Bush Bets Future on Success in Iraq (balanced )

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

washingtonpost.com 

Bush Bets Future on Success in Iraq

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 16, 2003; Page A01


There is debate on nearly every aspect of the crisis over Iraq -- except the
idea that, for better or worse, the stakes have become very, very high.

Walter Russell Mead, a distinguished historian of American foreign policy,
compared this moment to the birth of the Cold War around 1948, and before
that to the Spanish-American War of 1898, which established the United
States as a world power. "We're definitely in a period of major change," he
said.

Mead supports the administration's policy on Iraq. Jessica Tuchman Mathews,
president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, opposes it. But
she agreed on the scale: "Is this 1914?" she asked, recalling another
crucial moment, when overeager leaders plunged the world into a disastrous
war.

By accident or design, President Bush has allowed Iraq to become the gamble
of a lifetime. Today, The Washington Post summarizes what's at stake in four
areas of crucial national interest -- America's stature, Middle East
politics, the war on terrorism and conditions at home.

A less than gleaming outcome in Iraq could, in the view of many experts,
inflame terror, weaken our alliances, diminish the United States and
collapse confidence in our economy -- which is already at its lowest point
in more than a decade. Even a successful result contains risks in the eyes
of those who have pondered the recurring cycle in human history in which
power leads to hubris, hubris leads to overreaching, and overreaching leads
to collapse. Victory could tempt the United States to overreach.

Against this, Bush has set the rubble of Sept. 11, 2001. The status quo, he
reminds the world, is also fraught with risk. Success in Iraq, he has said,
could pay off handsomely -- by liberating a strategically placed country
from a despot, sowing modernity in the heart of the Middle East, and
imposing a severe price on a state that nurtures terrorist jihads and
pursues banned weapons.

Whether the United States, and the world, would be better or worse off after
a war in Iraq is a matter of conjecture on which very experienced, expert
people strongly disagree. Where some envision suicide terrorists with
radioactive bombs, rising inflation and gasoline shortages, others picture a
burst of economic enthusiasm at home and a chastening of rogue nations
abroad.

But if the process toward war continues as it has been moving, and the
U.S.-led coalition invades Iraq without clear support from the United
Nations, there is no doubt that America, and its place in the world, will
have changed. And so there is a sense in these tense days that existing
rules are being broken -- or rewritten, updated, smashed or subverted. The
verb you choose speaks volumes about your viewpoint.

For more than 50 years after the cataclysm of World War II, a shaky peace
was maintained by forming alliances, issuing threats and slowly, patiently
exerting pressure. The Cold War was an exercise in waiting. A lexicon of
waiting words defined American strategy, words such as "contain," and
"deter," and "erode." The United States rarely attacked.

Now, the Bush administration has announced that the old way is inadequate in
the face of new threats posed by global terrorism. Peace, in the
administration's view, requires risking alliances if need be, escalating
beyond threats sometimes, removing some enemies who might once have been
contained. To the slow work of the vise, Bush is adding the sharp blow of
the hammer.

Until it falls, no one can say precisely how much the hammer will smash.

If the experts are right and this is a threshold moment for the United
States and the world, then shelves of books will be written about how it
came to pass.

Those with the long view might begin as far back as 1916, when France and
Britain first started haggling over Western influence in what is now Iraq. A
middle-length version could begin in 1990 and 1991, with Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the Persian Gulf War to expel his
forces. "Historians will look back someday and see this not as two wars, but
as the conclusion of a 13-year-long war," said Daniel Yergin, a leading
authority on global economics and oil.

The short version will begin with Bush's January 2002 State of the Union
speech, when he widened his scope in the terrorism war from al Qaeda and
Afghanistan to take in the threats posed by weapons of mass destruction in
the hands of an "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Few observers outside the Bush circle recognized then how quickly the
president would home in on Iraq. Nor, apparently, did Bush realize how ready
North Korea and Iran would be to sprint toward the nuclear clubhouse while
the world focused on Baghdad.

Four months later, in a commencement speech at West Point, the president
announced that "the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment" must
give way to "new thinking. . . . We cannot defend America and our friends by
hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who
solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systemically break them.
If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."

This idea -- that some prospective threats must be dealt with preemptively
-- was then expressed as formal policy in September. The world finally heard
what Bush was saying, saw that Hussein was the test case, and, in many
countries, took a dim view of an American hyperpower conducting preemptive
wars.

Through six months of often rancorous diplomacy and street protests, critics
of the Bush policy have resisted more and more fiercely. The administration
has tried, intermittently, to explain Iraq in terms of past breaches of
international law and ongoing crimes against humanity. But having planted
the idea that this war is intended to vindicate a new policy of preemption,
there is no unsaying it.

The chips are now heaped in the center of the table.

The same geopolitics that have had Western powers haggling over Iraq for
decades still apply. Onto that, radical jihadists have added the high stakes
of suicidal terrorism. And atop that, Bush has piled the explosive idea of
preemptive war by the world's sole superpower. A coalition of countries --
France, Russia, Germany and others -- has added a layer of unprecedented
resistance to U.S. leadership.

However the world arrived at this point, we are here. Bush has staked his
own credibility on ousting Hussein. He has marshaled the nervous support of
a majority of Americans -- even as their gloom about the home front deepens
-- and he has raised an unusual, but not negligible, coalition of
international allies. The next step appears inevitable: "The cards," as Bush
put it in his recent news conference, will be "on the table."

"What's about to unfold is going to be transformative for the Middle East,
for American relations with Europe and for the United States itself," Yergin
ventured.

For better or worse, the guessing will end, and the results will begin to be
known.


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