|
|
|
Jewish World Review Nov. 9, 2007 /28 Mar-Cheshvan 5768 America's strategies for victory — and defeat By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The battle of Iraq is nearly over. And the Americans have nearly won.
Their enemies are on the run. Al Qaida forces have lost or are losing
their bases of operations. Its fighters are being killed and captured
in ever increasing numbers. Iraq's Sunni citizens who, until recently
refused to take any part in the post-Saddam regime, are joining the
army and citizens' watch groups by the thousands.
Local sheikhs in Baghdad, following the example set earlier by Sunni
sheikhs in Anbar province are ordering their people to fight with the
Americans against al Qaida. For their part, the Shiite militias know
that they are next in line for defeat. As a result, Muqtada el Sadr
ordered his forces to cease their attacks.
The numbers speak for themselves. Over the past month, some 46,000
Iraqi refugees returned home. Since May, the number of civilian
casualties has decreased by 75 percent. US military casualties have
also dropped precipitously after the death rate rose in recent months
of hard fighting. Neighborhoods in Baghdad which had ceased to
function under al Qaida's reign of terror have come back to life.
Businesses are reopening. Citizens are rebuilding their homes. Even
churches are opening their doors. This is what victory looks like.
Yet the promise of Baghdad is a lone ray of light in an otherwise
darkened field of failed US policies. As President George W. Bush
prepares to enter his last year in office, America's international
standing is at a low point. The forces of jihad, while being defeated
in Iraq, are rising everywhere else. The price of oil races towards
the once inconceivable price of $100 a barrel. New jihadist mosques
open daily throughout the world. Pakistan is a disaster. Iran is
closing in on the bomb.
To understand America's manifold failures, it makes sense to begin
with a look at why Iraq is different. For the new successful American
strategy in Iraq is not only different from what preceded it there. It
is also different from the US strategy which is failing everywhere
else.
The new American strategy in Iraq is based on a fairly simple
strategic assumption: The US goal in Iraq is to defeat its enemies and
to defeat its enemies the US must target them with the aim of
defeating them. This is a strategy based on common sense.
Unfortunately, common sense seems to be the rarest of commodities in
US foreign policy circles today. Outside of Iraq, and until recently
in Iraq itself, the US has based its policies on the notion that it
can bend its adversaries to its will by on the one hand signaling them
in a threatening way, and on the other hand by trying to appease them
where possible. And this is the heart of the failure.
In the lead up to Iraq, it was clear to US strategic planners that of
the three states - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - that Bush labeled as
members of the "Axis of Evil," Iraq was the least dangerous. It
sponsored terror less than Iran. Its weapons of mass destruction
programs were less developed that those of Iran and North Korea. As a
result, there were some voices - particularly in Israel - which
suggested that given that the US was uninterested in targeting more
than one country in addition to Afghanistan, the US should direct its
fire at Iran rather than Iraq. But for their own reasons, among them
the collapse of the UN sanctions regime on Iraq; the fact that Iraq
alone was under UN Security Council authority; and Iraq's relative
weakness, the Americans chose to go after Saddam.
They assumed that the invasion itself would work to strengthen
America's deterrent capability and so work to America's advantage in
its dealings with Iran and North Korea. Here then we see, that the
decision to invade Iraq was based in part on a continued American
reliance on a strategy of signaling rather than confronting Iran and
North Korea. If this hadn't been the case, Iraq probably would have
been cast to the side.
Initially the American strategy met with stunning success. Iran, North
Korea, Syria and indeed the Arab world as a whole, were shaken and
terrified by the victorious American assault on Saddam. Unfortunately,
rather than build on their momentum, the Americans did everything they
could to assure these states that they had no reason to worry that a
similar fate would befall them. Rather than maintain the offensive -
by sealing Iraq's borders and then going after insurgents' bases in
Iran and Syria, the US went on the defensive. And so it allowed Iran,
Syria and Saudi Arabia to support and direct the insurgency. As a
result of America's show of weakness, the lesson that its enemies took
from its campaign in Iraq was that to deter the Americans, they should
intensify their support for terror and their weapons of mass
destruction programs.
Once deterrence collapsed, the Americans chose a mix of appeasement
mixed with threats that had no expiration date. Last year's North
Korean intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear tests, the war
in Lebanon, the Hamas takeover of Gaza and Iran's intensification of
its nuclear program are all results of the failure of this model of US
foreign policy making.
These policies are of a piece with the US's general foreign policy
posture towards its adversaries. And that posture is unfortunately
based on a hugely inflated view of America's deterrent capabilities
and Washington's failure to craft policies which are suited to their
interests and goals.
Today, the most glaring example of this state of affairs is Pakistan.
America has two primary goals in Pakistan. First it seeks to prevent
Pakistan's nuclear weapons and technologies from proliferating or
falling under the control of jihadists. Second, it seeks to defeat al
Qaida and the Taliban.
After September 11, the Americans gave Pakistan's military dictator a
choice: he could help them defeat the Taliban and al Qaida in
Afghanistan or he could lose power. That was a good start but then the
Americans began losing track of their priorities. After General Pervez
Musharraf agreed to Washington's ultimatum, the Americans put all
their eggs in his basket. And so they lost their ability to deter him
and so influence his behavior.
Certain of unconditional American backing, Musharraf played a double
game. He helped the US in Afghanistan and then allowed the Taliban and
al Qaida to escape and rebase in Pakistan.
Musharraf was also unforthcoming on nuclear issues. He barred American
investigators from interrogating Pakistan's chief nuclear proliferator
A.Q. Khan, and so refused them key intelligence on other countries'
Pakistani supported nuclear programs. Yet having based their Pakistan
policy on their assumption that Musharraf was irreplaceable, the
Americans pretended nothing was wrong.
And now they are confronted by a disastrous situation. On the one
hand, thanks to Musharraf's hospitality, al Qaida and the Taliban
control large swathes of Pakistan and have declared jihad against
their host, thus placing Pakistan's nuclear arsenals in greater
danger. At the same time, they use their Pakistani bases to intensify
their insurgency in Afghanistan.
On the other hand, as has been his consistent policy since seizing
power in 1998, Musharraf continues to ignore the seriousness of the
Taliban--al Qaida threat. The purpose of his recent declaration of
martial law and suspension of the Pakistani constitution was not to
enable him to better fight the jihadists. It was to break his liberal
political opposition whose members demand democracy and an end to his
military rule.
And in the midst of this, the Americans find themselves with no
leverage over the still irreplaceable Musharraf.
A similar situation exists in Saudi Arabia. There too the US
squandered the leverage it gained after the Sept. 11 attacks by giving
unconditional support to the Saudi royal family. The Saudis
immediately understood that the best way to ensure continued American
support was to extend their support for terrorism and finance of
radical, pro-jihad mosques while raising the price of oil. As in
Pakistan, the worse the situation became, the more the Americans
supported them.
And then of course there are the Palestinians. Here American policy
has been a double failure. First of all, it has destroyed American
deterrence towards the Arab world.
In order to divert American attention away from their support for
jihadist terrorism, the leaders of the Arab world sought to convince
the Americans that the only way to end their support for terror and
jihad was by resolving the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
Rather than stop to question the validity of the Arabs' strange
assertion, the Americans believed them. Over time, this belief led
them to neglect their actual goals - to end the Arab world's support
for terror; prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction;
and maintain world oil prices at around $30 a barrel - in favor of a
secondary and unrelated issue. Aside from that, it bears noting that
it is largely because of the strengthening of jihadist forces in the
Arab world that there is no possibility of achieving peace between
Israel and the Palestinians. Rather than understand this, the
Americans have allowed the Arabs to send them on a wild goose chase
that will never end.
The very fact that this week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
thought that it was more important to come to Israel for the ninth
time of the year than deal with the crisis in Pakistan shows clearly
just how deeply the Americans have internalized this Arab fiction.
Then there are the Palestinians themselves. As Bush announced in 2002,
the US's main goal regarding the Palestinians is to force them to stop
engaging in terror and jihad. All other American policies regarding
the Palestinians were supposed to be conditioned on the accomplishment
of this goal. Yet as in Pakistan, over time the Americans neglected
this goal in favor of an easier one - supporting Mahmoud Abbas and
Fatah. In order to strengthen Abbas and Fatah, the Americans have cast
aside their goal of ending Palestinian terror. As a result, today they
have no leverage over Abbas. As with Musharraf in Pakistan,
strengthening Abbas is the only policy the Americans have towards the
Palestinians, and increasingly, towards Israel. And as in Pakistan,
the threatening reality on the ground is a consequence of the fact
that their policy ignores their actual goals.
Two conclusions can be drawn from contrasting America's victory in
Iraq with its failures in so many other theaters. First, the only way
to successfully fight your enemies is to fight them. And second,
basing policies on pretending to deter leaders who are not deterred is
a recipe for failure. Until the Americans accept these lessons, Iraq
aside, the international environment will grow ever more threatening.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
| ||||||||||
