The UN, US and Iraq IV

I think it is bad form to lift someone's post from another thread, and use it in this manner.

Our War's Mistaken Premise

By Benjamin R. Barber
Sunday, September 14, 2003; Page B07

The president is changing tactics. Forget weapons of mass destruction, the war in Iraq is about terrorism; time to go back to the United Nations to get some help with the military occupation and with paying the $87 billion reckoning for staying in Afghanistan and Iraq that is now being acknowledged. But he has reaffirmed his strategic vision: It is America's strategy of preventive war against rogue states, the very concept that has been the source of America's inability so far to defeat terrorism or establish anything resembling democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq.


That is the powerful lesson that can be drawn from the carnage at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, from the emerging insurrectionary alliance between Baathists and radical Muslim groups, the reemergence of the Taliban and its politics of assassination in Afghanistan, and the renewed rise of sectarian militia forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

To fully understand America's failure, we have to back up to 9/11. Preventive war, the novel national-security doctrine announced after 9/11, exempted the United States from the obligation to justify war on grounds of self-defense or imminent threat. It promulgated a new right "to act against emerging threats before they are fully formed," to "act preemptively" against states that harbor or support terrorism. It is this strategic doctrine, and not tactics or policies on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is now failing so catastrophically.

The war on terrorism remains the Bush administration's ultimate rationale. The administration continues to insist that "in Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror" (Vice President Cheney), that "military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror" (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz), that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a "terror regime" and that the ongoing war there today must be understood as part of the war on terror (President Bush).

Yet terrorism is flourishing -- not just in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya and Indonesia but in Afghanistan, where the Taliban were supposedly defeated, and in Iraq, where, prior to the war, there was no sponsored international terrorism at all.

The harrowing truth is that preventive attacks on "rogue states" and "those who sponsor or harbor terrorism" fail because they are premised on a fatal misunderstanding of what terrorism is and how it operates. In operational terms, terrorists are not cancers on the body of a weakened nation-state that die when the state dies. Rather, they are migrating parasites that temporarily occupy hosts (rogue states, weak governments, even transparent democracies). When a given host is destroyed or rendered immune to such parasites, they opportunistically move on to another host -- ever ready to reoccupy the earlier host if it is revived as a "friendly" regime. With their Taliban host eliminated, al Qaeda cadres moved on -- to the Afghan hinterland, to Pakistan, to Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the Philippines, maybe back to Hamburg and to those places identified early on as harboring the terrorists of 9/11, Florida and New Jersey, and now back to Baghdad and Kabul.

Terrorists are not states, they use states. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself said after 9/11, in words he has apparently forgotten, "the people who do this don't lose, don't have high-value targets. They have networks and fanaticism." Because they are "stateless martyrs," as happy to die as to kill, terrorists cannot be defeated through preventive military victories over countries that may share their agendas or harbor their agents. They have neither an address to which complaints and troops can be sent nor conventional "interests" that can be negotiated or penalized. Al Qaeda is in effect a malevolent NGO.

Terrorists are, in the president's words, "enemies of the civilized world." But what makes the world civilized is its adherence to the rule of law, its insistence that it will not attack adversaries, however evil, unless first attacked by them, its reliance on multilateral cooperation and international courts rather than unilateral military force and the right of the strongest.

The president's policies meet fear with fear, trying to "shock and awe" adversaries into submission. But fear is terrorism's medium, not ours. Democracies that respect the rule of law cannot win wars unilaterally and in defiance of international law -- not when the enemy has no policy but chaos, no end but annihilation (including its own).

Harry Truman once said that all war prevents is peace. Preventive war has neither created peace nor preempted terrorism. The intelligence and police cooperation that the Bush administration has quietly been engaged in has, to the contrary, had more success. But it is directed at terrorists, not rogue states, and it has succeeded through the very cooperation and multilateralism that unilateral preventive war undermines.

Pursuing preventive war at a growing cost in American lives and money against regimes the Bush administration doesn't like or countries that brutalize their own people may appeal to American virtue, but it undermines American security.

The only proper way the United States can honor both its national interests and those who have died in this war and its aftermath is to abandon its failed preventive war doctrine and rejoin the world it has tried in vain to pacify through unilateral preemptive force.

The writer is Kekst professor of civil society at the University of Maryland and the author of "Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

The crusade against 'terrorism'
Bush and his handlers are not protecting Americans by pursuing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, they are protecting their own political skins
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor

NEW YORK -- "If at first you don't succeed, lie and lie again" seems to be the watchword of the floundering Bush administration.

First, it was the ultimate evils, bin Laden and Mullah Omar. When they couldn't be found, evil forces "that hate our freedoms." Then Saddam's nuclear weapons, anthrax, mustard, and nerve gas, "drones of death," mobile germ labs, and links to al-Qaida, etc.

Now, in the latest change of sales pitch, the president insists his war on terrorism equals Iraq.

According to Bushthink, any Iraqi opposing U.S. occupying forces is a "terrorist." Ergo, growing Iraqi nationalist resistance will inevitably mean Bush's signature "war on terrorism" will be a growth industry.

Like the gigantic Enron swindle, it's a huge bubble, inflated by false claims and calculated deception.

Straining credulity even farther, the president claimed that waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan would spare America from another 9/11 that might otherwise happen at any moment - though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

It was the duty of the world community, Bush proclaimed, to "share the burden of occupation" of Iraq and Afghanistan - which the White House finally admitted will total at least $166 billion US for this year and next, an astronomical sum that could buy 39 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. By the end of 2004, Bush's wars could amount to 30% of the total cost of the equally misbegotten 17-year Vietnam War.

Clever rebranding

By cleverly rebranding the invasion of Iraq as the essential part of his crusade against terrorism, Bush and his handlers were clearly counting on their core supporters in middle America to have short memories and a weak grasp of foreign geography and nomenclature.

They are probably right: recent polls confirm 2/3 of confused Americans still believe the nonsense, promoted by the White House and neo-conservatives, that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks.

This example of how the White House shamelessly exploited the confusion and ignorance of many Americans about world affairs recalls another famous quote.

Reich Marshall Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trial: "The people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Indeed.

In an astounding about-face, the Bush administration is now begging "old" Europe, led by those "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" - as Bush's know-nothing supporters called France - and the "irrelevant" UN to send troops and money to Iraq. In Europe, so long abused and slandered by Bush and his supporters, the plaintive request was greeted by sneers.

France's conservative Le Figaro headlined White House pleas for help as "Saving Private Bush."

Congress, terrified of being branded "unpatriotic," will go along with this monumental political and economic folly. While America's economy sags and its states plunge deep in the red, George Bush plans to spend in short order almost as much to wage a hugely expensive colonial war in chaotic Iraq, as the cost of the post-WWII Marshall Plan.

Bush and his handlers are not protecting Americans by pursuing the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, they are protecting their own political skins.

These twin foreign misadventures are a historic geopolitical, military and economic blunder. Europeans repeatedly warned against invading Iraq. So did genuine Mideast experts, who were dismissed as pro-Arab or, like this writer, as "friends of Saddam." The mushrooming disaster was totally predictable and avoidable.

Absurd claims

It defies understanding how the many intelligent men and women in the Bush administration believed their own absurd claims about the danger posed by Iraq, and stuck America in the worst mess since Vietnam. Mind you, chief "whiz kid" Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam disaster, was also noted for his intellect, as is his heir, Donald Rumsfeld. "Brilliant" VP Dick Cheney actually claimed last spring that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. In Washington, arrogance and ignorance too often combined.

Shockingly, Congress's budget office just reported the U.S. will run short of troops in Iraq by spring. Almost half of U.S. Army combat units are tied down in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. That's why Bush is trying to bribe or browbeat nations like Turkey, India and Pakistan into sending cannon-fodder troops to Iraq, and force rich Europe to pay part of the bill.

Grand chutzpah

But asking other nations to "share the burden" of an unprovoked invasion of another country takes grand chutzpah.

Aggression is not a burden, it's a crime under the UN Charter. The Bush administration did not invade Iraq to perform social work but to grab its vast oil reserves.

Bush's demand that Third World UN troops serve under orders of American officers is a further insult to the United Nations and will reinforce the belief of those who attacked its Baghdad HQ that the organization is merely a cat's paw of Washington. What Bush should do is declare victory and bring U.S. troops home. Now. Save $166 billion and many, many lives. It's still not too late to climb out of the swamp.