Another review. Storm Warnings for a Supply-Side War

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Gordon C. Thomasson" <gthomas1 () stny rr com>
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 12:26:11 -0500
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Another review.

Here is a cogent review in the March 24th edition of The Nation of the book
most cited as "making the case" for invading Iraq. Ian Lustick is a
professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania,  associate
director of its Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict,
and author of several books on the Middle East.
 
review | Posted March 4, 2003
Storm Warnings for a Supply-Side War
by Ian S. Lustick
 
        There's nothing like a compelling icon when no compelling argument
is available. That is just how Kenneth Pollack's book, The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq , is presented by its publisher (the
venerable Council on Foreign Relations) and how it is used. It was hailed by
the managing editor of Foreign Affairs (which is published by the council as
well) as "one of the most important books on American foreign policy in
years." Of course, the overwhelming majority of those who will cite the book
to support a US-led war in Iraq will not read it. They will rely on its
title, its publication by the Council on Foreign Relations and the
titillating biography of the author--a former CIA analyst whose advice to be
tough on Iraq went unheeded during the Clinton years. It has become a
talisman, not an argument.

But what does the book actually do? It provides an excellent review of the
history of the up-and-down relationship between Saddam's Iraq and its
neighbors and between Saddam and the United States. It vividly documents the
horrors of Saddam's repressive regime. It argues that neither containment
nor deterrence nor sanctions can be relied upon (individually) to prevent
him from gaining access to nuclear weapons. It spells out the author's
(reluctantly arrived at) belief that only an American invasion, mounted to
do the job even without help from Middle Eastern or European allies, can
succeed. 

Most of this is unsurprising to anyone who has read reviews of the book, or
even to those who have read its first 300 pages. However, lurking in the
book's last 100 pages is the decisive but largely ignored aspect of its
argument. What may be surprising is that Pollack here spells out, somewhat
unsystematically yet with admirable clarity, the conditions under which his
advice for an all-out, US-led invasion of Iraq should actually be taken.
What is glaringly apparent is that not a single one of these conditions has
been met. 

Before launching an invasion, writes Pollack, the United States must judge
itself ready to commit all the resources necessary "to rebuild Iraq as a
stable, functioning nation." His own estimate of the requirements for this
objective includes maintaining US troops in Iraq "for five to ten years" at
a cost of "$5 billion to $10 billion on reconstruction over that same period
of time, plus as much as another $10 billion to $20 billion to maintain a
military presence in the country." Elsewhere, Pollack suggests that the US
bill for reconstruction "could easily amount to several billion dollars per
year for as long as a decade." But even this higher estimate is almost
certainly absurdly low, especially for bringing a heavily damaged country to
the kind of "stable, prosperous, and pacific" state Pollack says is the sine
qua non for not substituting one "intolerable threat" for another.

In this regard, it is sobering to consider that Washington has agreed to pay
Turkey more or less the entire amount Pollack estimates will be needed to
rebuild Iraq just to compensate it for expected damage to its economy from a
war--and the war is not even supposed to be fought in Turkey! Indeed, as
Pollack writes, "our information about the situation in Iraq is poor. Once
we arrive in the country, we might discover that the reality was quite
different from what we had expected." Whatever the costs of reconstruction
and Iraqi nation-building are, they will be high, and Pollack's point is
that unless the United States is willing to pay them it should not invade.
No statements emanating from Washington suggest that the Bush Administration
has made that judgment. Certainly the American people have not.

Pollack also warns that other "significant price tags" will be attached to
the war he has suggested. To wage that war requires that "the United States
would have to be willing" to incur those costs and risks. These include the
likelihood "that deaths from an invasion would number in the high hundreds
for U.S. military personnel and the high thousands for Iraqi civilians," but
that "we might suffer several thousand American military personnel killed
and several tens of thousands of Iraq civilians killed." No poll I have seen
that includes significant estimates of US casualties reports a response rate
anywhere near a majority of Americans in support of an invasion. Nor has the
Administration itself indicated its readiness to accept this many American
deaths and the much larger number of wounded that would be associated with
it. 

        Pollack also argues that the United States should not and cannot
conduct a successful war alone. At one point he goes so far as to say that
the Persian Gulf states "have a veto over whether or not we invade Iraq."
Elsewhere he stipulates that "an invasion of Iraq would require a new
coalition to support it"--a coalition that at minimum must include Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab
Emirates. Needless to say, of these necessary allies only Kuwait and,
perhaps, Turkey (although its Parliament is balking), have been cajoled or
coerced into joining our "coalition of the willing."

One reason the coalition Pollack sees as necessary has not been established
is that another key condition for the war has not been met. Pollack
repeatedly emphasizes that as uncomfortable as it may be for many in
Washington to accept, the Israeli-Palestinian problem would have to be
radically reduced in scope, though not necessarily solved, before a war on
Iraq would be advisable. "Much as we may not like mediating between Israel
and the Palestinians, if we are going to deal with the problem of Saddam
Hussein, it is necessary that we do so." Only if we "deal with the
Arab-Israeli conflict and get it moving in the right direction," he writes,
can we be confident of the access we will need to Egyptian air space, the
support we need from the Egyptian government and the political barrier
required to reduce the risk of regime collapse in several friendly Arab
countries. The Israeli-Palestinian problem is identified as the source of
most of the "bedlam" in the Middle East, and Pollack warns that levels of
unrest in the region must be reduced if his characterization of an invasion
as "the conservative course of action" is to be considered valid. "Unless
and until we have done that preparatory work, an invasion of Iraq itself
would be the risky option." Again, needless to say, this condition is as far
from being met now as it has been since the beginning of the second intifada
in the fall of 2000.

Pollack also warns that despite the dangers he sees in Saddam's Iraq and the
inadequacies of other options he considers, no invasion should be undertaken
unless key domestic political requirements are met. As in World War II and
Vietnam, he writes, "the United States should not embark upon this [war]
without the clear, expressed support of the American people." A marker of
this requisite level of public support would be "the endorsement of a
congressional declaration of war." Of course, Congress is nowhere near ready
to pass such a declaration. Polls now show that no more than 55 percent of
the American people support President Bush's handling of the Iraq issue.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are marching in the streets against the
war, and it has not even begun.

But of all the warnings Pollack offers, of all of the conditions he places
upon the advisability of the war option, none are more categorical and more
obviously unmet than his insistence that no war can be made on Iraq until
after Al Qaeda has been defeated. According to Pollack, "it would be best to
hold off on plans for an invasion until al-Qa'eda [is] more thoroughly
eradicated." In his conclusion he is more emphatic. "In the immediate wake
of 9/11, we rightly devoted all of the United States' diplomatic,
intelligence, and military attention to eradicating the threat from
al-Qa'eda, and as long as that remains the case we should not indulge in a
distraction [sic!] as great as toppling Saddam." Pollack is specifically
afraid that a war in Iraq could itself lead to the transfer of weapons of
mass destruction from Iraqi arsenals to terrorist networks like Al Qaeda.
While allowing that the utter destruction of Al Qaeda would be too severe a
condition for a US war in Iraq, "we certainly need to be at a point where we
do not have monthly government warnings of possible terrorist attacks."
Oscillating as we have been, between Code Yellow and Code Orange alerts, it
is clearly the case that this condition for war, however hedged, has not
been met. 

Having finished The Threatening Storm, the careful reader will wag his or
her head in disbelief. How can a book resounding with so many warnings
against an invasion be heralded as acompelling call to arms? The question
parallels the large question ringing in the ears of millions of puzzled
Americans. What is the reason for this war? What has made it such an urgent
matter to dispose of Saddam Hussein? What has changed in Iraq to produce a
threat to the United States and the world that was not present eight, six or
four years ago? What is the "demand" for this war?

The answer is simple. This is a supply-side war. There is very little demand
for the war, and nothing in the way of a compelling necessity for it. But
the enormous supply of political capital flowing toward the President after
9/11 combines with the overweening preponderance of US military power on a
global level to make the production of war in Iraq not a trivial affair but
one that can be embraced with relatively little thought and almost no need
to appeal to a readiness to sacrifice. That a war is militarily and
politically so "easy" for the United States government can explain why so
little reason for a war can produce so powerful a campaign for one. It also
explains why so weak an argument for it, as is contained in the Pollack
book, can be so widely regarded as persuasive.

 
        Let us consider this point more closely. History and international
relations theory both teach us that unchecked power leads to hegemonic
ambitions and violent efforts to achieve them. In any country there will be
small groups with powerful fantasies that can have access to power. Those
fantasies are usually irrelevant because of countervailing power and the
all-too-apparent risks of miscalculation. But when the margin of military
power is as great as it is now, it takes less to render decisive the access
to power enjoyed by small groups holding extravagant, hegemonic ambitions.

Since the 1980s there has been a small but powerful group of neoconservative
hawks who see in the "'remoralization' of American foreign policy" the
restoration of "a sense of the heroic" and the establishment of an American
position of "benevolent global hegemony" as not only good in themselves but
as necessary to insure the repeated election of conservative Presidents
(William Kristol and Robert Kagan, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,"
Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996).The idea is to use the glories and
dangers of overseas adventures to redefine the agenda of political
contestation away from the bread-and-butter issues used by liberals to win
elections. 

With these factors in mind one can understand that the proximate cause of
the Bush Administration's campaign for war in Iraq was the terrorist attack
on September 11. Before that, the cabal of neocon warriors driving this
juggernaut--including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Donald
Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and the tom-tom beaters of the Weekly
Standard--could not prevail in the battle for the President's foreign policy
agenda against the prudent realism of the old Republican guard, represented
(at that time) by Colin Powell and now-silenced veterans of earlier
Republican administrations: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Henry
Kissinger. After 9/11 the amount of political capital available to the
President for doing anything at all that could be massaged to look relevant
to 9/11 increased beyond measure. This campaign for an invasion of Iraq is
thus aptly understood as a supply-side war because it is not driven by a
particular threat, a particularly accentuated threat or a "demand" for war
associated with the struggle against Al Qaeda, but because of the
combination of an enormous supply of military power and political capital
and the proximity to the highest echelons of the American government of a
small cabal long ago committed to just this sort of war.

The agenda of this cabal includes not so much oil (though cheap,
American-controlled oil is a part of the plan) but a desire to repeat in the
Middle East the "miracle" of the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of
the Soviet bloc and the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe.
Demonstrating the usefulness and usability of American arms is taken, by
this group, to be necessary to allow the United States to get its way in
other regions, and to accomplish a wide array of goals in pursuit of its
hegemonic position, without always having to use force. There is also an
unstated but powerful objective to transform the Arab countries in the
Middle East from states putatively obsessed with irrational hatreds of a
wholly innocent Israel into rational, accommodating democracies that will
give up on the Palestinian problem and let right-wing Israeli governments
determine the future of the occupied territories without external pressures.

Just as Pollack's book is useful for identifying the long list of reasons
the fantasies of this group are likely to lead to disaster for the Middle
East and for us, so too does it document this supply-side interpretation.
Pollack was close to the circles that wanted a war on Iraq during the
Clinton years. He and others were frustrated by the inability to move the US
government toward that objective. What changed? Pollack is very clear:
We need to keep in mind that what makes any of this discussion possible is
the shock to the American populace as a result of the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, and the public's willingness to make sacrifices and take
forceful action to eliminate other such threats. This willingness may not
last forever.

"This willingness may not last forever." Exactly. As the American people
gain perspective on the character of the threats they do and do not face, as
they learn to distinguish Al Qaeda from Iraq, and Iraq from anthrax attacks
in New Jersey and Washington, and as they gain the capacity to think
rationally about the costs and risks associated with various options for
combating national security threats, support for the invasion and occupation
of Iraq will virtually disappear. This appreciation of the closing window of
political opportunity for the war is another reason for the insistence on it
now and the determination to ignore all evidence to the contrary when it
comes to discussion of the wisdom of that course of action.




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