The war that dare not speak its name

Baghdad may be just the beginning

4-13-03

By EDWARD CONE
News & Record

So, who do we fight next?

Not to jump the gun, so to speak, but our campaign to stabilize the Middle East via forcible regime change is not certain to stop at Baghdad. Instead, we may be on to Damascus, or Tehran, or even Riyadh.

If the United States is fighting a long war against radical Islamism (we are), and if a key to our strategy in that war is to eliminate regimes that we say may support terrorism (it is), and as we have already shown that we'll fight without United Nations approval, then more fighting seems almost inevitable.

It's possible that the United States has much more limited war aims, and that taking down Saddam Hussein is all we set out to do, and that George W. Bush is willing to risk being remembered for quitting too soon, just like his father. Possible, but not likely.

Fighting a long war against a succession of targeted countries (including perhaps that other charter member of the "Axis of Evil," North Korea) is not the official policy of the United States. But it is an article of faith at the neo-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, reportedly a must-read in the Bush White House. "In a war of such reach and magnitude, the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future," the Standard thundered recently in an article headlined "Bush's Grand Strategy."

The same strategy is discussed at length in a Washington Monthly article by Josh Marshall, who says our government is putting one over on the people in its pursuit of a wider war. "The White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public," Marshall says.

I think Marshall is right about the plans, but wrong about the people. My guess is that Americans understand the analogy to a world war and that many of them tacitly accept and support it. This support may be rationalized by pretending that Saddam was connected to the Sept. 11 attacks, and it may ignore the implications of Dick Cheney's doctrine of preemptive military action, but it is nonetheless solid.

The possible costs seem to be accepted as well, maybe because our losses are already high if the onset of hostilities is understood to be the attacks on New York and Washington. It's true that formidable as the U.S. armed forces proved themselves to be in Iraq, resistance was often disorganized and short-lived; in the words of military historian John Keegan, "This has been a collapse, not a war." Still, if the battle for Baghdad had turned into a siege, a great many Americans would have thought it worth the price.

Iraqi doubts about our willingness to take casualties showed a misreading of this nation's temper, as Minneapolis newspaper columnist James Lileks writes in his Web log. "They don't understand what's changed. In a sense this is not West vs. Arab, or U.S. vs. militant Islam; it's a dynamic culture vs. a static one."

Now, a really dynamic culture might be less reactive and more creative, finding other coherent responses to the post-Sept. 11 world beyond the age-old practice of marching soldiers through the Fertile Crescent. And a dynamic culture could once again adjust its attitude if a wider war goes from imagined to imminent, or if a series of costly wars and occupations drags on into an indefinite future.

For the moment, though, the use of force as needed to remake the Arab world to America's liking seems to be the implicit strategy of the United States under the leadership of George W. Bush. It is a doctrine that dare not speak its name, but it is a popular one nonetheless.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com or www.edcone.com), a magazine journalist, contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

© News & Record 2003

Last update: 4/14/2003; 10:56:52 AM.