WHAT IS TO BE DONE ? IRAQ, THE WAR ON TERROR AND HOW THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION CAN CUT THE GORDIAN KNOT

In the earlier preface I noted that in numerous quarters the call to do something about Iraq is rising and for many of these commenters -and the Kerry campaign given the implications of their criticism– the thing to do is to get out. Differences exist over whether we should leave in unseemly haste or only after a decent interval but mostly we are being offered the false dichotomy of staying the course with the existing strategy in Iraq or just bugging the hell out in a reprise of the fall of Saigon, complete with hapless locals clinging to departing American helicopters.

That’s a false choice. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from well-meaning myopia or a Z Magazine inspired hunger to relive the Sixties with an American defeat, it’s still a false choice. What the administration needs to do is regain their perspective, remember the strategy and be willing to make radical changes in tactics that align our reach with our grasp. An enemy slain by a thousand cuts is just as dead as one you have sent to the guillotine.

The Gordian Knot

The Bush administration’s decision to mount an invasion of Iraq generally struck the public in one of two ways – an eminently sensible and logical continuation of the war after smashing the Taliban or a grand folly of hubris, a distraction from fighting the real war with a grab for empire (or oil, or to help Israel) a misguided ” democratic imperialism”. The explanation for these viscerally different reactions is not political affiliation, after all we saw during the pre-war debate that America had liberal hawks and antiwar paleocons. The explanation lies primarily in the degree in which a person recognizes that the difficult strategic problems facing the United States – Radical Islamism, Terrorism, Rogue State dictatorships, WMD proliferation and Failed States – are an interrelated, interconnected, self-reinforcing Gordian Knot. If to you these threats are separate, highly compartmentalized, policy problems to be solved in their individual boxes unrelated to the context of everything else – which was our modus operandi during the Cold War to prevent escalation of a crisis to the unthinkable – then invading Iraq will look a little insane.

There is an internal logic to the anti-war position that is sound but it fails because it rests on the false premise that the old rules of the Cold War to keep WWIII from breaking out with the USSR make sense against an amorphous, nihilistic, irresponsible set of foes who wish to attack us sporadically, suicidally and apocalyptically. In reality, these problems are interconnected and cannot be solved in isolation. Pakistan forments Islamist extremism and trades in WMD with North Korea. The DPRK sells missile technology to Iran. Teheran, Saddam and Saudi Arabia , despite mutual loathing, all funded suicide bombers in the West Bank and Gaza and so on. Pulling on just one string of the knot creates freedom of action for a bad element elsewhere. Pressure must be applied everywhere at once ( if not to the same degree everywhere) and the Bush administration crafted a two pronged strategy of Preemption and Liberalization to change the calculus of our opponents by raising their potential costs.

Iraq in the Context of the War on Terror

The problem I have with the Bush administration is not their strategy but a haphazard execution that has allowed the conditions inside Iraq to increasingly determine our response and to magnify Iraq beyond it’s actual strategic importance in the context of everything else. Just as it would have been foolish to wait until Afghanistan resembled a central Asian Switzerland before moving to confront our other enemies, attempting to ” fix ” Iraq without allocating the correct resources is hampering our mobility and keeping us off-balance.

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