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 my article of a couple of days ago where I talked about our (lack of) need for European approval and assistance in case we decide to go after Iraq.Quite frankly, I'll confess that I do not have a well justified reason yet for doing so, and my article was not intended to be an argument for attacking Iraq. What I was writing, rather, was a reaction to European paternalism. There's a certain feeling I get from them to the effect that the US is their problem child, big and strong and rambunctious but still young and a bit undisciplined, and although nearly an adult still requiring a bit of supervision. So the parents back in the old country still feel an obligation to keep an eye on the teenager across the ocean to make sure he doesn't get into trouble by going off half-cocked. I've been getting those kinds of vibes from what I've been reading coming out of Europe ever since this crisis began. Yesterday I encountered four different articles all of which seemed to mesh, and I was inspired to write that log entry. It's true that I spent a lot of time concentrating on our military capability, but that was mostly because I was reacting to a statement from one of the authors that the US wasn't capable of fighting the war alone -- with the implication that since we "needed" their help, then we better ask their advice and follow it. We don't need their help, as I showed, and while their advice is readily available (actually, since their advice is getting shoved down our throats) we are not under any obligation to follow it. So I did spend quite a lot of time analyzing American capabilities. But capabilities and intentions are not the same, and military capabilities and political capabilities are also not the same. I know full well that our military capability doesn't translate into political capability. I'm not convinced that we should attack Iraq, at least yet. I am convinced that ten years of evasion by Iraq about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's continuing attempts to acquire them has got to come to an end, and it's clear that the only way that's going to happen is via much stronger measures than we have been using until now. Economic sanctions and no-fly zones have not succeeded, but the status quo cannot be permitted to continue. So if hostilities do move to Iraq, it will mostly be because this is a good opportunity to catch the wave and clean that problem up. In that sense, it is indeed opportunistic. But that doesn't mean it's wrong, and the fact that doing so would lose us the "moral high-ground" doesn't actually impress me much, if for no other reason than because winning tends to give you the moral high ground, but also because I'm not convinced that we really need the moral high ground -- or at least that it has to be as high as some others do. See, I don' think it's as much that we have to be on top of a moral mountain, as that we just have to be somewhat higher than whoever we're fighting. Against Saddam, that won't be too difficult and even with a preemptive and unprovoked attack by us I think we'll still have it. That said, the course I believe we should be taking, and the course that I think the US government actually is taking, is to put steel into our diplomacy. Saddam is going to be handed much stronger demands and the rhetoric will be notched up considerably. But if that does fail, I do think we'll need to attack. I am not, however, looking forward to that prospect because unlike Afghanistan, it's going to require us to commit a lot of our own ground forces and they are going to be taking a considerable risk. There's no way that this one will turn out to be a push-button war. That's more or less what I think about Iraq right now, but it's not as forceful or rigorous as I'd like, and sending men to war because "now's a good chance to take care of it" isn't sufficient to make me really comfortable with the idea. I'm still trying to work out more about it and see if I can come up with a better case. It's also obvious that the value statement would change a lot if a smoking gun of some kind were unearthed, but of course I can't rely on that. Still, Thomas lays out two possibilities: Iraq does not have WMD's in which case we have no reason to fight, or they do in which case it's too dangerous to attack them. He misses the third possibility: they don't have them now but will have them in ten years unless we do something about it now. This war will need to be a masterful exhibition of defeating our enemy in detail, and we'll have to be very careful about the order in which we pick our fights. It's actually in one sense going to be World War III, but where the last two world wars happened simultaneously everywhere, this one is going to be serial (more like the Cold War was, which also could lay claim to the name "World War III"). I'm not sure even if we do decide to attack Iraq that it would be the next target; there are other places to clean up first. It's true that if we got involved with Iraq that certain other diplomatic assets would go away -- so the idea is to plan the campaign so that by that point we don't need them anymore. It's exceedingly complicated, and quite frankly I'm out of my depth. And by the way, I haven't changed my mind about my identification of Islamic Theocracy as being our primary danger in this. But the fact that it's what we have to defeat doesn't mean it's all we'll need to fight. For example, one argument in favor of taking on Iraq is the possibility that somewhere along the way here we'll need to destabilize Saudi Arabia. It is, after all, the source of Wahhabism, the fountainspring from which most of the Islamic Theocracy we're fighting arises. But if we do that while Saddam remains in charge and relatively powerful in Iraq, then he might decide to take advantage of the situation and attempt to annex part of Saudi Arabia in the chaos -- and we'd have to fight him anyway, only at the same time as we're involved in some other mess. So if we think we might end up having to effect a change in Saudi Arabia (and many warbloggers seem to think this) then we'd probably be well advised to take care of Saddam first. So exactly what does happen with regards to Iraq will depend enormously on what else we intend to accomplish. Iraq is sort of like the Taliban. We are taking out the Taliban not because they are a direct objective of the war, but because it was necessary to do so in order to eliminate al Qaeda. Likewise it may turn out to be necessary to fight and defeat Iraq not so much because Iraq is a primary objective, but because if we don't do so then accomplishing some other primary goal (like changing the government of Saudi Arabia) would be impossible. That's all speculation; it's not an attempt to lay out the course of this war so much as to show how all the pieces intertwine and how Iraq may end up in the mix. I don't honestly know what is going to happen, but I think there's a pretty good chance that somewhere in the course of this Iraq will rise to the top of the list. (discuss) |
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