war on terrorism if we'd focused on Afghanistan and not gotten distracted in Iraq," Wilson said. "Then there wouldn't be the rebirth of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as pockets of al-Qaida." Last week, Reuters reported that fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar had ordered the new deputy military commander for southern Afghanistan to intensify guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces.
Wilson, like some other foreign policy experts, is openly skeptical of the claim that the fight against Saddam would have any positive impact in reducing terrorism against the United States. Saddam's terrorist ties were with Palestinian-focused groups, such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, which have been waging a guerrilla war with Israel for years. And unlike al-Qaida, the groups have not targeted or issued threats against the United States.
"Why are we fighting the battle of terrorism in Iraq?" Wilson asked. "Does Iraq have ties to groups with a global reach, a distinction the president himself made for the war on terrorism after 9/11? Or is it because we've so tied our foreign policy to Israel? If the United States considers any terrorist attack against Israel to be an attack on the U.S., then it ought to come out and say so."
Thomas Neumann, executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, argues that Middle Eastern terrorist groups cannot be easily divided into distinct groups, and need to be fought across the board, regardless of whether their primary targets are America or Israel. "Terrorism is global, security is global. We have to go to the terrorists, or they will come to us."
