Savvy pundit Jim Hoagland is worried, and rightly so, about the strategic aftereffects of a very difficult year in Iraq.
Military victory in Iraq was supposed to change the psychology of nations as well as the regime in Baghdad. "For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America," President Bush said in his State of the Union message in January.It is not working that way as the occupation of Iraq stumbles toward a nominal end on June 30. The purposes and durability of the use of American military power abroad are being more loudly questioned and more persistently stigmatized in the media, on domestic political hustings and at international conclaves today than they have been since Vietnam.
This is a growing problem for Bush as he heads toward Election Day. But the consequences of failure to create a psychology of victory by following Afghanistan with Iraq are far broader than Bush's fate at the polls. The souring of America on intervention abroad has major strategic implications for the United States and for the world.
The threshold for preventive war, for example, will be raised significantly for the immediate future. Intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and the intentions of dictators or terrorist gangs that seem to possess them are unlikely to be sufficiently clear to meet the standards for action demanded by the post-facto doubts and recriminations on Iraq. Intelligence analysis will become even more cautious and ambiguously stated to policy-makers. Vulnerability to surprise attack could grow again.
Unfortunately, Bush has compounded the confusion by prolonging Iraq's occupation and its aftermath, and blessing naked expediency in Baghdad, where the new prime minister is a long-time CIA asset who is accused in The New Yorker last week of having once been part of Saddam Hussein's execution squads.
Americans have lost sight of the mass graves of Iraqi Shiites, the genocide campaigns against the Kurds and the war crimes committed by the criminal Baathist regime that was overthrown a year ago. The benefits of fighting terrorist networks in the Middle East and thereby galvanizing the Saudi, Moroccan and other Arab regimes to take forceful action against their extremists are not described or seen clearly enough to counterbalance the abuses of Abu Ghraib or the problems of Fallujah.
The lack of fortitude in Washington is also notable as the American nomenklatura heads for the tall grass.
Instead, Washington is in the grips of an overlapping series of blame games geared toward influencing the November elections, ruining the reputations of rivals and obtaining or protecting jobs for the professionally ambitious and the ambitiously professional.
I think Hoagland is right to be concerned, but he overlooks in his column another root cause: the corrosive, savagely political opposition to the war effort by the Democratic Party, which has made it difficult, sometimes impossible for President Bush to take the hard steps that could lead to a faster, more decisive victory. (Not to mention the opportunistic enmity of many so-called "allies" abroad.)
Even so, the American military has performed so brilliantly that the Iraq campaign may yet succed in spite of all.
Posted by Alan at June 26, 2004 03:53 PM