The war on four fronts; A year after the war on Iraq began, its

Diplomatic editor Trevor Royle

Resolution in adversity, unity in the face of increased danger, steadfastness in an uncertain world, defiance against an unyielding enemy ... that is the message the Bush administration is sending out as it marks the first anniversary of military operations against Iraq.

First on parade was President Bush, rallying his allies with an address in the White House which spoke of steadfastness in adversity and the need to avoid compromise as though it were the work of the devil. His hawkish defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld followed with a homely, upbeat message to the troops, thanking them for their efforts and promising the end was almost in sight. Getting Iraq straightened out, he said, was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: "They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start."

If only it were so simple. Both men showed determination in getting their message across to Washington's allies and the troops in Iraq, but the reality is much more complicated than the president's folksy, downhome moralising. One year after the coalition forces unleashed their modern weapons to bring down Saddam Hussein's regime there is no sense of closure or comfort, little belief that the war was well won or its objectives fulfilled.

True, Saddam has been deposed and Iraq has been put on the long road towards freedom from dictatorship, but these probably could have been achieved by other means. Dr Hans Blix, former head of the UN weapons inspection team, thinks so. On Friday he said the invasion of Iraq had polarised the Middle East and worsened the threat of global terrorism. He also had harsh words for the coalition, blaming Bush and Blair for pursuing a "witch-hunt" to justify their actions, exaggerating the Iraqi threat, and undermining his inspectors. They were, he said, like advertising executives hyping their product: war in Iraq is good.

So what now? Instead of scanning the horizon with the gaze of the justified conqueror, the US is embroiled in a series of interconnected conflicts, none of which it is winning in the short term and all of which will create headaches for Washington's strategic planners for at least 25 years. For the distinguished military commentator Anthony Cordesman, holder of the Arleigh A Burke chair in strategy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the scenario is bleak and testing. He has given the clearest analysis of the challenges the US faces in a paper he presented to the institute called Four Wars And Counting. The four wars are Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism and the War Yet To Come.

He argues that these conflicts will require greater pragmatism and less reliance on ideological soundbites and slogans. "It's going to be a very tough year," he says. "In fact, it's going to be a very tough decade."

The War in Iraq Following the coalition's crushing victory, the war against Iraq is now being seen as possibly illegal and, in many minds, distinctly immoral. Why was its anniversary marked across the globe yesterday by the same kind of protests which preceded it? Why are the hawks on either side of the Atlantic so defensive, demanding that the world has to move on? For all the advance scaremongering, the fighting was certainly unequal. One statistic tells casual observers all they need to know about the military operations. In the financial year before the US and Britain sent their forces to the Gulf, the US spent $379 billion dollars on its armed forces, while Iraq rustled up a mere $2bn for the same purpose. The outcome of the conventional battle should never have been in doubt, and it comes as no surprise to find that in the most recent analyses of the conflict the shortest sections are on the performance and shortcomings of the Iraqi forces.

While most commentators agree that the best results of the war were the toppling of Saddam and the crushing of a rogue nation that threatened stability in the Middle East, there is also a widespread admission that WMD will never be found, either because they had been decommissioned by UN weapons inspection teams or because they had been spirited out of the country. It is also possible that their existence owed more to the braggadocio of Saddam loyalists who ran Iraq's armed forces and gave their leader over-optimistic accounts of their arsenal. Remember Comical Ali?

And the war itself has not yet been won. Coalition forces are bogged down in a nasty, low-intensity conflict which shows no sign of abating, though almost 600 soldiers have died since it officially ended. In public, US commanders toe the party line by emphasising improvements, such as the growing Iraqi security forces, and insisting that the transfer of power will take place according to timetable. In private, their thoughts are darker. Some fear coalition forces will be needed for at least 10 years to keep the peace, while others doubt that democracy and Iraq are natural bedfellows. For evidence they have only to look outside their defended compounds, where the different factions are weighing up their chances in the scramble that will follow the transfer of power. Winning the war in 2003 was the easy part; but securing the peace in 2004 is a different and much more volatile matter.

The War In Afghanistan Further to the east, Afghanistan is still simmering. If not for this weekend's fighting in south Waziristan, which has given rise to rumours that Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, is about to be captured, Afghanistan would be in danger of becoming the forgotten war.

In terms of realpolitik, the attack on the Taliban administration was fully justified - as they provided shelter and training facilities for the al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks. Yet even this was a skewed victory, achieved as much by the opposition militias which acted as proxy allies as by the weight of US firepower. Attempts at nation-building have not been the complete success the Bush administration craved, and the writ of President Hamid Karzai's administration does not run much beyond Kabul. There has to be something wrong when a leader rarely ventures out of his base and leaves much of his country in the hands of warlords.

It has not all been bad news: on the credit side, the Afghanistan operation has demonstrated the value of multilateralism in the task of nation-building. That was the message taken to Kabul last week by secretary of state Colin Powell, who produced a roll-call of successes including the provision of 25 million school textbooks, the construction or rebuilding of 203 schools, the rehabilitation of 140 clinics, and the vaccination of 4.26 million children against measles and polio. Perhaps the highest-profile achievement is the restoration of the 310-mile Kabul-Kandahar highway, which now allows the trip between the two cities to be taken in less than four hours, a third of the previous ordeal.

While the bulk of the fighting was undertaken by the US, with considerable support from British special forces, reconstructing the country has fallen on the international community. Nato is now in command of the 5000-strong International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) and the UN is overseeing the elections which are due to take place in June. Not that it has been plain sailing: Isaf still takes casualties, with two US soldiers being killed at the end of the week and five UN inspectors narrowly escaping when their compound in Paktia's Chamkani district was attacked with rockets on Friday.

The War Against Terrorism The despatch of the Taliban in Afghanistan has done little to discomfort al-Qaeda. While some of its leaders were killed or captured in the military campaign, the network simply moved out of Afghanistan and reinvented itself as a different, more shadowy grouping, still pursuing the salafi-jihadi doctrine of transnational jihad, sometimes called "the war against the Crusaders". That they can still attack at will was shown all too graphically in the attack on the Madrid trains and the bombs that slaughtered tourists in Bali. Calling it al-Qaeda is also a hindrance. While it is an instantly recognisable shorthand, Cordesman points out that it masks the rarely spoken fact that "the war against terrorism is not against al-Qaeda, but against violent Islamic extremism driven by mass demographic, economic and social forces in a region with limited political legitimacy".

Chillingly, Cordesman and other US analysts now believe this war will take at least 25 years to complete, and that it will not be won by the methods now being used. Strategists now know there will be no quick and decisive victories, that sophisticated conventional weapons have only a limited role to play, and that the fighting will be costly in financial and human terms. Instead of firing off smart weapons and Cruise missiles, the network has to be infiltrated, bank accounts have to be seized, communications systems penetrated - all expensive, time-consuming tasks. A campaign of that kind also needs partners, not just in the Western alliance but also in the Arab world, who are prepared to stay the course and work to achieve common ground. That will mean less talk about pre-emptive strikes and more about economic reforms. There has to be a greater emphasis on the Palestinian problem, and there needs to be an end to pious promises of imposing democracy.

Unless there is a shift of emphasis, this third and perhaps greatest of the four wars is the one the US might be in greatest danger of losing. In the aftermath of September 11 waging war on terrorism was an easy slogan, but while it won Bush instant allies (including the now much-reviled French), it was a mass of contradictions. To the Americans it was clear-cut. They had been attacked by fundamentalist terrorists, most were of Saudi Arabian extraction and all had links to al-Qaeda. Hitting back was sold as a righteous duty, yet the need to retaliate led to the creation of a belief that the war was being waged against the Arab world in general and then Iraq in particular.

The War Yet To Come As well as Afghanistan, Iraq and the war against terrorism, the US faces the prospect of further confrontation with North Korea over its possession of nuclear weapons. While Libya has been counted a success for surrendering its WMD, there are still question marks over Iran and Syria, both deeply suspicious entities in the minds of Rumsfeld and his hawkish allies. Elsewhere there is the ever-present danger of being sucked into a regional conflict over Taiwan, and the drug wars in South America are never far from causing the US grief. Not only does the drug trade fund crime, it is linked to terrorism, and it offers a stark reminder that homeland security remains a chimera while cocaine from South America floods into the West. Already Washington's neo-conservative think-tanks are having to spend more time defending their thinking than looking for the next place to get another taste of pre-emptive action.

All this has come about in a way that has not always benefited US interests. A year ago Washington was clear about its aims. With the UN Security Council opposed to force, the US pushed through its policy of acting unilaterally and decisively, hitting Iraq before the dangers escalated. In place of the multilateralism offered by the international community there would be a coalition of the willing, and the UN itself would be sidelined as a liberal "old world" irrelevance. (In pursuit of that policy, a US State Department official told the Sunday Herald they would not be pushed around by "a Marxist in a toga" - a clear reference to the UN ambassador from Guinea who presided over the Security Council in the last fevered days before the Iraq war.) What a difference a year makes. The UN is now more deeply involved than ever, and even the "coalition of the willing", now numbering 90 countries, is showing that its foundations are far from secure. Spain looks certain to carry out its new administration's threat to pull out of Iraq and realign the country with the sceptics of Old Europe who were opposed to war in the first place. President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland has admitted feeling "very uncomfortable" about the failure to discover WMD, and latest coalition recruits South Korea and Japan have told the coalition high command that they, not the US joint chiefs of staff, will decide how and whether their troops will be deployed. Local US commanders hoped the 3600-strong Japanese contingent would join the US 1st Infantry division in the Kirkuk area, but this has been vetoed in Tokyo. As a worried State Department official put it, the coalition is not yet faltering, but "it is failing to put the necessary building blocks in place in advance of the transfer of power".

It is not the beginning of the end of the coalition, but the road ahead looks less secure than when US armoured forces thundered to Baghdad in just three weeks, crushing the opposition. Then, victory was a matter of destroying a known enemy. Now it is a matter of deciding who the enemy really is.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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