- Paul Wolfowitz could not come up with the right number
when he testified on Capitol Hill recently - he was off by about 30% in
his estimate of the number of Americans killed in Iraq, which at this writing
is 786. He's a busy man. You can't expect him to remember how many young
Americans have died for the ambition of his adult life. Had he been asked
what they died for, he would not have repeated what he told Vanity Fair
last year. He would not have said, "For oil." By now, on message
with the rest of the administration, he'd have said, "For democracy."
-
- Tragically, any good the US could have obtained from
bringing democracy to Iraq has been vitiated by the mayhem Wolfowitz's
obsession with toppling Saddam Hussein has inflicted on the Iraqi people
- the 7,000 to 10,000 civilians killed, the torture victims, the populace
so brutalized and humiliated by an occupation to which Wolfowitz appears
not to have given a thought that over 80% want us out now. And those are
just the short-term, intra-Iraq harms. Long-term, according to the ranking
member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, US interests
in the Middle East have been set back a decade by Abu Ghraib.
-
- Shortly after September 11, Sir Michael Howard, the British
military historian, issued what sounded then like an apocalyptic warning:
that in the context of the "war of civilizations" between radical
Islam and the West a US occupation of Iraq would be tantamount to a nuclear
exchange between the superpowers during the Cold War. It sounds like realism
now. The fallout from the photographs will poison Muslim minds against
the US, and possibly against democracy, throughout this century. Before
the war, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak cautioned that a US invasion
of Iraq would create "a hundred Bin Ladens." That is likely to
prove a conservative estimate.
-
- As for US credibility beyond the Middle East, a friend
writes: "I'm guessing that another result of this adventure is that
much of the world will now see us as a paper tiger (which has both good
and bad aspects). After seeing how incapable we are, with our 135,000-man
army, of dealing even with a weak, backward little country like Iraq, is
any heavily armed tyrant quaking in his boots? All we can do is blow up
things. Don't our hinted warnings to China (China!) about Taiwan sound
hollow now? If China decides to take Taiwan, we will ... what? Send Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle over there with a company of Marines?"
-
- Paradoxically, the very scale of the debacle in Iraq
may yield one long-term good: the repudiation of neo-conservative "democratic
imperialism." The Americans killed in Iraq will not have died in vain
if their sacrifice keeps other Americans from dying in neo-con wars to
"remediate" Syria, Iran, or North Korea. After Iraq, "neo-conservative"
may achieve the resonance of "isolationist" after World War II
- a term of opprobrium for a discredited approach to foreign policy, shorthand
for dangerous innocence about world realities. Like the isolationists,
the neo-cons are history's fools. The strategy they championed was the
wrongest possible strategy for the wrongest possible moment in the wrongest
possible region of the world.
-
- History showed what worked against threatening statesócontainment
and deterrence. Behind them, confident of the melting power of its way
of life, the West waited out Soviet Communism. Containment had its critics
- a wing of the Republican Party demanded a "rollback" of Soviet
power from Eastern Europe. The neo-cons are the heirs of rollback. They
ditched the strategy that worked against a nuclear-armed superpower to
launch a pre-emptive war against a toothless Iraq, which has been contained
and deterred - and disarmedósince the Gulf War. They identified
the wrong enemy (a state), attacked it for the wrong reasons (WMD), and
in a way that strengthened our real enemy, the transnational terrorists
of September 11. America has made mistakes in foreign policy, but nothing
compares to this. In the larger context of the Cold War, Vietnam made a
kind of sense. In the context of the struggle against Islamist terrorism,
Iraq is an act of self-sabotage. Of the neo-cons and their neo-con war
Auden might have written: "Intellectual disgrace stares from every
human face."
-
- Last week, on the NPR public affairs program On Point,
Ian Lustig, a Middle East scholar, saw another filament of hope emerging
from the ruin of Iraq: The US may be so desperate to recoup a measure of
good will in the Arab world that it will force a settlement between Israel
and the Palestinians.
-
- The outlines of a two-state solution were agreed upon
by former Israeli government officials and moderate Palestinians at Geneva
last year. Secretary of State Powell welcomed their initiative. But progress
toward peace cannot happen so long as Ariel Sharon's Likud Party remains
in power in Israel. President Bush's father helped bring down an earlier
Likud government by withholding aid. The issue was the building of more
Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The settlements remain the issue
on which the US still has leverage and over which it still has responsibility,
and, along with Palestinian terrorism (over which we have neither control
nor responsibility) they are the roadblock on the "road map"
to a two-state solution.
-
- On the settlements US and Likud interests diverge. President
Bush betrayed the national interest in abandoning thirty-five years of
US policy toward the settlements to appease Ariel Sharon - and win Jewish
votes in Florida. It is hard to imagine a second Bush Administration reversing
course and even harder to imagine John Kerry facing down a vital part of
the Democratic coalition to force Israelis to choose between the settlements
that have brought them so much suffering and continued US aid. But desperation
brings clarity. National crisis can override special-interest politics.
Israel could still build its wallóonly within its pre-1967 borders.
Perhaps a Palestinian state on contiguous territory on the West Bank, its
people barred from work in Israel, its economy petrified, would confront
its Islamist terrorists. But even if it did not, "Fortress Israel"
would be as secure behind its wall as its history with the Palestinians
will permit. And the US would have taken the one step, perhaps the only
step it can take now, to tamp down the fury of the Arab street, to deny
a propaganda instrument to the denizens of the Arab "basement"
itching to perpetrate a new September 11, and to strengthen the forces
of reform in the Arab world. If there is a path to democracy in the Middle
East, it begins in Jerusalem, not Baghdad.
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- Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.
All rights reserved. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/polipro/pp2004-05-19.htm
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