Headache upon Headache: Questions of Iraq, nukes, and occupation

The problem with the Iraq debate is that as soon as one tough question appears to be settled, another even harder one rises to take its place. For example, suppose one concludes -- as I have -- that the narrowly defined security risks of going to war against Iraq are smaller than the risks of waiting and watching for trouble to multiply. That is an important question, and just six months ago, most war hawks and doves alike thought it the only one to hand. But it has only led to another: If the United States goes to war either alone or without U.N. Security Council sanction, would the possible damage to its reputation for generous and benign international conduct be severe enough to reverse that judgment? And even if one gets by that question and is still inclined to war -- as I am -- a third, related question compounds the calculation: What is the United States to do with Iraq once it gets it?

Clearly, the United States would do itself no good, and Iraq's neighbors palpable harm, were it to leave Iraq before stabilizing the country in its present territorial configuration, accounting for all stocks and precursors of weapons of mass destruction, and ensuring that Iraq does not become a failed-state incubus for future terrorism. That such dangers are real becomes clear if we assess objectively the aftermath of the war against the Taliban -- something the administration has not been wont to do publicly, so that few Americans realize how badly the U.S. government has erred there.

We have abetted the creation of a very narrowly based government in Afghanistan that has no chance to enact even a traditional form of decentralized rule acceptable to the majority of the country's population. Not only is that government minoritarian Tajik in a country whose center of population and political gravity is Pashtun, but only those in a single Tajik valley, the Panjshir, can hear the heartbeat of power. Thus, to strengthen the government of Hamid Karzai (a Pashtun figurehead on a Tajik physique) and to build an Afghan army amounts to inviting a new phase of civil war -- with ourselves bound to one side and other external powers in league with the other. One of those powers is Pakistan, whose own Pashtun population, along with Taliban remnants it is loath to root out, make up its prospective tools of influence in a renewed Afghan civil war. That war could easily coincide with or even lead to conflagration and extreme danger in Pakistan, where Karachi is the new Al-Qaeda Central -- only a bus ride away from Pakistan's nuclear-weapons arsenal.

It is not that we did "too little" in post-war Afghanistan; it is that what we did do was done timidly. The U.S. military chose to fight by proxy, and the National Security Council declined to stop the Northern Alliance from seizing Kabul, lest it lose future options to deploy Afghan warlords against Taliban and al-Qaeda survivors rather than U.S. soldiers. The result is not only a narrow government, incipient civil strife, and a consequent inability to get at perhaps thousands of trained terrorists, but a lack of respect for U.S. power and mental discipline throughout the region. Of course, Iraq is not like Afghanistan, either in historical, social, or military terms. But the U.S. track record in Afghanistan inspires little confidence that the civilians in and around the Oval Office have got the grip they need on the U.S. military to finesse their way through the tricky political terrain of southwest Asia.

But if doing too little in a post-war Iraq could be dangerous, trying to do too much could be much worse. There are two forms of such overreaching: imperial Machtpolitik and muscular Wilsonianism.

The former would have the United States occupy Iraq in order to control its oil, thereby gaining both power of intimidation against Iran and decisive leverage against Saudi Arabia, a country that many consider to be at the bottom of our problem with once and future 9/11s. The latter would have us transform 22 Arab countries and the Muslim world beyond into liberal democracies, thus getting at the root causes of Islamist terrorism. Either such effort, or a tossed and turned combination of the two, would in due course cause future Osamas to pour off a newly invigorated assembly line of Middle Eastern resentment, and head in our general direction. Whatever its stated Wilsonian predicates, U.S. actions would be understood in the imperial tense, for the United States would inherit with a vengeance the European colonial mantle of a previous era in the Muslim world, and the image of an aggressive Christendom for centuries before that. Even the cleverest U.S. "hearts and minds" public diplomacy would bounce off a civilization whose infosphere remains impervious to alien ministrations. Indeed, the more sophisticated our efforts, the more their intended recipients would fear our conspiracies.

The potentially counterproductive impact of a war against Iraq could rise sharply if American troops end up killing lots of Iraqi civilians, or if Saddam manages to draw Israel into a war in parallel with the United States. Should the worst happen both during and after a war, it would represent bin Laden's greatest triumph: He will have used terrorism exactly as the manual directs -- to get the target of terrorist action to harm itself in a way that the terrorist attacker cannot achieve on his own. He will have his war of civilizations, and he will have put maximum pressure on his most proximate enemies: the "impious" regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the other Arab autocracies.